The West Bank Hearings: Israel's Colonization of Occupied Territory

Seth Tillman Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Winter, 1978), pp. 71-87.

[Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugees conducted two days of hearings, on October17 and 18,
1977, on the legal, social and human rights aspects of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank’ with Jewish
settlements]

1. INTRODUCTION
In ordinary discourse, there should have been nothing extraordinary in President Carter’s endorsement
of Palestinian “rights,” including the right of the Palestinian people to a “homeland” of their own. All
peoples are generally assumed to have “rights” of one kind or another, and it would have seemed more
unusual to consider one special group as not having rights. In the arcane code language of Middle East
debate, however, the terms “rights” and “homeland” have nothing less than electrifying connotations when
applied to the Palestinian people. Until this year, indeed, political and diplomatic orthodoxy required
American officeholders to refer to the Palestinians not as a people but as “refugees,” and not as possessing
“rights” - which connotes entitlement - but rather as having only interests’’ - which might or might not be
legitimate . When President Carter altered the vocabulary of Middle East discussion in the United States, he
also appeared to alter American policy in the direction of greater appreciation of Palestinian aspirations and
of the central importance of the Palestinian question in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.
The elaborate code language employed in official discussions of the Middle East has much more to do
with policies than with linguistics. For thirty years, public discussion of the Middle East in the United
States has been constrained by a virulent orthodoxy, according to which Israel has been defined as peaceful
and brave while the Arabs - and especially the Palestinians - have been stereotyped as violent and
treacherous. In much the same way that the anti-communist orthodoxy of the fifties made it imprudent for
Americans to

* Seth Tillman, a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former professional staff
member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Congress.
This is an analysis, completed before President Sadat’s trip to Israel in November 1977, of the Hearings
before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugees, Committee on Judiciary, US Senate, October 17-
18, 1977, chaired by Senator James Abourezk.
72 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
perceive any possible redeeming qualities in communism or anything less than totally malign intent in the
behaviour of the Soviet Union, the Zionist orthodoxy has made it imprudent - at least for individuals in
public life, and at least until recently - to speak out in fundamental criticism of Israeli policies, or in any
way favourable of Israel’s designated arch-enemy, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
As its spokesmen repeatedly insist, the Zionist lobby is not all-powerful. it can, to be sure, mobilize
formidable pressure campaigns through the media, by mail and by telephone. Counting among its
supporters many of the nation’s foremost fund-raisers, political contributors and activists, it can reward its
friends and target the errant for political oblivion. It liberally dispenses both praise and abuse, the big gun
in the latter department being the charge of ”anti-Semitism,” which to a politician is comparable in impact
to the old McCarthyite charge of “soft on communism.” Formidable as these resources are, however, they
would not seem sufficient in themselves to enable those who dispose of them to dominate American policy-
making with respect to the Middle East to the extent that all other considerations of the national interest are
overweighed by the commitment to Israel. Noting the obvious American interest in the oil of the Arabian
peninsula, and the historically rooted American commitment to the principle of the self-determination of
peoples, most Arabs - and an increasing number of Americans - are mystified by the Israeli lobby’s
apparent ability to manipulate the United States government into jeopardizing its oil interest while
conceding only the most grudging recognition to the principle of self-determination for the Palestinian
people.
Arabs suppose that the Zionist lobby must dispose, in addition to its other resources, of a secret weapon,
and indeed it does. Its power is enhanced far beyond what it otherwise would be by the timorousness of the
politicians. It is an open secret around the chambers of Congress that many members who give effusive
support to Israel with their votes and public statements privately hold a different view, or at least are
skeptical, as to where justice-and the true interests of all concerned-actually lie. Many too are frank to say,
in private, that they resent the pressures of the lobby but are unwilling to jeopardize their careers and
ambitions by incurring the lobby’s wrath. It is at least conceivable that the lobby’s threats of political
vengeance are based in part on bluff, but few officeholders have been willing to test it, thus conceding to
this most assertive of special interest groups a measure of raw political power which may well be in excess
of its actual tangible resources.
Only an occasional maverick is brave-or foolish-enough to challenge
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 73
Zionist orthodoxy and its enforcers. The US has always had mavericks in its politics and whatever their
motives-lack of further ambition, curmudgeonly nature, ignorance of the consequences, or deep conviction-
they have usually played a useful role. Sometimes they have been prescient in their views, at other times
mistaken, but rarely if ever has their dissent damaged the Republic.
The hearings herewith reported - on the colonization of the West Bank territories by Israel - qualify no
doubt as an act of apostasy against the prevailing orthodoxy. The acting chairman of the Subcommittee
regretted that none of his colleagues found themselves at liberty to participate in these hearings, and he left
it to others to judge whether he himself was prescient or mistaken in his view of the Palestinian question.
The core of that view - which gave rise to these hearings - is that the Palestinian case has been distorted and
misrepresented in the United States, so much so that a basic issue of human rights has been portrayed
instead as a problem essentially of terrorism, and a people who were forcibly dispossessed from their
homeland have been perceived instead as aggressors against those who expelled them. In the case of the
Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank and in Gaza-about a million in all-
basic issues of both human rights and international law, which under ordinary circumstances would surely
have appealed to the good instincts of the American people, have been obscured by the propagandist power
of the Israel lobby in the United States.
This has taken place despite the dimensions and obviousness of the injustice done the Palestinian
people. Of the total of 3 million Palestinians, half are registered with the United Nations as refugees, many
having been made refugees twice, in 1948 and again in 1967. Many of these talented and industrious people
have fared well, or prospered, in Jordan, Lebanon and even the occupied West Bank, but over 600,000 still
live in poverty and bitterness in refugee camps. “Our problem,” said one such refugee to a relief officer, “is
very simple . A foreigner came and took our land, took our farms and our homes, and kicked us out.” As
the former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commented in a recent television panel, “I
don’t know why there isn’t more sympathy for the lot of the Palestinians. They have really had a very
rough go.” Contesting the charge that the Palestine Liberation Organization has no real objective except to
kill Israelis, Senator Fulbright said: “I think the Palestinians have a legitimate feeling about that territory,
like other people who have been ousted from their homes. . . “ 1
1American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “Prospects for Peace in the Middle East,” WETA-
TV, Channel 26, Washington, D.C., November 6, 1977.
74 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
With a view to helping fill the gap in public knowledge of the Palestinian people, their present living
conditions and their aspirations for the future, the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugees
conducted two days of hearings, on October17 and 18, 1977, on the legal, social and human rights aspects
of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank’ with Jewish settlements. This, of course, is only one aspect of the
broader questions of Palestinian rights, to say nothing of the overall Arab-Israeli conflict. The occupied
territories of old Palestine, however, are the central and decisive issue in the broader conflict, and the
Israeli colonization policy, carried out in defiance of what is now unanimous world opinion, has major
implications for war or peace in the future. In the measured view of the State Department, the Israeli
settlements are an “obstacle to peace.” On October 28, 1977, the UN General Assembly adopted a
resolution declaring that the settlements “have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction” to
Middle East peace efforts. The vote was 131 to 1, with only Israel opposed. The United States and a
handful of other countries abstained.

2. THE TESTIMONY
The witnesses heard by the Subcommittee were: Israel Shahak, Professor of Chemistry, Hebrew
University, Jerusalem; Yehuda Avi Blum, Professor of International Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
W. T. Mallison, Professor of Law and Director of the Comparative and International Law Center, George
Washington University, Washington, D.C. ; Salim Tamari, Professor of Sociology, Bir Zeit University, on
the occupied West Bank; Ibrahim Dakkak, engineer, Jerusalem; and Fouzi El Asmar, journalist, author, and
editor, a Palestinian Arab and citizen of Israel. In addition, the record includes a statement on Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories by Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for the Near
East and South Asia.

Stating at the outset that he wished to concentrate “not on questions of law but on questions of justice,”
the opening witness, Dr. Shahak, himself a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, said that the assertion by
Israel of a right to settle its citizens in a territory whose own inhabitants would not be permitted to settle in
Israel proper is a violation of the principle of equal justice under law. The Israeli settlements policy, in Dr.
Shahak’s view, is reminiscent of restrictions which were once imposed upon Jews in Europe. Limiting the
privilege of forming new settlements to Jews only, the Israeli policy, said Dr. Shahak, “constitutes the most
blatant and open racism ... "
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 75
In addition, Professor Shahak continued, both adults and children in the settlements, especially in the
Egyptian Sinai, are exploited by “unjust and unequal wages,” so much so, at least in the Sinai, that their
circumstances can be accurately characterized as conditions of “slave labour.”
In questioning, Dr. Shahak explained the pattern of Jewish settlements on the West Bank as indicating a
“process of ghettoization which. . . shows the intention not only of permanent occupation but of permanent
ghettoization, of keeping the population in permanent subjection by keeping them in squares whose lines
will be the divisions of the settlements.” “I think,” the witness added at a later point, “that the settlements
are established in order to achieve a colonial rule which will be easy."
Dr. Shahak also pointed to deprivations of human rights in the occupied territories, including summary
deportations and imprisonment without trial. Nor, the witness added, are the West Bank Arabs accorded
rights of democratic protest through the formation of parties, trade unions, or cultural clubs. In conclusion,
Dr. Shahak observed that “if General MacArthur after conquering Japan in 1945 would have denied to
Japanese people for more than ten years such rights instead of allowing establishment of democracy rather
rapidly step by step, you would not have now a Japanese state which is as friendly to the United States as it
is now. You would have something very much worse, worse both for the Japanese people and for the
United States.

The next witness, Yehuda Avi Blum, Professor of International Law at Israel’s Hebrew University, dealt
at length with the question of the legality of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank-or as it is now
commonly referred to by Israelis, in “Judea and Samaria.” Professor Blum addressed himself especially to
the meaning of the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which relates to the protection of civilians in time of
war. Article 49 of that Convention, to which Israel, the United States and the principal Arab countries are
all signatories, states that “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons
from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or
not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." The only exception allowed is evacuation for reasons of
“the security of the population” or for “imperative military reasons.” In its other most pertinent clause
Article 49 states that, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian
population into the territory it occupies.”
76 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
Contending that the intent of Article 49 was to prohibit only those transfers of its own population by an
occupying power which would have the effect of displacing the local population, Professor Blum concludes
that the provision has no bearing on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank because they are being placed
in uninhabited areas and no local populations are being expelled. Further, in Dr. Blum’s view, Israel cannot
be regarded as an “occupying power” in the West Bank because, in his view, the party which was driven
out in 1967, Jordan, was not itself the “legitimate sovereign.” According to this line of reasoning, Jordan
acquired the West Bank by using force in violation of the United Nations Charter in the wake of Arab
rejection of the United Nations partition plan of 1947, and this “could not give rise to any valid legal title."
Since it was not a legitimate, internationally recognized “sovereign” which was expelled from the West
Bank by Israeli forces in 1967, it follows, in Professor Blum’s analysis, that Israel is not bound by the
obligations of an occupying power as spelled out in the fourth Geneva Convention. Professor Blum went on
to argue that Israel herself had a better “relative” title to sovereignty over the West Bank, as part of the old
Palestine mandate, than anybody else. The fact that Israel has so far refrained from exercising full
sovereignty rights is, in Professor Blum’s view, an unusual and commendable act of restraint motivated by
Israel’s reluctance to foreclose “certain political options” in any future negotiations. In conclusion
Professor Blum expressed his judgment that under international law Israel “cannot be considered as an
occupying power” in the West Bank, and further, that “Israel’s rights to Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip
are not subject to the limitations formally imposed by international law on a belligerent occupant.” Under
questioning Professor Blum added, “The moment Israel wishes to extend its law and jurisdiction and
administration to Judea and Samaria, it is entitled to do so... "
The Subcommittee notes at this point that although Professor Blum did not testify as an official
representative of the Israeli government, his appearance before the Subcommittee was suggested by the
Embassy of Israel and the views expressed by Dr. Blum in fact coincide with the official position of the
Israeli government. In a statement entitled “Jewish Settlement in the Areas Administered by Israel,”
distributed by the information department of the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D. C., under cover of a
letter dated October 25, 1977, it is asserted that “an overall reading” of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva
Convention makes it evident that its purpose is solely to protect local populations from displacement and
that ‘‘since no Arab inhabitants have been displaced by Jewish settlements, it is clear that the situation
envisaged in
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 77
Article 49 of the Geneva Convention does not apply to the Jewish settlements in question.” The statement
further implies future Israeli annexation by asserting, with respect to a possible future peace agreement,
“We believe that the agreement concerning Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip should be based on our
living together with the Palestinian Arabs in those areas, and not on partition of the territory.”
Israel’s apparent determination to retain control of the West Bank is further indicated by various official
statements, including a “précis” of Foreign Minister Dayan’s press conference of August 9, 1977, in which
it is stated, among other basic points, that “Israel will not return to the previous boundaries nor agree to the
creation of a Palestinian state in any form,” and also that “Israel is not ready to accept any foreign
government on the West Bank and in the Gaza.” Asked if Jordan was included in the category of “foreign
rule” which Israel would not accept on the West Bank, Foreign Minister Dayan replied, “Yes.”

The Subcommittee next heard testimony by W. T. Mallison, Professor of Law and Director of the
Comparative and International Law Center of George Washington University. Asserting that the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 are indeed applicable to the territories occupied by Israel, Professor Mallison noted
that the common Article 2 of all four Conventions states that they “shall apply to all cases of declared war
or of any other armed conflict which may arise . . . even if the state of war is not recognized . . . "
and further, that they apply to “all” situations of partial or total occupation of territory. Emphasizing that
the Conventions, under their own clearly stated terms, apply to the facts of an international conflict and not
to its merits as interpreted by one of the belligerents, Professor Mallison went on to observe that “the
negotiating history makes it clear, since the application of the Conventions is mandatory, that questions as
to dejure titles to territory are not involved and that the Convention must be applied in occupied territory
whatever the claims concerning the dejure status of that territory.”
As to Professor Blum’s claim that Israel is not bound by the fourth Geneva Convention because it does
not regard Jordan as having been the legitimate sovereign before 1967, Professor Mallison comments that
“the idea that in order to apply the law of belligerent occupation, it is necessary for the belligerent to
recognize the displaced government’s title to the territory finds no support in either the text of the
Convention or its negotiating history. In addition, it is contrary to the well-established customary law based
upon state
78 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
practice.” Even during the American Civil War, Professor Mallison recalled, the United States treated the
Confederacy as being subject to the international law of belligerent occupation. Referring again to the
Israeli claim that Jordan lacked title to the West Bank because Jordan acquired that territory, in Israel’s
view, by aggression, Professor Mallison commented that “if the humanitarian law were to be changed so
that its application was made contingent upon recognition by the belligerent occupant of the justness of the
war aims of its opponent, it is perfectly clear that the humanitarian law would be rarely, if ever, applied.”
In summary Professor Mallison advised the Subcommittee that he was “in full agreement with Dr. Blum
with only two exceptions" -- one relating to the facts, the other to the law.
Professor Mallison noted that the United States and the United Nations have consistently taken the
position that the fourth Geneva Convention is binding upon Israel with respect to the occupied territories,
and further that the Israeli settlements on the West Bank are illegal and an “obstacle to peace.” On
November 11, 1976, the United States joined in a unanimous statement to that effect by the United Nations
Security Council.
The illegality of the Israeli settlements is indicated, Dr. Mallison reminded the Subcommittee, by the
clear and explicit language of Article 49 (6) of the fourth Geneva Conventions, which states that “the
Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it
occupies.” There are, Professor Mallison noted, “no qualifications or exceptions to this provision.”

Professor Salim Tamari, Professor of Sociology at Bir Zeit University in the occupied territories,
addressed the Subcommittee on cultural aspects of the Israeli occupation and on the employment of Arab
workers from the occupied territories by Israel. All aspects of cultural expression, said Professor Tamari,
including drama, literary magazines and the press, “have been subject to extreme control by the Israelis.”
Dramatic scripts, for example, must be submitted to Israeli military censors for advance approval. The
occupation authorities, said Professor Tamari, came down particularly hard on a journal of folklore
produced by a group of teachers and students. “All references to Palestinian identity, to express a folk
culture, are frowned upon . . ."
Repressive measures, according to the witness, were directed especially against intellectuals and potential
political leaders, most especially against those who articulated Palestinian national aspirations. Professor
Tamari went on to cite instances, involving students and teachers, of night arrests and
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 79
interrogations, sudden deportations and extended imprisonment without trial. The last is carried out under a
law of administrative detention, a heritage from the mandate days which the British used against Jewish
partisans and which the Israelis now use regularly against Palestinian intellectuals, students and activists.
Professor Tamari recalled the deportation in 1975 of the President of Bir Zeit University, Dr. Hanna
Nasser. (The instance was well-known to the acting Chairman of the Subcommittee, who had met
personally with Dr. Nasser subsequent to his deportation.) Student demonstrations in support of the
Palestine Liberation Organization were taking place at the time. Although Dr. Nasser was not a participant
in the demonstrations, he was arrested in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and driven by jeep to the
Lebanese border, where he and a colleague were thrust across, without escort, through the dangerous
border military zone. Dr. Nasser came through safely; he was retroactively charged by the Israeli
occupation authorities with having incited the students to riot.
Professor Tamari also apprised the Subcommittee of the conditions under which Arab workers from the
occupied territories are utilized by Israel. They are used, he said, as “cheap labour,” especially in the
construction industry. “Our workers,” said Professor Tamari, “are constructing houses for Israeli
immigrants ... often in land which has been confiscated from Arab owners.
Sometimes, according to Professor Tamari, Palestinian workers find themselves working as hired labour on
farms which they themselves once owned. Asked further about the confiscation of land by the Israelis,
Professor Tamari said that the confiscations were concentrated in the fertile Jordan valley and also around
Nablus, “ostensibly for security reasons . . . .“ Jewish settlers are then brought in from Israel proper to farm
these lands.
Invited to comment on Dr. Shahak’s charge that the Israeli settlements policy constitutes “racism”
because only Jews can join them, Professor Tamari replied, “I would hardly call that a charge because the
Israeli government does not claim that these settlements are housing projects for the population. These are
openly established settlements, many of them on confiscated land, for the clear purpose of settling Jewish
immigrants and Israeli citizens, who are Jewish, and who are by definition not Arabs . . . these settlements
are exclusively Jewish settlements where Arabs are allowed to build but are not allowed to settle at all.”
Summarizing Palestinian attitudes toward the Israeli colonization policy, Professor Tamari observed:
“Daily we see foreign immigrants coming in to take our land and our houses . . . . We walk in Jerusalem
and see people
80 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
coming from all over the world, especially from Europe and the United States, and taking the attitude that
this country is theirs, while the inhabitants of that country, the Palestinians, are daily being deported and
denied their human rights.” The Palestinians, the witness concluded, placed their hope in the United States,
and in Israel’s dependency on the United States, which they hoped could be used to compel concessions to
the human rights of the Palestinian Arab people, who had lived in Palestine for thousands of years.

Dr. Ibrahim Dakkak, an engineer from Jerusalem, expressed apprehension that the new Israeli policy of
equalizing public services for the West Bank was the precursor to complete annexation. Jerusalem, he
recalled, had been annexed after the 1967 war with assurances that the two sectors would thereafter enjoy
complete equality with respect to services, welfare and education. There remained, nonetheless, said the
witness, two Jerusalems, Arab and Jewish. “The only unification which took place was the unification of
the administration against the will of the Arabs.” The services provided the Arab quarters of Jerusalem
continue, according to Dr. Dakkak, to be “much inferior,” and he added, “from 1947 until now, not a single
neighbourhood was built as a mixed neighbourhood for both Arabs and Jews. Not a kibbutz was established
as a mixed kibbutz.” Dr. Dakkak indicated that he had little doubt that an Israeli design for “unification” on
the West Bank would be no different from that in Jerusalem. Summarizing the overall effects of the Israeli
colonization policy on the West Bank Palestinians, Dr. Dakkak said: “They are losing their property .They
are losing the control of their destiny. They are losing their culture . . . "

The final witness to appear before the Subcommittee was Mr. Fouzi El Asmar, a journalist, editor and
poet, a Palestinian Arab who is a citizen of Israel. Contesting the statement of Professor Blum that Israeli
Arabs are free to form political associations of their choice, Mr. El Asmar asserted that in fact Israeli Arabs
are free to form political groupings -- or “lists” -- only if these are associated with Jewish parties; they may
not form independent Arab parties. Further, the witness asserted, Arab student organizations within Israeli
universities are denied recognition by both university authorities and the Ministry of Education, who refuse
to deal with them. Arab students, he said, are denied facilities on university campuses for cultural and
intellectual events which are readily accorded to Jewish students. Mr. El Asmar invited
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 81
the subcommittee to consider the outcry which would go up if Jewish students in American universities
were denied campus facilities for Jewish cultural events.
Mr. El Asmar went on to describe the continued use by Israel of the emergency laws enacted by the
British mandatory authority in 1945. Under these regulations, according to Mr. El Asmar, Israeli authorities
detain individuals without charges or trial, restrict the movements of suspected individuals, place
individuals under house arrest, destroy houses, inflict collective punishment, confiscate property and, as
noted earlier, summarily expel individuals from the country. Such practices, in Mr. El Asmar’s view, are
not exceptional but rather are an integral part of the Zionist colonial nature of the State of Israel. . .

3. COMMENTS AND CONCLUSION

On the basis of the testimony taken by the Subcommittee-which in its main outlines is corroborated by
the reports of numerous visitors to the occupied territories, both official and unofficial-it seems accurate
and reasonable to define the Israeli settlements and occupation policies on the Palestinian West Bank as a
regime of “colonization.” At the very least the Israeli settlements represent, in the phrase used both by the
United States government and the United Nations, an “obstacle to peace.” As the Assistant Secretary of
State for the Near East and South Asia, Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., testified, “The Israeli government has taken
the position that all issues are negotiable and that the settlements will not be an obstacle to negotiations and
peace. In our view, however, once settlements are established, they inevitably create psychological and
political conditions which will make it more difficulf to negotiate the final disposition of areas where they
are located.” 2
Furthermore, Professor Blum’s artful sophistries notwithstanding, the settlements are illegal. That is the
official position of the United States government and it is in any event obvious. The language of the sixth
clause of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention is clear: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or
transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” There are, as Professor Mallison
notes, “no qualifications or exceptions to this provision.” By no stretch ‘of the legal imagination can this or
any other provision of the fourth Geneva Convention be tortured into authorization for a belligerent
occupying power to exempt

2 Testimony before the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Organizations and
on Europe and the Middle East.
82 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
itself from its voluntarily contracted treaty obligation because it contests the legitimacy of the governing
authority it displaced. The first rule of legal interpretation is that the law means what it says and not
something different; the second is that authoritative interpretation is to be provided by impartial authorities
and not by partisan belligerents. To affirm otherwise is an assault upon the very spirit of the law and an
insult to the intelligence.
No less insulting, to the sensibilities as well as the intelligence of the Palestinian people, is the Israeli
contention that the people living under their military rule are happy and even free. The Israelis point to
certain social services they say they are providing, to jobs provided by Israeli enterprises, and to the
holding of free municipal elections -- most of which were won by candidates strongly supporting the
Palestine Liberation Organization. Even if these claims were wholly accurate -- and there is abundant
evidence that they are not -- they still would not alter the fact of a colonial regime in the occupied
territories. Israeli references to Arab-Jewish “coexistence” on the West Bank may be used to advance a
claim that the colonial regime is a benevolent one, but benevolent or otherwise, that is what it is. The
“coexistence” of which Israelis speak is in any case of a special nature since the settlements being
established are exclusively for Jews; no Arabs are invited or permitted to live in them. This is clearly not a
coexistence of equals, but rather one between a dominant invader and a subordinate indigenous population
who are to be kept docile by a combination of military force and political and economic inducements.
There is nothing new about these techniques: they are the classic devices employed by the British in
India and many of the other classical colonial empires. It is, to be sure, more enlightened, humane and
efficient than the brutal subjugation of populations as practised by the Germans in Europe during World
War II. It is colonialism nonetheless, and of an anachronistic variety. All that is new about it is its revival in
an age when the classical European colonial empires have all but vanished from the earth.
The essence of colonialismis the imposition of alien rule upon an indigenous population. It may range in
character from brutal to benign, but there are few if any recorded instances in which the native population
have come to like it. The West Bank Palestinians are no exception: although the Israeli occupation has been
comparatively mild as military occupations go, the West Bank Palestinians still do not wish to be ruled by
foreign intruders in their ancestral homeland. A research team from Bar-Ilan University in Israel recently
completed a five-year study of the attitudes of Palestinian Arabs who work in Israel, questioning about
1,000 of the 50,000 Arab workers who
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commute from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to work in construction, agriculture, industry and services
in Israel proper. In direct contradiction of the current Israeli assumption-that “coexistence” will reconcile
the Arabs to Israeli rule-the study, according to its director, Professor Yehuda Arim, “shows no support for
the naive assumption that time will take its course, and that if only the Israelis and Arabs will live together,
the Arabs after a time will come to accept the situation and change their attitude in a positive direction.” Or
as the professor more pungently summed it up, “If someone hates your guts, living with him will make it
worse.” 3

Except for Israel itself, world opinion is now unanimous in its collective judgment that the Israeli
colonization of the West Bank is both illegal and an obstacle to peace. The evidence is conclusive, but even
in marshalling it one has the strong sense that the practical problem lies elsewhere. It is unlikely indeed that
the Israeli government would agree to withdraw from the occupied territories if only it could be convinced
that the fourth Geneva Convention really is binding with respect to the West Bank, or that Israel’s special
branch of “coexistence” will never win Arab acquiescence. It is more than likely that the Israelis know
these things; their arguments to the contrary-Professor Blum’s testimony being an example-are more in the
nature of rationalizations than bona fide legal and political analyses. The practical problem-and the real
issue-undoubtedly lie elsewhere: in the bone-deep conviction of Israel’s current leaders that the West Bank
- ”Judea and Samaria” - is the patrimony of the Jewish people, part of the flesh of “Eretz Israel,” the
property of the Jews by Biblical right, a gift from the Supreme Being which cannot be revoked by
“squatters” - even “squatters” who have lived on the land for 2,000 years.
As matters stand, the Israeli leaders, with apparently solid backing from their people, have no intention
of withdrawing from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They are willing, they say, to negotiate aspects of
their regime on the West Bank, but they are not willing, as they have made abundantly clear, to give it up.
Foreign Minister Dayan stated that clearly in an address to the staff of his Ministry on June 22, 1977. The
Begin government, he said, did indeed desire to make peace with the Arabs, “not on the basis of territorial
partition of the West Bank, not by dividing it into parts, one of which would
3 “Israeli Jobs Failing to Win Arabs,” New York Times, November 1, 1977.

84 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

belong to Israel and the other to an Arab state, but by finding a way to 'coexist’ there, without annexing any
part to Jordan, without handing over any part of the West Bank or of the Gaza Strip to the rule of another
government.” Again, in an official “précis” of Foreign Minister Dayan’s press conference of August 9,
1977, issued the following day by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, it was stated categorically that
“Israel will not return to the previous boundaries nor agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in any
form,” and further, “Israel is not ready to accept any foreign government on the West Bank and in the
Gaza.” Asked if this included Jordan as a “foreign government,” Mr. Dayan replied, “Yes.”

It is something of an oddity in the modern world to have territory claimed on obscurantist religious
grounds.Security is also emphasized, to be sure, and no one questions the sincerity, or in some measure the
validity, of Israel’s fears for her security. But increasingly, since the Begin government came to power, the
emphasis has shifted to religious, Biblical grounds, to the mystique of “Eretz Israel.” This, one suspects, is
where the real conviction lies; this is what fuels Mr. Begin’s engine. It places Israel in direct defiance of the
modern world’s primary standard of equity for the drawing of international frontiers: the principle of self-
determination, the right of peoples, so far as possible, to live within political jurisdiction of their choice.
There being no practical way to reconcile the two standards-one ancient and religious, the other modern
and secular-Israelis have found themselves in a painful moral dilemma with respect to the Palestinian
people. A few mavericks such as Dr. Israel Shahak have faced the dilemma squarely, acknowledging both
the rights of the Palestinians and the wrongs done them by successive expulsion from and occupation of
their native land. And there are others: Former Chief of Military Intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi has urged
his fellow Israelis to concede the right of the Palestinians to form a state, and also asks Israelis to “show
sympathy for the Palestinian problems and suffering, to the making of which we have contributed. “ 4 An
Israeli journalist, Meir Merhav of the Jerusalem Post, warns Israelis that the “total and unconditional
rejection of Palestinian self-determination” is “partly the result of a false perception of reality, partly the
outcome of faulty logic and partly the product of an irrational mixture of mystical beliefs, aggressive
romanticism and traumatic fears, which cannot be upheld in today’s world.” 5
4Maariv, January 7, 1977. Quoted in The Middle East, 3rd ed., published by Congressional Quarterly,
September 1977, p. 118.
5 “The Palestinian Reality,” New York Times, November 7, 1977, p. 37.
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 85

There are indications that this view is not wholly rejected by the Israeli people. A poll taken by Israel’s
largest newspaper, Maariv, showed that almost half of the Israeli people-and over half of those of prime
military age-believed that the establishment of additional settlements in the occupied territories would be
detrimental to peace prospects.
The leaders of Israel, however, still hew, it would seem, to the Zionist myth of the “land without a
people for a people without a land.” Confronted on the one hand with the mystical vision of “Eretz Israel,”
and on the other hand with the fact of a long established Palestinian population, Israel’s leaders have tried
to escape from their moral dilemma by denying the existence of a “Palestinian people” as a distinct national
or ethnic unit. “There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . ,“ said Golda Meir in 1969. “It was not as
though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came
and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” 6 Unrepentant, the
venerable Mrs. Meir reiterated these sentiments in November 1977. Emerging from a White House meeting
with President Carter on November 8, Mrs. Meir was asked by reporters whether Israel would ever accept a
Palestinian homeland as called for by President Carter. She replied, “I think not. It is not necessary for the
Palestinians. It’s dangerous for Israel. It is a threat to Israel’s existence and of no necessity for Palestinian
refugees." 7
The premise in Mrs. Meir’ s view -- and it is shared by her successors -- is that the Palestinian people
have no right to a national identity; they are merely Arabs, indistinguishable from all other Arabs, and the
proper, decent thing for them to do is to forget about their former homes and vanish into the landscape of
the surrounding Arab countries, which, after all, have plenty of land and can only begrudge the Jews a
small land of their own, the territory of former Palestine, out of hateful animosity.
Reports of their nonexistence have come as startling news to the uprooted Palestinians. In their own
considered judgment they do exist, not just as Arabs undistinguished from all other Arabs, but as
Palestinians with a strong and distinct sense of themselves as Palestinians. Their national feeling, to be
sure, has been sharpened and intensified by the Zionist impact-by expulsion, occupation and dispersion --
but it is a bona fide and determined nationalism
6Interview with the London Sunday Times, June 15, 1969. Quoted in Alan R. Taylor, The Zionist Mind
(1974), p. 143.
7 Quoted in “Carter and Golda Meir Differ in Talks on Mideast,” New York Times, November 9, 1977.

86 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

nonetheless, as bona fide and determined as that of the Israelis themselves. Rival claimants to the land so
long inhabited by the Palestinians, the Israelis cannot, in the framework of their moral dilemma,
acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism without calling into question the legitimacy of their
own, without identifying themselves as usurpers.
That -- and not the Geneva Convention -- is the heart of the issue of the West Bank, and it is a moral
dilemma for Americans as well as for Israelis. That is not to suggest that anyone at this late date-
Americans, the principal Arab states, or most of the Palestinians themselves-would now seriously
contemplate the dismantling of the Israeli state and its replacement by the “democratic, secular” state which
Mr. Arafat himself has long since conceded is no more than a “vision” and a “dream.” To displace Israel
today would be no less an injustice than it was for Israelis to displace the Palestinians thirty years ago. In
practice the moral dilemma resolves itself down to whether Israel will accept, and whether the United
States will insist upon, self-determination for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. We may
prefer -- and we may say that we prefer-a Palestinian homeland linked to Jordan, but by accepted standards
of justice-our own and those of the international community -- it is for the Palestinians alone to decide the
form which their homeland will take.
Americans are not, and cannot be, the keepers of the conscience of the world. We are, however,
responsible for our own conscience and that means that we have an obligation to uphold principles of
international justice to which we have voluntarily subscribed and for the most part adhered through our
history. One of the foremost of these is the right of peoples to self-determination, a principle largely of
American origin which is neither obscure nor contested as a standard in the modern world. Its central
meaning is, simply, that a land belongs to the people who inhabit it and not to someone else, however
ingenious the claimant’s legal arguments, however sincere his sense of historical attachment, however deep
his conviction that the Creator intended the land in question for him.
The principle of self-determination of peoples is specified in the United Nations Charter, and it is rooted
in American tradition. In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson defined it as a guidepost of American policy: ”.
. . peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere
chattels and pawns in a game.. . “ 8 In 1977 a leading Palestinian intellectual wrote : “The thing to
remember about the American
8Address to Congress, February 11, 1918.
THE WEST BANK HEARINGS 87
policy is this: It is a pragmatic policy. It is an opportunistic policy. It is guided neither by professed moral
values nor by any clear perception of the future. It is a policy which deals with conflicts not in terms of
justice and finality but in terms of management and manipulation.” 9 Someday, somehow, the Israeli-
Palestinian problem will be resolved, and when it is, one of these statements - the Wilsonian precept or the
Palestinian’s indictment - may stand as definitive of the American role. As of this writing, in November
1977, it would be difficult to predict which it will be.
9Hisham Sharabi, “Building the Arab-American Bridge,” Monday Morning, Beirut, August 29, 1977.