Occupation in the Garden of Eden

The West's flawed unilateral thinking on Israel.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has a habit of making grand political declarations on matters ranging from the environment and Just Stop Oil campaigns to UK immigration policy to child benefits. I’m not much bothered by the Archbishop’s pronouncements (although certain corners of the British press certainly are), because they are inconsequential; he may be political, but a politician he is not. Yet one of his more recent grand declarations did catch my ear, when following the July 19th ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel’s occupation of the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (by which it means the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza), the Archbishop declared that “ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity.” In this pronouncement, the self-proclaimed Anglican sage revealed the fatal flaw at the heart of Western naivety regarding this conflict: that ending it is only a question of unilateral action by Israel. This short-sighted perspective needs some picking apart both in substance of the practical and legal aspects, and in style of how much of the West, and the Progressive end of the Western Left in particular, view agency with respect to ethnic groups.

An Ideology Beyond National Self-Determination

The substance is the appropriate point of departure because it feeds into the style. The Archbishop was saying out loud the core substantive belief that so many in the West hold in viewing this conflict; that peace is a matter of Israel packing up the fanatic settlers, militarily withdrawing from the West Bank, and providing the Palestinians with the territory to form an independent Palestinian state. It requires a spectacular level of naivety to think that this conflict ends with a Palestinian state because if a state within some defined territory was all the Palestinians wanted, they would have one by now.

The 1937 Peel Commission would have given the Palestinians ~70% of the land that constituted British Mandatory Palestine; the Palestinians rejected it outright (the Jews had, albeit reluctantly, signalled their willingness to accept the proposal). The 1947 UN Resolution 181, the infamous “Partition Plan”, provided the legal basis for the declaration of two sovereign states; Israel declared their independence accordingly in May 1948, while the Palestinians again rejected the opportunity to declare their own sovereign state, and the region has chased a “two-state solution” ever since. And no fewer than five Arab countries promptly declared war on and invaded Israel. Arafat, on behalf of the Palestinians, rejected the Camp David proposals and the Clinton Accords, which would have provided ~95% of the occupied territories to Palestine and a contiguous state, and a shared capital of Jerusalem with East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.

Behind these repeated rejections of opportunities to realise a sovereign state lies the most defining characteristic of the Palestinian independence movement; the refusal to entertain territorial compromise. Infused with both the territorial maximalism of the 20th Century pan-Arabist movement and the virulent ethnocentric anti-Semitism of pan-Islamism, the core issue for the Palestinian independence movement has never been about agreeing to lines on a map, but eradicating the very existence of any lines in the first place. The wording of the 1948 declaration issued by the Arab League on the day of the invasion of the nascent state of Israel is instructive of the pan-Arab territorial maximalism: “The only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State.” While contemporary cosplaying Westerners chant in English that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, the chant in Arabic conveys the true sentiment: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab”.¹

The Palestinian independence movement has never confined its territorial aspirations for a state to what the West terms “the occupied territories”; it has always sought the entirety of the area of former Mandatory Palestine. Because to the Palestinian movement, the “occupied territories” extend over all of the former Mandatory Palestine, i.e., over Israel itself. This is embedded throughout the Palestinian independence movement, in all its various forms. Consider Article 2 of the 1964 National Charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO): “Palestine with its boundaries at the time of the British Mandate is a regional indivisible unit.”

Or Article 2 of Hamas's 2017 spin on their Charter: “Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit.”

This is largely unique in historical contexts, which you can read in more detail in this previous essay on the dilemma of self-determination in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The inter-war period in the 20th Century leading up to the end of the Second World War was defined by this dilemma as large empires crumbled and nationalist aspirations for sovereignty and statehood rose from the rubble. National independence movements faced a choice between realising sovereignty or pursuing maximalist territorial ambitions. Almost uniformly, nations opted for some territorial compromise to achieve sovereignty.

The Irish independence movement, for example, sought the entirety of the island of Ireland; it compromised on that maximalist aim to achieve a sovereign independent state with 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland. At the end of the Second World War, ~12–14 million ethnic Germans were expelled from lands in Eastern Europe, some of which had been German territory since the 9th Century, to form more territorially intact states in Central and Eastern Europe. Note that Germany does not insist on any “right of return” for Prussians or Silesians. Even with such border-drawing, the maps of contiguous states in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans were all imperfect compromises that often left pockets of ethnic groups in another nation-state. It is possible to pull example after example of these instances, which reinforces the fact that the Palestinians are perhaps the only movement that has refused territorial compromise in favour of territorial maximalism in their vision of sovereignty.

Of course, realising this conception of nationhood requires the eradication of another sovereign nation. This also appears to be unique in the myriad examples of struggles for self-determination one could point to; Irish independence was defined by independence from the Crown, not the elimination of the British state; Polish, Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian independence was defined by ceding from the Soviet Union, not the eradication of Russian people. It is hard to think of another example of a people whose entire sense of national identity is defined not by any deep-rooted self-conception of national consciousness, but by opposition to the existence of another people and nation. That this stands in such stark contrast to the deep and serious sense of national identity in Israel is an undercurrent to this perpetual conflict that is often not visible, but potent in pulling the tides. This thinly-veiled conception of national identity is painfully evident in Edward Said’s 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, where Said struggled to express the construction of a Palestinian political identity, conscious that the identity that had been formed to that point was one of airline hijackings and the 1972 Israeli Olympic athlete massacre. Perhaps this thin conception of nationhood is why the Palestinians politically remain rudderless and corrupt, devoid of any robust or responsible leadership.

The sad reality is that Said’s intellectual vision of Palestinian political and national was about 40 years too late to mould the Palestinian political consciousness which, as alluded to above, was primarily shaped by three forces: 20th Century pan-Arabist territorial maximalism, the post-Second World War importation of Nazi ethnocentric anti-Semitism into the Islamist doctrine of jihadism, and the Soviet Marxist-Leninist doctrines of anti-colonial struggle and perpetual revolution (read this essay for further detail). The convergence of these ideological forces, initially in the Muslim Brotherhood and consolidated in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Arafat, forged a Palestinian national identity with violence at its core, where national identity would be shaped by and through armed struggle and where nothing short of the entire “river to the sea” would suffice for a nation. That they find themselves with neither sovereignty nor any sort of territorial integrity is a direct reflection of this ideological commitment. And none of this has ever been hidden; this commitment has been articulated time and time again in broad daylight.

Consider Arafat: “I know there are two ways to reach a Palestinian state, through the negotiating table and through a war of independence. We can accept a lot of casualties, 30,000 martyrs. Can you accept 500 Israeli soldiers killed?”

Or Hamas’ (now thankfully dead) Ismail Haniyeh: “We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance... We will not recognise Israel, Palestine must stretch from the River to the Sea.”

Haniyeh again when asked about the civilian casualties in Gaza (note: his own people): “The blood of the women, children and elderly... we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.”

Or Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah: “Pay no attention to those who say there are civilians and soldiers in Israel. They are all occupiers and invaders…”

This is to say nothing of the Hamas Charter and its 2017 amendments, explicit in its content and intent: “The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.”

In articulating their vision of Palestinian nationalism, whether the PLO or more recently Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the aims and methods of Palestinian nationalism are clear. And yet when faced with these unequivocal statements and their attendant ideologies, the default response of so many people in the West, most prominently among the Western Progressive Left, is their now tried and true four-step process: Excuse, Equivocate, Justify, Deny. The message is clear, as echoed by the Archbishop, that when it comes to the Middle East, only one people holds agency, and only one country holds responsibility.

Permission to Cast the First Stone

Do not for one second take the foregoing as an attempt to whitewash the record of Israel as the other party (read this previous essay); indeed the central theme of this essay is that any conflict has at least two sides. The problem is that the ideologies, motivations, and actions of one side are swept entirely out of the picture in the West. To try and offer a point-for-point counter-example would be to paint a picture of false equivalence in how this conflict is portrayed and the central forces that render it perpetual. With how this conflict is framed and reported in the West, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that somehow there is only one actor and the rest is background noise. A recent Washington Post front page contained the headline “Israel hits targets in Lebanon”, with an image that could easily be assumed by an incurious reader to depict mourners after "Israel hits targets": the image in fact depicted the devastated mourners of 12 Druze children that were killed in Israel by a Hezbollah rocket.

Or the Guardian: “Israel announces strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon after rocket attack kills 12 in Golan Heights.” Hezbollah rocket, perhaps?

Or try Sky News: “Israeli authorities say at least 11 people killed in rocket attack on football pitch in Israel-occupied Golan Heights.” Ah, “occupation”. The word that, to the Western Left at least, means that the attack was almost certainly “justified” and/or “anti-colonial resistance”, even when it kills Druze rather the Jews. Some book said that only he who is without sin may cast the first stone; one party to this conflict is permitted to cast stones with no consequences. This implicit position has been adopted by Hamas, evident in the words of Ghazi Hamad:

“The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”

The “logic”, such that it is, is clear: Israel is the Original Sin, therefore its opponents are without sin and may cast as many stones, rockets, and ritualistic slaughter as they can muster. Everything is justified. Hamad’s reasoning is the reasoning of the Western Progressive Left, whose “allyship” unironically extends to the hardline of the Islamic conservative Right, with whom they share an ideological kinship in hatred of “the West”. Hamad would have fit right in at Columbia or most “social studies” departments of Western universities.

Even the wording of the ICJ ruling in July is instructive of how agency and responsibility is viewed between Israel and, in particular, the surrounding Arab nations. Consider Paragraph 53:

“On 14 May 1948, Israel proclaimed its independence with reference to the General Assembly resolution 181 (II); an armed conflict then broke out between Israel and a number of Arab States, and the Plan of Partition was not implemented.”

The wording “armed conflict broke out between Israel and a number of Arab States” is as much of a whitewash of the facts as you could spin. A “number of Arab states” was no less than five countries - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq - that invaded a nation for no other reason than it had declared its independence on the basis of a UN resolution. Now, a legal purist might argue in mitigation that the wording of the ICJ ruling is intended to be neutral, but given that the ruling related to the question of the legal status of the occupation, the facts pertaining to the respective wars that resulted in that very occupation are highly pertinent. The occupation came about following successive invasions from Jordan and Egypt, and Syria over a 20 year period. Yet this is conspicuously absent Para. 57 of the ICJ ruling:

“In 1967, an armed conflict (also known as the “Six-Day War”) broke out between Israel and neighbouring countries Egypt, Syria and Jordan. By the time hostilities had ceased, Israeli forces occupied all the territories of Palestine under British Mandate beyond the Green Line.”

What is striking here is the wording of “...occupied all the territories of Palestine under the British Mandate...”. Such wording implies that some extended status of the British Mandate up to 1967, and there is nothing “neutral” in this wording because it overlooks a particular inconvenient fact; that the territories in question were already under occupation - by Jordan and Egypt. Egypt, the first to operate Gaza as an “open-air prison”, ruled Gaza under military administration from 1959–1967. Jordan occupied the West Bank during the 1948 war and officially annexed the territory in 1950, with King Abdullah I issuing a decree prohibiting the use of the word “Palestine”. Clearly as an aspiration, “Palestine” was one that not even other Arab states were keen to subscribe to. In 1970, the Arafat-led PLO would go on to attempt to overthrow Abdullah’s successor, King Hussein of Jordan, resulting in the “Black September” civil war in which King Hussein’s forces killed several thousand PLO fighters and expelled tens of thousands more Palestinian Arabs. The UN had nothing to say about Egypt’s occupation of Gaza or Jordan’s land grab and annexation of the West Bank, but did immediately have something to say about Israel in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, per Para. 58 of the ICJ ruling:

“On 22 November 1967, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 242 (1967), which “emphasiz[ed] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war” and called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and the “[t]ermination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Interesting language by the Security Council, no? Calling for the recognition of the right of an independent state to live in peace with recognised sovereignty and territorial integrity free from threats and acts of force? This is the very core of the conflict - the fundamental antecedent - articulated in a sentence, without a hint of irony for the fact that the country to which such a statement applies above any others in the Middle East is Israel. The fundamental antecedent that has underpinned this conflict is the claim that Israel has no right to exist in the Arab world.

“Respect for and acknowledgment of sovereignty”? Hamas’ Ghazi Hamad articulated the pan-Arab sentiment on that point:

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”

Here is just a sample of Middle East/North African countries who refuse to recognise Israel’s sovereignty: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

“Respect for...territorial integrity and political independence...”? Israel’s declaration of independence on the 15th of May 1948 was the very reason Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, invaded the next day. Israel’s territorial integrity has never been accepted by the Arab nations nor by the Palestinian independence movement in its various forms.

“Right to live in peace...free from threats or acts of force”? Allow the now-dead Fawzi Barhoum to speak to that:

“Anyone who has a knife, a club, a weapon, or a car, yet does not use it to run over a Jew or a settler, and does not use it to kill dozens of Zionists, does not belong to Palestine.”

Given the ideology of jihadism at the core of Islamist fundamentalism, which defines the ideology that refutes every word of the Security Council’s naive vision of mutual respect for sovereignty and the right to live securely and in peace, perhaps the aspect of the ICJ ruling that is most obscene in its omission is Para. 67:

“Following an increase in acts of violence from the West Bank, in the early 2000s Israel began building a “continuous fence” (hereinafter the “wall”)...”

By “acts of violence”, does the Court mean suicide bombers and the Second Intifada?

And thus we come to the crux: the ICJ’s ruling was treated as “historic”, but it merely articulated the status quo. Under international law, military occupation (termed “belligerent occupation”) is permitted on condition that an occupation is temporary, and justified by military necessity of the occupying power. It is important to note that while an occupation must be “temporary” under international law, there are no defined temporal limits on the duration of an occupation.

A belligerent occupation exists where a state that is “not the recognised sovereign of the territory” exercises “effective control” over the territory by force. The military necessity element is important; under international law, occupation is considered a method of warfare. Under international law, the occupier is to operate a military administration, minimally interfere with the local civilian population, govern in the interests of the population under its control and is prohibited from taking steps that would interfere with the future ability of the territory to return to its sovereign status, including a prohibition on an occupier transferring its population into the territory it occupies. Long before the ICJ’s ruling, a legal consensus existed that both the population transfer of settlers into the West Bank and the application of Israeli law to those settlers, reflecting government and judicially sanctioned policies, and de facto annexation of large areas of territory, render the occupation illegal under international law.

Yet herein lies the rub; the status of the occupation, and this alone, is naively assumed in the Western reductionist view to constitute both the diagnosis and the remedy; if “illegal” under international law, it must end, and once it does end and the Palestinians have a state, all will be well.

The flaw in this thinking is that the “military necessity” of the occupation never went away. The occupation is the ultimate legal and political paradox; it is both illegal under international law and militarily necessary against a Palestinian nationalist movement committed to waging eternal war against Israel and who cannot be trusted for the blink of an eye to lay down arms. This is why the wording of Para. 58 of the ICJ ruling that referenced UN Resolution 242 requiring the withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories was so striking in its framing. The Six-Day War was the third time in twenty years that two neighbouring countries, Egypt and Jordan, had sought war with Israel. The West Bank in particular provided a strategic buffer against potential future Jordanian aggression, and the lands captured from Egypt ultimately would serve as the bait to normalise a future peace with Israel (Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank in 1994 in signing its formal peace treaty with Israel).

The examples of Egypt and Jordan, however, are confined to inter-state warfare; from the late 1970s onwards the threat to Israel passed from states to non-state actors, to the jihadism of Palestinian nationalist and Islamist fundamentalist movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Not only do we have the open commitments of these movements in words and actions, together with the words and actions of their overlords in the Islamic Republic, there are two precedents that Israel can draw on that both show that Palestinian nationalism and pan-Islamism cannot be trusted; South Lebanon and Gaza. Israel militarily withdrew from South Lebanon, and in return it received Hezbollah and rockets into north Israel; Israel withdrew both militarily and uprooted all Jewish settlements in Gaza, and in return it received Hamas and October 7th. The same can be said for the security wall around the West Bank, the building of which was precipitated by Arafat's waves of suicide bombers in the Second Intifada. The ICJ can make whatever pronouncements they like because only one fact matters; suicide bombings in Israel dropped to next to nothing (although attacks have been carried out around the border and in Jerusalem). Anyone who thinks that the violence would end if Israel packed up the settlements and withdrew entirely from the West Bank is as incautious as they are naive.

Given such precedents, what sane, rational actor would withdraw from the West Bank? The West Bank provides an enormous strategic advantage, its hills directly overlooking the Sharon Plains, the narrowest and most densely-populated region of Israel between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli civilians would be completely exposed. The occupation of territory like the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza is easy to single out as the sole reason there is no Palestinian state, but the ongoing occupation is a consequence rather than a cause; the ideologies that have defined the Palestinian independence movement long preceded the Six-Day War and the occupation of the territories formerly occupied by Jordan and Egypt (a fact constantly overlooked by Western eyes).

All precedents clearly show that any Israeli withdrawal will be viewed by the Palestinian nationalist movement as simply one step closer to achieving the river to the sea. And bear in mind that support for Hamas and their actions on October 7th among Palestinians remains high. Yet it does not seem to matter how many representatives of the Palestinian nationalist movement speak openly and plainly about their intentions, and declare their ideologies in print and in deed, they are unheeded, ignored, and conveniently hand-waved off by swathes of the Western world. Why?

There is No Sin in the Garden of Eden

Why is it that no responsibility or agency is ever held to the Palestinians, or the wider Arab world, in shaping and perpetuating this conflict? Why are their ideas and ideologies, their intent and actions, met with the four-step rhetorical strategy of Western Progressives of Excuse, Equivocate, Justify, Deny? Imagine trying to understand Irish independence without getting to grips with Irish republicanism; imagine trying to explain the Balkan Wars while pretending Croatian and Serbian nationalists “didn’t reaaaally mean what they said”; imagine trying to discuss the Soviet Union while equivocating and downplaying Stalinism; imagine trying to emphasise the horrors of Third Reich while denying National Socialism’s central tenets.

No serious engagement with any socio-cultural, political, and/or religious movement can be undertaken without serious study of the ideas and ideologies underpinning those movements. In each of the examples above, Westerners have little issue with holding the people who believed in those ideologies to account for the actions taken in the name of the causes to which the ideologies were related. We have little issue condemning the IRA for blowing up pubs of English civilians in the name of “republicanism”, or slamming Serbian Right-wing nationalism for the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, or holding the entirety of Germany to collective responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. Nor does the West have any problem brandishing the entire Jewish people and the state of Israel as an abhorrence. Yet there is one notable exception to this rule: Islamism and its adherents, to which the West tiptoes on eggshells and engages the rhetorical strategy of Excuse, Equivocate, Justify, Deny.

They who are considered through the Western gaze to be without sin are free to cast stones. The lowest hanging fruit explanation is the reductionist filtering of the conflict through the tiresome dichotomous construct of “oppressor/oppressed” that defines Western thinking, most prominently on the Left. It has permeated through the entire past 10 months of the war in Gaza as Progressives hold signs scrawled with “ceasefire now!” while simultaneously chanting “globalise the Intifada”, utterly oblivious to the contradiction. The “oppressor/oppressed” construct has a long history on the Western Left going back to the French-Algerian War (covered in this essay) and, as is the way with most of the bad ideas in contemporary Western academic thought, we can thank the grotesque relativism of 20th French “intellectuals” for such reasoning. In this construct, “the oppressed” are always without sin, and all actions are thus justified.

However, beyond the naive reductionism characteristic of the “oppressor/oppressed” framework in which many in the West are bred to (un)think, there is something deeper that underscores why the narrative in the West sweeps the responsibility of one side of this conflict under the rug while deifying and sanctifying the other. That deeper construct relates to the infantilising and de-agentifying views that Western Progressives hold for ethnic groups generally and the Arabs in particular; the Garden of Eden. In this context, the Palestinians are viewed as the Garden of Eden before the Original Sin of Israel/“whiteness”/“colonialism”/“imperialism”, who but for the Original Sin would live in a state of nature, idyllic and harmonious, unperturbed by sin. Just as the Garden of Eden needed no rain, the Palestinians in Eden needed no ideas or ideologies before The Fall (Israel), as theirs was an existence of innocence and peace. As such, they are presumed to hold no worldly views that were not forced upon them by The Fall.

This view of the Palestinians as the Garden of Eden before The Fall underpins the removal of agency for any actions taken on behalf of their liberation, the portrayal of violence as merely the acts of the “Noble Savage”, for whom violence against “the oppressor” is noble and justifiable as a response to the disruption of their idyllic harmony in Eden. The irony is that such infantilising and condescending views of agency are held and articulated most forcefully by the Progressive Left who fancy themselves as champions of the “oppressed” and the voice of ethnic groups in the West. In substance, it is little more than saviourism dressed up as activism, of veiled supremacy couched in the language of Progressive piety. When concepts such as imperialism are assumed to only have Western origins and Western actors, the implicit assumption is that only the West is history’s actor, and that “only White men have the power to make history.”

The truth is that Palestinian nationalism is a movement steeped in and shaped by various ideologies; they have agency, and they have guided their trajectory. When the Archbishop declared that “ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity”, he merely articulated the obverse of the coin: ending the doctrines of jihadism and Islamist fundamentalism at the core of the Palestinian national project is a necessity to end the occupation. When people in the West take this movement and its driving ideologies and Excuse, Equivocate, Justify, and Deny, they are not truly acting on behalf of the Palestinians and their right to self-determination; they are crippling the probability of a sovereign Palestinian state being realised by fanning the flames of the very ideologies that prevent it from ever becoming a reality. The Palestinians will never be free until they first free themselves from the ideologies that have repeatedly failed them and plunged them further into cyclical violence and repression. At some point, they’ll have to be responsible for the movements that shape their futures.

1. Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falastin arabieh.