Gershon Shafir's timely study approaches the question of Israeli occupation of the West Bank within various contexts that apply to but are not limited specifically to Israel and the Palestinians. Among them are broader studies of empire and settler colonialism, international humanitarian law (IHL), territorial disputes and occupation within the framework of international law, and torture of persons under occupation. In addition, he uses the South African experience resisting apartheid and achieving full equality and political rights as a contrast to forming a Palestinian state and to the BDS movement.
Shafir divides his book into three parts of roughly eighty pages each: What is the occupation? Why has the occupation lasted this long? And, how has the occupation transformed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? The first two sections are meticulous in their analysis of the realities of the occupation and its impact on Palestinians. The third surveys recent history with speculation about the future of the Israeli settlement project, based on extensive scholarship dealing with state formation and the stability of multiethnic societies with diverse religious identities.
Shafir views the occupation within the lens of Israeli legal categories and the daily experience of Palestinians under occupation. Following the 1967 war, Israel wanted the newly occupied land, especially the West Bank, but without its inhabitants. How could Israel pursue its territorial goals while denying both that the land was occupied and that Palestinians in these lands should have legal rights under international conventions or citizenship, the latter a threat to a Jewish majority in Israel? Denial became a key tool in Israeli treatment of Palestinians, as it rejected legal categories defined by the Geneva Convention and IHL rulings by the Hague International Court of Justice [ICJ], even if Israel was a signatory to these conventions.
To summarize Shafir's well-grounded deconstruction of Israel's circular logic of denialism, international treaties to which Israel is a signatory have never applied to the occupied Palestinian territories [OPT]. Its justification was set out by Israel's legal counsel Meir Shamgar in what Shafir calls the Shamgar Doctrine. In 1967, Israel had taken control of lands first occupied by Jordan and Egypt (the West Bank and Gaza). These Arab states had never had true sovereignty over these territories but had been occupiers, meaning their sovereign rights to the lands were not subject to the Geneva Conventions. Israel, conversely, having never called these areas “occupied lands” but disputed lands, was exempt from the strictures of the Geneva Conventions because Egypt's control of Gaza and Jordan's annexation of the West Bank “should not be recognized.” (Eugene Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the 1967 war, held the same view.) Furthermore, Shamgar argued that sovereign states have ownership of land, but not stateless peoples; hence since 1948, the Palestinians, as a stateless people, “could not be a party to the Geneva Conventions.” For Shafir, the Shamgar Doctrine “writes the Palestinian people out of the history of Palestine.”
These Israeli arguments ignore the approach of international laws to affirm the rights of peoples of whatever status and places. Israel placed itself “on the same side as … settler colonialism.” Indeed, Israel's rejection of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention distorted the meaning of the article which opposes individual or mass forcible transfers of population from occupied territories to any other lands. Article 49 was written in light of Nazi population transfers but Israel argues that it does not force its population to settle on occupied lands. Since that settlement is voluntary not compulsory, not to mention encouraged by Israeli governments, “colonization by Israeli citizens on occupied land is legitimate … [and] By this upside-down logic the Geneva Convention would be protecting the occupying power and not the occupied population” (p. 26).
As Shafir notes, “colonization” was the term used by prominent Zionists after World War I and seems more applicable to the current situation than the word “settlement.” Beyond that, the terms used to justify expanded settlements illustrate Israeli policies. Unauthorized settlements are not illegal and can receive government benefits. As for legalities, a former chief state prosecutor concluded that “violation of the laws had become institutionalized” in the pursuit of territorial expansion (New York Times, “Report Shows Israeli Support for West Bank Settlements,” 8 March 2005, https://nyti.ms/2JaNKrb).
I have dealt in detail with this first section of Shafir's book to illustrate the depth of his investigation into Israel's justification of colonization in the OPT. In the second section, on the length of the occupation, he views its main enablers as the United States and IHL as he examines the origins of the settlement movement, distinguishing between post–1948 attitudes, those of the post–1967 war era, the intensification of activity once Likud assumed power, and finally the growing influence of yeshivas especially on the Israeli military as a marker on changes in Israeli society. Hesder yeshivas were designed to inculcate military values and encourage Orthodox Jews to enter military service. Initiated after the 1967 war, the movement did not make a significant impact until the latter 1980s when a premilitary preparatory yeshiva was founded in the Eli settlement; its graduates now number in the thousands and have served in elite combat units. Indeed, “of the currently existing forty-four preparatory schools in Israel, eighteen are religious; of these, eight are in the West Bank and another two in the Golan Heights” (p. 114). As a result, the influence of religious Zionists in the military has exploded; whereas in 1990, “2.5 percent of infantry officers were religious Zionists, by 2007 their number had jumped to 31.4 percent, three times greater than their representation in the national population” (p. 114). This shift, combined with a decline in secular officers and soldiers, has permitted rabbis to preach their message to all officers and troops, most clearly seen in the third Gaza war, in 2014.
As Shafir illustrates, the influence of religious settlers can be seen as far back as the Oslo peace process where Gush Emunim was allowed to alter the Oslo II maps to suit settler interests after they had been approved by the Knesset. A key element in these developments has been Israeli judicial definitions of the occupation as “temporary” even as colonization expanded, leading to what Eyal Weizman has termed “permanent temporariness.” The result is that International Humanitarian Law does not officially object to the settlement project because it is deemed temporary as shown by periodic peace negotiations, despite the fact that US foreign policy since 1967, with few exceptions, has served to “enable” settler activity as a result of domestic political pressures; “temporariness at once constitutes Palestinians as the subjects of Israeli colonial rule and denies their colonial subjugation” (p. 157).
In the third section, Shafir engages in “feasibility studies” of the prospects for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian stalemate. This requires discussion of recent negotiations, especially those between PA head Mahmoud Abbas and then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007–8, where Olmert was the first Israeli leader to, at least in principle, agree that the June 1967 borders would be the basis of a future two-state solution that included limited territorial exchanges.
Relying on the Israeli analyst Shaul Arieli, Shafir is surprisingly optimistic about the demise of the settlement/colonization enterprise. He points out that recent West Bank population growth has been from within established colonies, not from new arrivals, and that the vast bulk of settlers live close to the Green Line. However, he is somewhat sanguine about growth of ring towns around East Jerusalem when that has been a focus of settler activity in the past two years, since much of this book was written. But as Shafir notes, a major obstacle to any agreement is the disparity between the actual size of Israeli population centers in the West Bank versus the jurisdiction of these settlements. Two percent of the West Bank contain inhabited towns whereas their municipal boundaries take up nearly half of the territory; a good example is Maʾale Adumim, the land area of which is larger than that of Tel Aviv and stretches nearly to the Jordan River, effectively blocking any chance of Palestinian territorial contiguity. Nonetheless, the settler movement has failed to displace the Palestinian majority or to inhabit more than a small percentage of the West Bank. As a result, major Israeli population centers could be dismantled in exchange for peace and retention of most settlements adjacent to the Green Line.
Whether such a process is possible remains, for this reviewer, doubtful. Here Shafir's discussion has for the moment been overtaken by events since he argues that the settlements/colonies, not the Palestinian refugee question or Jerusalem, are the main obstacles to resolution. Polls taken by the Adenauer Institute among Israelis and Palestinians appear to confirm his stress on the settlements. They indicate that at least 50 percent on both sides could agree to the idea of a two-state solution, but that percentage dropped by half for Israelis when one discussed specifics such as settler withdrawal or removal of Israeli troops from the Jordan River. However the furor over President Trump's stance on Jerusalem stresses that it also remains a key factor. Optimism may be in shorter supply than Shaul Arieli and Shafir assume, especially since most Israelis within its 1967 borders pay little heed to West Bank events.
A major segment of this third section discusses the possibility of a one-state solution or binational state as opposed to a two-state solution, and then shifts to the BDS movement; both use the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa as a comparison. These sections reflect wide-ranging scholarship with respect to citizenship, federalism in one country, and a single state, along with examining Noura Erekat's examination of a single state in light of the South African experience that has preserved preexisting poverty gaps while achieving equal political rights for all. What then would citizenship mean in a single Jewish-Arab state and what steps could be taken to overcome issues of identity and disparate cultural norms within both Jewish and Palestinian communities, not just between them?
As for the BDS movement, it compares badly to the African National Congress (ANC) struggle against apartheid. Though nonviolent, unlike the ANC, it, also unlike the ANC, rejects the idea of “normalization” of ties between the ruling group, Israel in this case, and the Palestinians. This means to Shafir that BDS leaders refuse to cooperate with Jewish opponents of the occupation, especially in their call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities and faculties whereas the ANC sought allies within the white South African community. For Shafir this is an ironic path to take in the call for freedom because the best studies of the impact of Israel's approach to the occupation, on which he relies, come from Israeli academics in Israel who would be victims of the boycott under BDS terms. Cooperation with sympathetic Israelis would be more fruitful than isolating and alienating them, especially since the antiapartheid movement gained worldwide support. BDS, on the other hand, while gaining sympathy for its economic boycott of Israeli goods in some circles, has sparked opposition to an academic boycott that is universal with respect to all Israeli universities, supposedly in the name of free speech.
Some may consider Shafir's analysis in this last segment controversial. Still he raises key questions about the feasibility of different approaches to resolving apparently intractable conflicts, practical solutions and methods as opposed to the moral satisfaction that may come from the academic aspect of the boycott movement which would isolate the very Israelis who back the Palestinian cause and instead serve rightist Israeli propaganda goals. For him, a reformed BDS working with Jewish allies in and outside of Israel, instead of alienating them, would have greater potential for exerting pressure on the occupation.
This is a major study, relying on a broad range of scholarship well beyond the contours of Israel/Palestine, closely analyzed and brilliantly argued. It deserves a wide readership not just for its discussion of Israeli strategies to deny what is obvious, the occupation, but for the questions it raises about current tactics to end that situation.
