Israel’s 50-Year Occupation: Harmful to Its Long-Term Interests and to Jewish Ethics

As the world marks 50 years of Israeli control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the construction of settlements housing approximately 700,000 Israelis in violation of international law, some believe that the Israeli government intends that this occupation be permanent.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared that there will never be a Palestinian state while he is in office. Other members of his government call for the annexation of the occupied territories.

Many Israelis are concerned about their country’s treatment of Palestinians. Prof. David Shulman of the Hebrew University notes that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent disenfranchisement of a huge population.”

While Israeli settlers enjoy protection from the Israeli army and subsidies from the government, Israel keeps 3 million indigenous Palestinians in the West Bank under military rule with restrictions imposed on nearly every aspect of their lives. While Palestinians live under military law and cannot vote, settlers have the full rights of Israeli citizenship.

Dan Ephron, author of Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, describes it this way: “… it includes separate legal systems — Israeli law for settlers and much harsher military law for Palestinians — and separate courts that mete out wildly unequal penalties … on Israel’s Independence Day in May, the government’s Central Bureau of Statistics published a report with updated population figures … A map in the report depicted the West Bank as just one more region of Israel, labeling it ‘Judea and Samaria District.’ The population figure, 8.68 million, included settlers who live in the West Bank. But it left out their neighbors, the Palestinians.”

The Israeli government is promoting the idea that the occupied territories are really part of Israel. The Green Line, the border which separates Israel proper from the occupied areas, no longer appears on schoolbook maps or newspaper weather charts.

The Economist (May 20, 2017) declares: “… the never-ending subjugation of Palestinians will erode Israel’s standing abroad and erode its democracy at home. Its politics are turning towards ethno-religious; chauvinism …The government objected even to a novel about a Jewish-Arab love affair. … To save democracy and prevent a slide to racism or even apartheid, it has to give up the occupied lands.”

While Israel proclaims itself a “Jewish” state, more and more Jewish voices are being heard in Israel, the U.S. and throughout the world saying that its treatment of Palestinians violates Jewish moral and ethical values. Hebrew University’s David Shulman put it this way: “In the end, it is the ongoing moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most dangerous, and most unacceptable. This failure weighs … heavily on our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank (New York Review of Books, June 22, 2017). •