The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has been under military occupation by Israel since 7 June 1967, when Israeli forces captured the territory, then occupied by Jordan, during the Six-Day War. The West Bank is part of the state of Palestine, and its status as a militarily occupied territory has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and, with the exception of East Jerusalem, by the Israeli Supreme Court. The West Bank, excepting East Jerusalem, is administered by the Israeli Civil Administration, a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Considered to be a classic example of an "intractable conflict", Israel's occupation is now the longest in modern history. Though its occupation is illegal, Israel has cited several reasons for retaining the West Bank within its ambit: historic rights stemming from the Balfour Declaration; security grounds, both internal and external; and the area's symbolic value for Jews.
Israel has controversially, and in contravention of international law, established numerous Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank. The United Nations Security Council has repeatedly affirmed that settlements in that territory are a "flagrant violation of international law", most recently in 2016 with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334. The ICJ has also found that the establishment of Israeli settlements is illegal under international law. The creation and ongoing expansion of the settlements have led to Israel's policies being criticized as an example of settler colonialism.
Israel has been accused of major violations of international human rights law, including collective punishment, in its administration of the occupied Palestinian territories. Israeli settlers and civilians living or traveling through the West Bank are subject to Israeli law, and are represented in the Knesset; in contrast, Palestinian civilians, mostly confined to scattered enclaves, are subject to martial law and are not permitted to vote in Israel's national elections. This two-tiered system has caused Israel to be accused of committing apartheid, a charge that Israel rejects entirely. Israel's vast military superiority, with a modern army and air force, compared to the Palestinian use of guerrilla tactics, has led to accusations of war crimes on both sides, with Israel being accused of disproportionality and the Palestinians accused of indiscriminate attacks.
The occupation also has numerous critics within Israel itself, with some Israeli conscripts refusing to serve due to their objections to the occupation. The legal status of the occupation itself, and not just the actions taken as a part of it, have been increasingly scrutinized by the international community and by scholars in the field of international law, with most finding that regardless of whether the occupation had been legal when it began, it has become illegal over time.
The West Bank in 1967
Israel's economy was 10 times larger than the West Bank's on the eve of the occupation, but had experienced two years of recession. The West Bank's population stood between 585,500 and 803,600 and, while under Jordanian rule, accounted for 40% of Jordan's GNP, with an annual growth rate of 6–8%. Ownership of land was generally collective, and the 19th century Ottoman land code prevailed, which classified land as either – waqf, mülk, miri, matruke, and mawat – the last three being formally state land, though Jordan never considered these last three as state property, and only a very small proportion of the West Bank was registered as such under Jordanian rule.
Education was (and remains) a high priority, The enrollment rate averaged an annual increase of 7% over the prior decade, and by 1966, Palestinian youth had the highest enrollment rate of all Arab countries. Palestinians in the West Bank had a favourable educational basis compared to Israeli Arabs and Jordanian youth, due to the preexisting provisions of the Jordanian school system which provided 12 years of free and compulsory education, with some 44.6% of West Bank teenagers in the 15–17 age group participating in some form of secondary schooling.
Conquest
In 1956, the Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion stated that: "Jordan has no right to exist. [...] The territory to the West of the Jordan should be made an autonomous region of Israel". There had been a very strong opposition to any "Balkanization" or division of Palestine, especially among American Zionists, in the mid-late thirties, since it would have made a prospective homeland, thus truncated, suicidally small. It was in this context that Ben-Gurion argued forcefully for accepting partition agreements as temporary measures, steps on the way to an incremental incorporation of all of Palestine into a Jewish state.
According to Israeli historian Adam Raz, as early as 1961, the IDF had drawn up meticulous plans for the conquest and retention of not only the West Bank, but also the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In August 1963, within the framework of "expected directions of expansion", southern Lebanon up to the Litani River was also included. Though international pressure might foreseeably force Israel to evacuate these conquered lands, contingency plans also envisaged political circumstances whose development would enable Israel to maintain control of these occupied territory indefinitely. The model for controlling Palestinians in the West Bank, were this to eventuate, was to be modeled on the Israeli governance of their Palestinian communities under a strict regime of permits.
Before the Six-Day War, there had been an unwritten agreement between Israel and the Jordanian government to uphold the neutrality of the border between the two countries along the Green Line. According to King Hussein, after Israel retaliated against Syrian-backed guerrilla infiltrations and sabotage by conducting on 13 November 1966 an assault on Samu in the West Bank, an area administered by Jordan, that tacit accord was broken. After Israel attacked Egypt at 8 a.m. on 5 June 1967, Jordan responded by shelling Israeli targets in West Jerusalem, and settlements along the border and then, after ignoring an Israeli warning, by attacking Israeli airfields in Ramat David and Kfar Syrkin, but also Netanya. In response, the Israeli army in a swift campaign took possession of East Jerusalem and, after news that King Hussein had ordered his forces to withdraw across the Jordan, took the entire West Bank by noon on 8 June.
Israel expelled many people from areas it had conquered, beginning with an estimated 12,000 people who on the very first day were rounded up in the villages of Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba in the Latrun Salient and ordered by the Israeli military into exile eastwards. All three villages were then destroyed, and within two years the area was planned as a recreational area now called Canada Park. Tens of thousands of Palestinians fled to Jordan from the refugee camps of Aqabat Jaber and Ein as-Sultan after Israel bombed the camps. The overall numbers of Palestinians displaced by that war is generally estimated to have been around 280,000–325,000, of which it has been calculated that some 120–170,000 were two-time refugees, having been displaced earlier during the 1948 war. The number who left the West Bank as a consequence of the war ranges from 100,000 to 400,000, of which from 50,000 to 200,000 lived in the Jordan Valley.
Military-civil administration
During the 1967 war, Israel appointed a Military Governor to rule the West Bank, with a remit to retain Jordanian law except where these conflicted with Israel's rights as belligerent occupying power. The Israeli administration of Palestinian territories became in time "the longest – and, accordingly, the most entrenched and institutionalized – belligerent occupation in modern history", issuing from 1967 to 2014 over 1,680 military orders regarding the West Bank. The third military order, issued two days after the onset of the occupation, specified that military courts were to apply the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the protection of civilians in a war zone: within 4 months this stipulation was erased from the order. Jordan maintains that some of the laws ostensibly retained from its code, stemming from the Mandatory Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, had in fact been abolished, and were invalid as they conflicted with the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The Israeli Military Governorate was dissolved in 1981, and in its place the Israeli military established the Israeli Civil Administration. The military order establishing the Israeli Civil Administration, military order 947, specified that "the Civil Administration shall administer civilian affairs ... with regard to the welfare and benefit of the population." Meron Benvenisti argues that this transition marked the transformation of the occupation from a temporary into a permanent system.
The military closely supervised elections in local clubs, cooperatives, or charitable organizations. West Bank lawyers were banned on security grounds from organizing a bar association. Palestinians were denied direct political representation after 1976, and instead, village leagues (rawabit al-qura) were introduced, and furnished by Israel with arms and militias. These leagues had a short life: their appointees were considered to be quislings by General Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and collaborationists by the local population, and to have been recruited from people who were lazy or had criminal backgrounds. With the Oslo Accords, Israel negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization a provisory agreement which left the latter some autonomy in Area A, mixed regulation of Area B, and total Israeli administration of the largest zone, Area C. Israel retains a right to operate militarily in all three zones, but security issues have a bilateral dimension that had led a number of critics to argue that effectively the Palestinian National Authority has become Israel's subcontractor in the occupation. According to an analysis by the Israeli think tank Molad in 2017, Israel deploys 50–75% of its active IDF forces in the West Bank, while only one-third deals with Arab states, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other perceived external threats. 80% of the former defend settlements, while 20% handle any behavior that Israel considers a security threat, including terrorism.
Israeli security concerns
A concern for security in Israel has been said to "vastly exceed the norm for other Western countries". Israel's military-industrial sector, which by the early 1980s employed a quarter of all industrial workers with 28% of GNP devoted to defense expenditures, became the fastest growing sector of the economy after 1967. It came to extend its activities beyond issues of defense, spilling over into the administration and settlement of the occupied territories.
The occupation has, according to some Israeli researchers, produced an ethos of conflict of which perceived security concerns, at times perplexing to outsiders, are a central feature. Although security is a fundamental Israeli preoccupation, the state has never formalized an official national security policy or doctrine. Before June 1967, the Israeli cabinet did not regard the West Bank as having a "vital security value". Before the war ended, the IDF's research department under Shlomo Gazit drew up a proposal to pull back from the West Bank and Gaza almost completely in exchange for a peace treaty, since, they concluded, there was no need for retaining any territory on security grounds. The document was ignored. It was in the wake of the conquest that secure, defensible borders became a keynote of Israel's foreign policy.
Four schools of thought came to dominate the question of the acquired territories. Two were closely linked to strategic questions of security. The territorialist approach, associated with Yigal Allon's Allon Plan (1967–1970), would have annexed all of the West Bank south of Jerusalem and the lowland border along the Jordan River, and excluded areas closer to the pre-1967 border, which had a high density of Palestinians. The functionalist view, associated with Moshe Dayan and later Simon Peres, foresaw setting up five army bases along the Jordan ridges, which also left the Palestinians in between with a degree of autonomy, though constrained to accept the presence of Israelis among them. From 1968 to 1977 Labor governments facilitated a number of settlements designed to form a bulwark against the threat of future mass tank assaults from Jordan and Iraq.
The third approach, associated with Menachem Begin and the Likud party, is annexationist, and with the ascendency of Likud, the biblical resonance of West Bank territory outweighed questions of security significance in driving an expansion of settlements, though both Likud and Gush Emunim came to oppose Palestinian independence on security grounds and treated West Bank Palestinians as either potential enemies or security threats, by arguing that national autonomy would develop into a basis for PLO aggression. The fourth position, associated with Abba Eban, Pinhas Sapir and Yehoshafat Harkabi is reconciliationist, being opposed to the idea of "Fortress Israel". Its proponents do not generally consider retention of the West Bank indispensable for guaranteeing Israel's security interests, with Harkabi, a former head of military intelligence, advocating withdrawal to the 1967 borders in exchange for a negotiated settlement with the PLO.
The West Bank was considered a bargaining chip in securing a broad peace treaty with Arab nations. In time, especially after the Sinai withdrawal, and suggestions the Golan Heights were also negotiable, the idea of retaining territory for strategic interests dwindled in importance, as a military anachronism in an age of missile warfare. The military arguments for retaining ground were supplanted by political considerations, that Arab acquiescence in agreed on borders is of greater importance, and that settlements, formerly placed along possible invasion routes, were no longer functional for security, if they were an obstacle to peace. The Oslo Accords, moreover, had set in place a Palestinian security apparatus that, as Yitzhak Rabin acknowledged, worked with Israel to safeguard Israel's security interests.