Amb. Dore Gold – “Occupation”: The Search for an Alternative Term
- Israel captured the territory of Judea and Samaria, which is also called the West Bank, as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War, when it battled a coalition of five Arab armies in a war of self-defense.
- Former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court Meir Shamgar wrote in the 1970s that “territory conquered does not always become occupied territory to which the rule of the Fourth [Geneva] Convention applies.” The convention “is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign, who was ousted, and that he had been a legitimate sovereign.”
- But the previous Jordanian presence in the territories was the result of its illegal invasion of the West Bank in 1948 in defiance of the UN Security Council. Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank was only recognized by Britain, Pakistan, and Iraq, but not by the rest of the international community, including the Arab states.
- In the territories Israel captured in 1967, a new reality has emerged. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and it agreed to the establishment of a self-governing Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, in line with the Oslo Accords, in 1993. Was this a Palestinian state? No. But it wasn’t an occupation either, making the term completely irrelevant for describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- Talking about the “occupation” has become a means of branding Israel unfairly and is often used to wage political warfare against the Jewish state.
- In light of this background, it would be far more accurate to call the territories “disputed territories,” as is done in similar circumstances elsewhere.
Amb. Dore Gold, former Director-General of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israeli Ambassador to the UN, is president of the Jerusalem Center.
