The Occupants Under Occupation
The Jerusalem Post, 10 June 1987

After 20 years of occupation it is legitimate to ask those Palestinians living under Israeli occupation how they themselves relate to the Palestine problem.

At this juncture, it is appropriate to recall some not-to-recent history. The core of the Palestine problem is not the relatively recent occupation of those parts of Palestine commonly called the West Bank & Gaza Strip which escaped Israeli conquest in 1948. The British occupation of Palestine 70 years ago, its severance from Syria, and the adoption of the Balfour Declaration were the first steps in a process that culminated in thwarting the universally accepted aspirations for national self-determination and Independence.

By 1948, there was a solidly entrenched Jewish presence in Palestine, totally independent of "Arab Palestine". The Arab defeat of 1948 was a consequence of the failure of the Arab Palestinian national movement to inflict a decisive defeat on British imperialism in an earlier decade, and was the price paid for the failure to perceive British imperialism as the main enemy of the Palestinian Arab people from the very start of the British occupation of Palestine.

The outcome of 1948 was the dispersal of the Palestinian people to various Arab countries, and the annexation of the remaining Arab inhabited parts of Palestine by Transjordan. In the 19-year interval before the second Arab defeat in 1967, the Jordanian regime assiduously strove to Jordanize its Palestinian subjects, who also happened to be the majority of the country's inhabitants.

In the surrounding Arab states, the Palestinians were unwelcome guests, restricted to their camps, and living at the mercy of the international charitable organisations. Throughout those years, the Arab regimes kept alive the promise of "the liberation" which appeared to connote the restoration of an idealised and mythical past, but which was never translated into a meaningful political or military programme. Since 1967 and the emergence of a relatively independent Palestinian national movement the main brunt of the struggle has been borne by Palestinians living outside Palestine itself. What emerged was a national movement in exile- to be sure, not in exile from its people, as more than half the Palestinian people lived in the Diaspora- but beyond the borders of Palestine itself.

Initially the re-emergent national movement carried on with the old slogan of "liberation", later modified to the "secular, democratic state." Since 1974, its declared aim has been the establishment of a "national entity", commonly understood to mean a state in the West Bank & Gaza. While the promise of liberation has not been totally discarded, a consensus has formed as to its indefinite postponement to a "time beyond time". More recently, after the departure from Beirut in 1982, the diplomatic road has been adopted as signified by the Amman Accord and the attempt to enlist the Egyptian regime in winning American endorsement for Palestinian national rights. The international conference is now viewed as being the prime mechanism for realising the latter.

The declared aim of the Palestinian national movement has become one of terminating the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or in the fashionable terminology used after the 1967 war, "liquidating the effects of the aggression". Thus today, national self-determination and the legitimate rights of the Palestinians have been condensed to the ending of Israeli occupation in the most recently occupied part of Palestine.

But what about those Palestinians living under occupation ? What is their specific role? Forgotten till the mid-seventies, their role since then has consisted of remaining "steadfast". The term itself seems to suggest that the natural order of things requires that because of the occupation and all that it entails the occupied should pack up and leave for a safer haven. Thus the mere act of not leaving their homes is deemed sufficient contribution to the Palestinian national movement, and its demand for self -determination and national independence.

As occupations go, 20 years is a long time, and some soul-searching seems to be in order. An arbitrary opening is provided by posing the question of the way Palestinians under occupation relate to the occupation. Alternatively, we might evaluate the price Israel is paying for occupying a land inhabited by a million and a half Arabs who are perceived to be hostile and are treated accordingly.

Official Israeli policy from the very first days of the occupation, when Moshe Dayan instituted the "open bridges", has been to lighten the economic burden of the occupation, to retain contact with Jordan, creating de facto a joint Israeli-Jordanian condominium in the West Bank, and to allow the inhabitants to continue running their own affairs in all spheres of activity not related to security (a broad term including land, water, movement of agricultural produce, etc.). The Jordanian civil service in the West Bank was integrated into the machinery of the occupation and now forms part of the so-called Israeli civil administration.

Economic necessity forced a large part of the labour force to seek employment in Israel, mainly in the service and agricultural sectors. With earning rates considerably below those of Israeli workers, bereft of job security, and excluded from the official Israeli trade union structure, this layer of semi-and unskilled labourers has managed to keep its head above water. Notwithstanding the important role they perform in the Israeli economy, they are outsiders in the system, unorganised and consequently with no political clout. They are totally absent from the political scene as actors.

If the media are to be believed, the active political players among the Palestinian in the occupied territories, and increasingly so since the 1982 exodus from Beirut, are the advocates of the "last coach of the last train" and of the necessity of securing passage aboard. These are the "notables,", an anachronistic term which sits uneasily in the last quarter of the century but which recurs with monotonous regularity in the Hebrew and Western press. No longer signifying a stratum of semi-feudal landlords, officials and heads of family clans, it is currently employed to denote an emergent class of merchants- commonly mistaken for businessmen- as well as doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists and government functionaries.

Following the 1982 war in Lebanon, the foreign and Israeli media have focused on this "new leadership", which seems to be independent of any kind of political movement or grassroots organisation, hence perhaps the aptness of the term "notables". In tandem with the old "notables" of the Jordanian ancien regime, they have come to regard the occupation of the West Bank & Gaza strip as the quintessence of the Palestine problem. Thus legitimate national rights and national self- determination are reduced to countering the threat of land expropriation and the expansion of settlements, the closure of universities, restrictions on movement and travel, and withholding of export licences for agricultural products via the open bridges to Jordan.

This old-new "leadership" receives its legitimacy from one of two sources and sometimes from both at the same time: the Jordanian regime, as a result of its newly-formed alliance with the main body of the Palestinian national movement, and the Israeli occupation. Their status grows with the influx of "steadfastness funds" which amount to an undeclared subsidy of the occupied areas. Also responsible is the manipulation of the media, both Israeli and foreign, which never tires of looking for proof that there must exist a Local political leadership capable of speaking for the Palestinians in the occupied territories and distinct from the PLO.

It is not necessary to dwell on the economic cost of the occupation as it has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, and not least by Israelis, that the occupation is a profitable enterprise for the Israeli economy, and promises to become more so if the various development schemes announced by the Jordanians in addition to the US and Western European efforts to " improve the conditions of life" in the occupied territories, bear fruit.

On the "security" level, Israeli standards of how an occupied people should behave somewhat cloud the issue. Yet despite the uproar created by isolated terrorist incidents involving loss of civilian life (which are to be condemned not merely because they are politically counter-productive, but primarily on the human level), there is little doubt that the West Bank & Gaza (except the latter for a relatively short period early on in the occupation) have proved quite easy to control.

There is no need to accept the Israeli gauge of the occasional stone-throwing as portending the mass upheaval which will threaten Israel's existence, and on which Israeli propaganda thrives. In point of fact, Palestinians under occupation have not exhibited a strong sense of national solidarity in the face of selective Israeli punitive measures such as the demolition of houses, the imposition of collective punishment on villages, deportation and the expropriation of land. The fact that the economic life of the territories is so closely intertwined with that of Israel cannot be discounted as a factor of primary importance. The emerging stratum of merchants and professionals who claim to represent the Palestinians are dependent for their well-being on official Israeli goodwill and on performing the role of middlemen between Israeli producers and Palestinian consumers.

On the political level, the stifling of all political activity at the grass roots, the continued harassment of women's associations, trade unions, youth groups, the banning of the National Front in the mid-seventies, and its successor, the National Guidance Committee, has left the field free for the growth of a leadership which owes its pre-eminence to the weakening of the Palestinian national movement after the 1982 war.

The continued support it receives from Jordan and certain quarters within the PLO, and the attention its individual members receive from official Israeli quarters, whether in the granting of special privileges or of summoning for consultations, enhances their stature as the "authentic Palestinians" with whom Israel, if and when the time is ripe, might be able to do business.