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Israel
The Occupied Territories
During the June 1967 War, about 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs
living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem came under
Israeli rule. Immediately after the war, East Jerusalem was occupied
and reunited with the rest of Israel's capital. Its Arab inhabitants--about
67,000 after the war--became citizens of Israel with the same
rights as other Israeli Arabs. The West Bank, ruled by Jordan
since 1948, was economically underdeveloped but possessed a relatively
efficient administrative infrastructure. Its 750,000 people consisted
of a settled population and refugees from Israel who had led during
the 1948 War. Both the refugees and the settled population were
Jordanian citizens, free to work in Jordan. Most of the leading
urban families and virtually all the rural clans had cooperated
with Hussein. The Gaza Strip, on the other hand, was seething
with discontent when Israeli forces arrived in 1967. Its 1967
population of 350,000--the highest population density in the world
at the time--had been under Egyptian rule, but the inhabitants
were not accepted as Egyptian citizens or allowed to travel to
Egypt proper. As a result they were unable to find work outside
the camps and were almost completely dependent on the UN Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel implemented harsh security measures
to quell widespread unrest and root out the growing resistance
movement.
Labor's settlement policy in the occupied territories was based
on a plan formaulated during the summer of 1965 by Yigal Allon,
deputy prime minister of the Eshkol government. The plan, primarily
dictated by security concerns, called for rural and urban settlements
to be erected in a sparsely Arab-populated strip twelve to fifteen
kilometers wide along the western bank of the Jordan River and
the western shores of the Dead Sea. Labor governments sought to
interfere as little as possible in the day-to-day lives of the
Arab inhabitants. Political and social arrangements were, as much
as possible, kept under Jordanian or pro-Jordanian control, the
currency remained the Jordanian dinar, the application of Jordanian
law continued, and a revised Jordanian curriculum was used in
the schools.
Another aspect of Labor's occupation policies was the integration
of the territories into the Israeli economy. By the mid-1970s,
Arabs from Israel and the territories provided nearly one-quarter
of Israel's factory labor and half the workers in construction
and service industries. Moreover, the territories became an important
market for Israeli domestic production; by 1975 about 16 percent
of all Israeli exports were sold in the territories.
The final element of Labor's occupation policies was economic
and social modernization. This included the mechanization of agriculture,
the spread of television, and vast improvements in education and
health care. This led to a marked increase in GNP, which grew
by 14.5 percent annually between 1968 and 1973 in the West Bank
and 19.4 percent annually in Gaza. As a result, the traditional
elites, who had cooperated with Hussein during the years of Jordanian
rule, were challenged by a younger, better educated, and more
radical elite that was growing increasingly impatient with the
Israeli occupation and the older generation's complacency. In
the spring of 1976, Minister of Defense Shimon Peres held West
Bank municipal elections, hoping to bolster the declining power
of the old guard Palestinian leadership. Peres wrongly calculated
that the PLO would boycott the elections. Instead, pro-PLO candidates
won in every major town except Bethlehem.
Israel's settlement policy in the occupied territories changed
in 1977 with the coming to power of Begin. Whereas Labor's policies
had been guided primarily by security concerns, Begin espoused
a deep ideological attachment to the territories. He viewed the
Jewish right of settlement in the occupied territories as fulfilling
biblical prophecy and therefore not a matter for either the Arabs
or the international community to accept or reject. Begin's messianic
designs on the territories were supported by the rapid growth
of religious nationalist groups, such as Gush Emunim, which established
settlements in heavily populated Arab areas.
The increase in Jewish settlements and the radicalization of
the settlers created an explosive situation. When in May 1980
six students of a Hebron yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, were
killed by Arab gunfire, a chain of violence was set off that included
a government crackdown on Hebron and the expulsion of three leaders
of the Hebron Arab community. West Bank Jewish settlers increasingly
took the law into their own hands; they were widely believed to
be responsible for car-bomb attacks on the mayors of Ram Allah
and Nabulus.
Begin's policies toward the occupied territories became increasingly
annexationist following the Likud victory in the 1981 parliamentary
elections. He viewed the Likud's margin of victory, which was
larger than in 1977, as a mandate to pursue a more aggressive
policy in the territories. After the election, he appointed the
hawkish Ariel Sharon as minister of defense, replacing the more
moderate Ezer Weizman, who had resigned in protest against Begin's
settlement policy. In November 1981, Sharon installed a civilian
administration in the West Bank headed by Menachem Milson. Milson
immediately set out to stifle rapidly growing Palestinian nationalist
sentiments; he deposed pro-PLO mayors, dissolved the mayors' National
Guidance Committee, and shut two Arab newspapers and Bir Zeit
University.
While Milson was working to quell Palestinian nationalism in
the territories, the Begin regime accelerated the pace of settlements
by providing low-interest mortgages and other economic benefits
to prospective settlers. This action induced a number of secular
Jews, who were not part of Gush Emunim, to settle in the territories,
further consolidating Israel's hold on the area. Moreover, Israel
established large military bases and extensive road, electricity,
and water networks in the occupied territories.
In November 1981, Milson established village leagues in the West
Bank consisting of pro-Jordanian Palestinians to counter the PLO's
growing strength there. The leadership of the village leagues
had a limited base of support, however, especially because the
growth of Jewish settlements had adversely affected Arab villagers.
The failure of the Village League Plan, the escalating violence
in the occupied territories, in addition to increased PLO attacks
against northern Israeli settlements, and Syria's unwillingness
to respond when the Knesset extended Israeli law to the occupied
Golan Heights in December 1981 convinced Begin and Sharon of the
need to intervene militarily in southern Lebanon.
Data as of December 1988
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