Separation wall between Israel and West Bank is NOT apartheid

 

                Banksy wall mural (Palestine 2005)

Separation wall between Israel and West Bank is NOT apartheid

By Hendrik van der Breggen

 

Is apartheid the purpose of the Israeli-built separation wall between Israel and the West Bank? Answer: No.

Although inconvenience and suffering by Palestinians in the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria) may be tragic effects of the separation wall, the question that should be asked is this: Why? Why was the separation wall built? The oft-missed truth will surprise Westerners who have succumbed to historical amnesia aided and abetted by anti-Israel media.

The truth is this: Israel’s purpose for the wall is not apartheid but to restrain hostile actors.

Whirlwind historical tour

To better understand why the separation wall exists, some knowledge of the history leading up to the wall’s construction is helpful. It gets a bit complicated, so please bear with me in the following whirlwind historical tour.

Let’s go back to 1967. It turns out that the Israeli presence in the West Bank was a result of a failed Arab attack on Israel in 1967. In that year Israel’s Arab neighbours—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—wanted to destroy Israel (that is, they again wanted to destroy Israel, as was the case in their previously failed plan in the Arab-Israel war of 1948–49). But they lost (also again).

Israel was able to resist successfully against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in what is called the Six Day War: June 5–10, 1967.[1] The Six Day War was a defensive war (via pre-emptive strike) on aggressor countries—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—clearly bent on wiping Israel off the map. Incredibly (some say miraculously), Israel defeated the warring neighbours within a week.

Starting (and losing) war has consequences

Consequently, Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula as well as Gaza to Israel (Israel returned Sinai to Egypt in a 1979 peace agreement, and Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to give Gazans independence). Also, Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel (which Israel still controls for strategic purposes against Syria). And Jordan lost the West Bank to Israel (Jordan had annexed the West Bank in 1950, after Jordan’s participation in the 1948–49 war against Israel).

These territorial gains by Israel followed the well-recognized principle of war that aggressor states, when defeated, can lose territory and subsequently have no legitimate right to complain (because, after all, they were aggressors).

Our focus here is the West Bank (and the wall).

After the 1967 Six Day War, the West Bank came under control of Israel to provide a security buffer against Jordan. (We will skip over the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria launched yet another attack against Israel—and again lost.) In 1988 Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank. Then in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which was an attempt to achieve a peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority was set up to control the West Bank and Gaza as a Palestinian state-in-the-making. Although Israel still maintained much control in the West Bank, the hope was to create a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel. In other words, the goal was a two-state solution (which, by the way, was also the UN goal prior to the 1948–49 Arab initiated Arab-Israeli war). And the hope was for peace.

Possible peace in 2000

In the year 2000 a possible peace agreement at Camp David (hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton) was negotiated between Israel and Palestine to create a full Palestinian state. This Palestinian state would include 90+ percent of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza, plus sections of much-coveted Jerusalem. The idea was for Israel to swap land for peace, and the deal was extremely generous to Palestinians. A genuine two-state solution seemed very much to be in the offing.

But then, to the astonishment of much of the world, the agreement was rejected by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat—and violence against Israel from West Bank ensued.

Rejection explained

Why the rejection? Answer: The peace agreement required Palestinians to recognize Israel as a legitimate state. For Palestinians, however, turning the West Bank and Gaza into their own Palestinian state was not the main concern. Rather, their main concern was that Palestinians should not recognize Israel—a Jewish state—as legitimate. Why not? Because Jews and a Jewish state in the region are anathema to Islam.

This is a religious objection that seems not appreciated, or at least underappreciated, by secular Western minds, so let me take some time to explain this religious objection. (Reminder: In our whirlwind historical tour we are still attempting to understand why Israel built a separation wall around the West Bank.)

About Islam/Islamism

It is important to understand the Islamic/Islamist mindset of the majority of Palestinians in 2000 because the issue for Palestinians regarding Israel very apparently was not over borders, but rather about whether Israel should be allowed to exist at all—in fact, Palestinians didn’t want Israel to exist at all. (And keep in mind that even at present most Palestinians still hold this Islamic/Islamist mindset as they support the group called Islamic Resistance Movement, whose acronym in Arabic is better known to Westerners as HAMAS.[2])

According to Islamic doctrine, all once-Muslim lands always belong to Islam. This includes the Palestine region, i.e., the geographical region that includes present-day Israel, West Bank, and Gaza, which was once part of the Ottoman Empire—which was an Islamic caliphate. But in World War I the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany and had lost the war against Britain and France. As a result, the Palestine region fell under control of the British who then passed the control to the UN. The age of empire was ending and the age of self-determining nation states was emerging. The goal of Britain and then the UN was to create two nation states. The Palestine geographical region, no longer controlled by the Ottomans or British, was to be divided by the UN in 1948 into two nation states for two peoples with legitimate claims to the land: Arabs and Jews. Arabs would have their own state as would Jews.[3]

But, as mentioned, according to Islamic doctrine the region was to belong always to Islam. So the Islamist Arabs did not want the Jews to have their own state. And so the Islamist Arabs rejected the proposed two-state solution—with violence.

Note: Islamists are Muslims who take Muhammad (c. 570–632 AD) seriously as their prophet and ultimate revealer of God’s will. According to Islamists, Islam is not merely a personal religion but also a political ideology—and the goal for Islamists is to achieve a just global “peace” by dominating the world via jihad and ruling via Sharia law. (When Islamist jihad stalls or falters because Islamists are the weaker party, Islamists are amenable to ceasefires or truces, but only temporarily and when they are weak, so they can again become strong. Ceasefires and truces are a tactical ploy, not a permanent solution.) In addition, according to Islamists, Muhammad’s later hateful and violent teachings against Jews—teachings that abrogate/ cancel the prophet’s earlier peaceful views concerning Jews—are also to be taken seriously.[4] Jews may be tolerated as second-class citizens or they are to be killed. Significantly, the prophet Muhammad, who is the model Muslim for Islamists, was a warlord who killed or supported the killing of many hundreds of Jews.[5]

Unfortunately for the Islamist Arabs, in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49, a war in which five Arab countries attacked the newly formed Israeli state to destroy it, the Islamist Arabs lost the once-Muslim land to the Jews. This war—started and lost by the Islamist Arabs—was a huge embarrassment to Muslims. Not only did a small fledgling Jewish state defeat the Arab armies of five neighbouring countries, which is embarrassing enough, but also that loss was a violation of Islam’s Allah-ordained domination of that region, which is even more embarrassing.

Daniel Pipes, an American historian and president of the Middle East Forum, elaborates:

Islamic doctrine holds that once a land has been conquered by Muslims, it becomes part of the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and an inalienable Islamic patrimony (a waqf). Accordingly, its loss constitutes a robbery, and Muslims must exert to bring it back under their rule…

Palestine became a part of Dar al-Islam after its conquest by Muslims in 638 CE, six years after the Islamic account records the death of Muhammad. Muslims then ruled it until 1917, with the exception of two centuries, from 1097 to 1291, when Crusaders controlled parts of it. The British ruled all of it from 1917 to 1948 and Israel, most or all of thereafter. This history has created a deep sense of entitlement: Palestine [i.e., the geographical region which includes Israel] belongs under Muslim control.[6]

Moreover, according to Islam and Islamists, Islam is the true religion whereas Judaism, the religion of the Jews, is not (nor is Christianity or any other religion). Thus, as previously mentioned, for Islamists, that is, for Muslims who take Muhammad seriously as their prophet and final revealer of God’s will, Muhammad’s later hateful and violent teachings against Jews (teachings that abrogate the prophet’s earlier peaceful views of Jews) are to be taken seriously. Jews are to be dominated as second-class citizens or they are to be destroyed. Jews simply cannot have a state in a once-Muslim land. A Jewish state is anathema to Islam.

All this to say: The peace negotiations of 2000 were rejected by Palestine because a Jewish state simply could not be allowed by Arab Islamists.

The sneaky part

There is more. As is often said, the devil is in the details.

Yes, the peace negotiations of 2000 were rejected by Palestine because a Jewish state simply could not be allowed for religious reasons by Arab Islamists, but there is an important wrinkle. The peace negotiations fell apart because it was a Palestinian attempt to beat Israel, albeit sneakily instead of militarily, and again the Palestinians failed.

As mentioned, gaining the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem was not enough for the Palestinians. The Palestinian sneaky strategy was to win against Israel in 2000 by insisting on the alleged “right of return” of Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49. This was a “right of return” not merely to what would be the new state of Palestine (i.e., West Bank and Gaza), in which most Palestinian refugees already lived, but to their former homes in Israel. In other words, Palestinians wanted an Israeli political suicide.

A look at some numbers will help us understand the Palestinian right-of-return strategy as a way of defeating Israel. At the end of the 1948–49 war there were 750,000 Palestinian refugees who had left Israel, but that number increased by the year 2000 to 3.7 million even though no more Palestinians left Israel.[7] Why the increase? Because instead of settling those refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency/ UNRWA—a refugee settlement agency that was co-opted by Palestinians and became an anti-Israel political weapon—nurtured the identities of these original refugees as perpetual and resentful anti-Israel refugees for 50 years, granted refugee status to their descendants, and maintained refugee status even of those who became citizens elsewhere (which is, to put it mildly, outlandish and unheard of in other international refugee organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees/ UNHCR). But Israel’s population in the year 2000 was 6.2 million, of which 1.4 million were non-Jews. So in the year 2000 an additional 3.7 Muslim Arabs coming to Israel would turn Israel into a state in which Jews no longer were the majority. Significantly, this would undermine the Jewishness of the Jewish democratic state. And this would allow Palestinians to win demographically in 2000 the war they lost militarily in 1949. As a result of the so-called “right of return,” Israel would become a Muslim/Islamist-majority state. Sneaky, indeed.

To avoid political suicide (and worse), Israel could not allow this Palestinian alleged “right of return.” So even though Israel was generously willing to turn over West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem in return for peace coupled with an official Palestinian recognition of Israel as a bona fide state, Palestine said no. And violence against Israel ensued.[8]

About the Nakba

At this juncture, it may be tempting for some pro-Palestine readers to object that the Palestinian “right of return” is legitimate because Israel was the cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948–49. That is, Israel was the cause of the displacement of 750,000 Arabs, a.k.a. the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). The idea, according to this objection, is that in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war Israel committed a genocide or ethnic cleansing against Arabs, so for justice to prevail Palestinian Arab refugees should be allowed to return to Israel. Today, the view that Jews committed genocide or ethnic cleansing at Israel’s inception is a highly popular view. But it is false and should be challenged.

The fact is that at Israel’s inception in 1948 the Palestinian Arabs started (and later lost) a genocidal war against the Jews, a war that was an attempt by the Palestinian Islamist Arabs and the surrounding Islamist Arab states to bring Hitler’s “final solution” (extermination of Jews) into the region of Palestine. Reminder: Nazi Germany lost World War II in 1945 yet many Arabs were Nazi-collaborators who, after World War II, continued to hold firm to their Nazi-like antisemitism and continued to fan the flames of this antisemitism in the Middle East. But the Jews refused to be victims (again) and successfully resisted the Nazi-collaborating Islamist Arab aggressors. The 1948–49 war was the cause of the displacement of 750 thousand Palestinian Arabs, but that war was started by Palestinian Islamist Arabs. Israel did not start the war and thus was not the cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Yes, many Arabs, especially those deemed hostile to Israel, were forced out by Israel in 1948. This is truly tragic. But it was war—a war started by the Arabs. And these facts remain: Many Arabs left Israel willingly to get out of harm’s way because a war (to exterminate Jews) was at hand (and these fleeing Arabs planned to return to Israel after Israel was destroyed); many Arabs left Israel because the surrounding Arab nations (wishing to wage genocidal war on the Jews) ordered them to leave to facilitate the war effort (and return later to a Jew-ridden land); many Arabs who were not hostile to Israel stayed in Israel (as citizens of Israel). In other words, the criterion for Arabs being forced out of Israel was not whether they were Arab, but whether they were hostile to Israel.

Middle East expert Denis MacEoin observes: “It is true that the Israelis expelled some Arabs, but they were mainly those in frontline areas and who were known to be cooperating with the enemy. But they were only a small percentage of those Arabs who became displaced.”[9]

Thus, embedded in the criterion of expulsion is a distinction that shows the Nakba was not genocide, not ethnic cleansing. Hostility, not ethnicity or religion, was the concern. This is a significant distinction that should not be missed (but often is) and it refutes the genocide/ethnic cleansing charge.

This distinction is additionally significant because it also refutes the oft-heard charge that Israel stole Arab land. That is to say, the distinction shows that in 1948–49 many Palestinian Arabs forfeited the ownership of their houses and land by siding with those who waged war on the Jews with the intent of murdering all the Jews. Is “forfeited” too strong a word? No. As MacEoin points out, “The Arabs in Palestine were being told: ‘You can leave now, you can get out of the way, let the armies—let the Egyptian army, the Jordanian army [and other Islamist Arab armies]—let them do their work, and then when you come back you can have all the properties that belong to the Jews when we have wiped them out.’”[10] Surely, abandoning one’s property (even with intent of doing so only temporarily) so thereby one aids and abets a genocidal war against one’s neighbours constitutes no legitimate grounds whatsoever for one’s complaint of theft concerning the abandoned property’s subsequent appropriation by those neighbours (as a nation state) when the genocide attempt is stopped by those neighbours.

All this to say: Palestinian refugees do not have a “right to return” to Israel, and so the Palestinian rejection of the 2000 peace offer was because they did not want Israel to be a state.

By the way, for the sake of context, after the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war about 800 thousand Jews fled or were pushed out of nearby Arab countries to find safety in Israel and elsewhere.[11]

Back to the separation wall

Again, in the peace negotiations of 2000, turning the West Bank and Gaza into a Palestinian state was not the main concern for Palestinian Islamist Arabs. Rather, the main concern was that Palestinians should not recognize Israel—a Jewish state—as legitimate. Jews and a Jewish state in the region are anathema to Islam. The whole of the region was to be under Muslim control. Because Muslim control could not be gotten via the alleged “right of return,” Islamic terrorists in West Bank launched multiple suicide bombings and attacks against Israelis, and so Israel struck back with force—and walls.

Daniel Gordis, a Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College (Jerusalem), explains the sad situation well, so I quote him in extenso:

In 2001, more than a hundred Israelis died at the hands of suicide bombers. Dozens more died in attacks of other sorts. As the Palestinians grew increasingly brazen, they attacked more heavily trafficked locations seeking ever higher body counts. In the summer of 2001, a suicide bomber attacked a disco on the Tel Aviv beach, which left twenty-one Israelis dead, most of them teenage girls from Russian families who had immigrated to Israel. Over a hundred were injured. Barely two months later, a suicide bomber attacked a pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, at one of the city’s busiest intersections. One hundred and thirty people were injured in the blast, and fifteen were killed. Half of the dead were children.

Most of the perpetrators of the violence were coming from the West Bank….

On the first night of Passover in 2002, some 250 guests had gathered for the traditional Seder [a Jewish service or dinner to celebrate the beginning of Passover] at the Park Hotel in the seaside city of Netanya. A Palestinian terrorist disguised as a woman managed to get past hotel security and detonated a large explosive in the crowd, many of whom were elderly and some of whom were Holocaust survivors. The blast killed 28 civilians and injured about 140 people. Twenty of the wounded were severely injured, and two later died of their wounds. Several married couples were killed, as was a ninety-year-old. A father was killed with his daughter.

Gordis adds:

In the aftermath of this attack, Ariel Sharon [then prime minister of Israel] decided to respond, and shortly thereafter, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield. The largest Israeli military operation in the West Bank since the Six-Day War, it was designed to uproot the terror infrastructures in the major Palestinian cities there. In essence, Israel took back the cities that it had transferred to the Palestinians in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords.

Israel did not stop there. Committed to stopping the terror and the attacks on its citizens, the government decided in September 2002 to build a separation barrier cutting off Arab areas in the territories from Israel. The wall, which took more than five years to construct, covered 480 miles (though it was never completed). When the northern section of the wall was completed, it managed to stop all terrorist attacks from that section of the West Bank. Despite its undeniable effectiveness, the wall evoked widespread international condemnation for the inconveniences it imposed on innocent Palestinians, but Israel’s leadership was not moved. Construction of the wall continued, and by December 2004, the number of suicide attacks had decreased by 84 percent.[12]

Presently, the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria) is a territory of which parts are controlled by the Palestinian Authority and parts by Israel—and it is complicated. Areas are divided as Palestinian-controlled, as Israeli-controlled, and as something-in-between. As mentioned, the segregation and Israeli presence in the West Bank are due to security reasons. It is not done for the sake of apartheid, as often is alleged in news and social media. The segregation and Israeli presence are no doubt difficult for Palestinians, but this is Israel’s response to the many past Palestinian attacks and suicide bombings against Israel.

Again, it is not apartheid. Nor is it racism. It is not discrimination or oppression based on race or ethnicity. Rather, it is an attempt to restrain hostile actors. Again, the separation wall was built by Israel for security reasons. And shortly after the wall was built Palestinian attacks and suicide bombings dropped significantly.

Sadly, at time of writing (November-December 2024) there has been an upsurge in Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria against Israelis.

Conclusion

Although inconvenience and suffering by Palestinians in the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria) may be tragic effects of the separation wall, the question that should be asked is this: Why was the separation wall built? As our whirlwind historical tour has shown, the purpose of the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank is not apartheid. This oft-missed truth may surprise Westerners who have succumbed to historical amnesia aided and abetted by anti-Israel media, but the fact is that the wall was built for the sake of Israel’s security against Palestinian Islamist attacks—and reasonably so.[13, 14]

 

Endnotes

1. For a detailed examination of the Six Day War, see Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Ballantine Books/ Presidio Press, 2017). Oren has a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and is a former Israeli Ambassador to the United States.

2. “Poll: Hamas Remains Popular Among Palestinians,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, March 22, 2024, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/22/poll-hamas-remains-popular-among-palestinians/.

3. For a defence of the falsity of the claim that Israel’s inception was a colonial enterprise, see Hendrik van der Breggen, “Settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing: Two false assumptions about Israel’s inception,” APOLOGIA, October 8, 2024, https://apologiabyhendrikvanderbreggen.blogspot.com/2024/10/settler-colonialism-and-ethnic.html. See also Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024). For my review of Kirsch’s book, see Hendrik van der Breggen, “Book review of Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism,” APOLOGIA, November 7, 2024, https://apologiabyhendrikvanderbreggen.blogspot.com/2024/11/book-review-of-adam-kirschs-on-settler.html.

4. It should be noted that the Qur’an is not ordered chronologically. Instead, it begins with the longest chapter and ends with the shortest chapter. The result, it seems to me, is that it is not clear to the peaceful Muslim that the violent verses come after—and abrogate—the peaceful verses. Muslims who follow Muhammad’s violent teachings are scripturally correct in doing so.

5. It would be reasonable to describe Islamists as what Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls “Medina Muslims,” i.e., they follow the violent teachings of the Prophet Mohammed when in the city of Medina the prophet effectively became a warlord after his peaceful approach to spreading Islam in Mecca was rejected (“Mecca Muslims” follow the Prophet Mohammad’s peaceful teachings when he first began his religion in Mecca). For more on the distinction between Medina Muslims and Mecca Muslims, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Islam Is a Religion of Violence,” Foreign Policy Magazine, November 9, 2015, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-violence-ayaan-hirsi-ali-debate-islamic-state/. For further thought about Islam and Jews, see Mark A. Gabriel, Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle (Lake Mary, Florida: Charisma House, 2003). For further thought about Islam in general, see R. C. Sproul & Abdul Saleeb, The Dark Side of Islam (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003) and see Robert Spencer et al., Islam: What the West Needs to Know, DVD (98 minutes), produced and directed by Gregory M. Davis and Bryan Daly (Lorain, Ohio: Quixotic Media Productions, 2006), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mllMkm8pcVU.

6. Daniel Pipes, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated (New York & Nashville: Wicked Son/ Post Hill Press, 2024), 32–33. See, too, Serge Trifkovic’s comments at 51:25–52:36 in Spencer et al., Islam. For further thought, see Mordecai Kedar, “Arabs and Muslims Will Not Accept Israel as the Jewish State,” The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, January 18, 2018, https://besacenter.org/muslims-israel-jewish-state/.

7. Source: “Total Palestinian Refugees (1950–Present),” Jewish Virtual Library (based on UNWRA statistics), https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-palestinian-refugees-1950-present.

8. For further thought about how Palestinians with the help of UNRWA use the so-called right of return of Palestinian refugees to undermine Israel, see the following: Richard Goldberg, “Close Down UNRWA: Western nations must not continue to contribute to a UN agency that is effectively controlled by a terrorist organization,” Quillette,  February 7, 2024, https://quillette.com/2024/02/07/close-down-unrwa/; Zoe Booth, “Should We Get Rid of UNRWA?” Quillette, December 3, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpyrt0hK7v4&t=11s; Einat Wilf  & Adi Schwartz, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing/ All Points Books, 2020); Einat Wilf, The Israeli-Arab Conflict: Seminar by Dr Einat Wilf, ed. Jaime Kardontchik (Independently published, April 25, 2022). I find the work of Einat Wilf especially helpful. Wilf holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD in political science from Cambridge, served as an intelligence officer with the Israeli Defense Forces, is a former member of the Israeli parliament, and presently works with the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office.

9. Denis MacEoin, in “The Status of Jerusalem, the 1949 Armistice Lines, and Refugees,” Whose Land? Episode 12 (London: UK Lawyers for Israel: 2024), https://uklficharity.com/whose-land/whose-land-episode-12/. MacEoin has a PhD in Persian/ Islamic Studies from Cambridge University, was a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, and was a senior editor at Middle East Quarterly.

10. MacEoin, “The Status of Jerusalem, the 1949 Armistice Lines, and Refugees.”

11. Some might argue that because Israel presently tells non-Israeli Jews they have a right to return to Israel (their ancestral homeland), Israel is being inconsistent in not giving Palestinian refugees a right of return. This is problematic because the Palestinian refugees, unlike diaspora Jews, sided with those who wished to destroy Israel.

12. Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (New York: HarperCollins Publishers/ Ecco, 2016), 382–383.

13. For additional thought about the separation wall, thought that takes into account Palestinian as well as Israeli views of the separation wall, thought that ends on a positive and hopeful note, see this 15 minute video: “Why Did Israel Build a Wall Around the West Bank?” Unpacked, October 11, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP0TMkuqGw. I should add that this video is now over a year old, that many Palestinians in the West Bank now support Hamas, and that over the last year terrorist attacks launched from the West Bank against Israel have increased. That is, keep in mind that the video’s positive and hopeful note may not be as justified as it used to be. Still, the video is helpful for getter a better understanding of why the separation wall was built.

14. One final note: The popular idea that Israel “occupies” the West Bank is disputed—and not unreasonably so. According to Natasha Hausdorff  (a British barrister and international law expert, with degrees in law from Oxford University, Tel Aviv University, and Columbia Law School), the term “occupation” regarding Israel in the West Bank is a misapplication of international law because of the rule uti possidetis juris (Latin for “as [you] possess under law”). This rule has to do with the borders of newly emerging states at their moment of independence retaining the borders they had while dependent. In Israel’s case the rule determines that the pre-existing administrative lines of the British Mandate became Israel’s borders when Israel declared independence in 1948, and this means that the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza fall within Israel’s borders. This also means that after Israel’s 1948–49 war of independence, a war in which five Arab nations attacked Israel—nations including Jordan and Egypt—Jordan ended up occupying West Bank and Egypt ended up occupying Gaza. Thus, when Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 again attacked Israel and again lost, Israel resumed, legally, its control of the West Bank and Gaza. That is to say, in 1967 Israel legitimately took back West Bank and Gaza from the occupation of, respectively, Jordan and Egypt. That is, in 1967 Israel did not occupy the West Bank and Gaza, nor does it continue to do so. Here is the legal point: A country does not “occupy” its own territory that was occupied by another country but then recovered militarily from that occupier. So Israel does not occupy the West Bank.

          For some critical legal discussion of Israel’s alleged occupation of the West Bank, see 1:09:06–1:13:32 of Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster’s interview with Natasha Hausdorff in “There is No Genocide, No Apartheid, No Occupation,” Triggernometry, July 14, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wrhzDBvhEc.

For a long well-researched article that helpfully sets out in layman’s terms the problems with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) vis-à-vis Israel, see Stephen Daisley, “How to undermine international law,” Stephen Daisely Substack, July 31, 2024, https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/how-to-undermine-international-law. Daisley is a journalist whose work appears often in The Spectator and The Scottish Daily Mail.

        Confession: In Daisley’s layman-friendly article, I did have to look up the meaning of one word. That word is “farrago.” Farrago means a confused mixture or hodgepodge. It’s found in the fourth sentence of this paragraph: “Countries hostile to Israel sponsored a resolution at the UN General Assembly. This resolution was essentially a charge sheet and accused Israel of every crime in history with the possible exception of the Jack the Ripper murders. It was passed despite attracting the support of fewer than half of member states. A farrago of untruths, half truths, distortions, misrepresentations and profoundly partisan interpretations of history, the resolution formed the mandate for the ICJ’s inquiry and the advisory opinion reflects that. It cobbles together Palestinian demands, anti-Israel sources and an exclusively Palestinian reading of history into a judicial manifesto for the Middle East.”

 

Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor (formerly at Providence University College, Canada) and author of Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War (paperback can be purchased at Amazon or pdf can be downloaded for free at Hendrik’s blog APOLOGIA).