Israeli Military Governorate הממשל הצבאי Ha-Memšal Ha-Tsvaʾi | |
---|---|
1967–1981/82 | |
![]() Territories following the 1967 War were subject to Israeli Military Governorate | |
Common languages | Hebrew (official), Arabic |
Government | Military government |
Commander of the Military Governorate | |
History | |
• End of Six-Day War | 10 June 1967 |
• Implementation of Egypt–Israel peace treaty | 1982 |
Currency | Israeli lira |
The Israeli Military Governorate was a military governance system established following the Six-Day War in June 1967, in order to govern the civilian population of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the western part of Golan Heights. The governance was based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides guidelines for military rule in occupied areas. East Jerusalem was the only exception from this order, and it was added to Jerusalem municipal area as early as 1967, and extending Israeli law to the area effectively annexing it in 1980. During this period, the UN and many sources referred to the military governed areas as Occupied Arab Territories. [1]
The Egypt–Israel peace treaty led Israel to give up the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 and transform the military rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into the Israeli Civil Administration in 1981. The Western part of Golan Heights was unilaterally annexed by Israel from Syria the same year, thus abolishing the Military Governorate system entirely.
The Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967, with Israel launching surprise strikes against Egyptian air-fields in response to the mobilization of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border. A period of high tension had preceded the war. In response to PLO sabotage acts against Israeli targets, [2] [3] [4] Israel raided into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank [5] [6] and initiated flights over Syria, which ended with aerial clashes over Syrian territory, [7] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli civilian settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli responses against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border, [8] and culminating in Egypt blocking the Straits of Tiran, [9] deploying its troops near Israel's border, and ordering the evacuation of the U.N. buffer force from the Sinai Peninsula. [10] [11]
Within six days, Israel had won a decisive land war. Israeli forces had taken control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The resulting expansion of territory led to the establishment of a military government on those territories to run the affairs of Arab populations falling under Israeli military rule. Overall, Israel's territory grew by a factor of three, including about one million Arabs placed under Israel's direct control in the newly captured territories. Israel's strategic depth grew to at least 300 kilometers in the south, 60 kilometers in the east, and 20 kilometers of extremely rugged terrain in the north, a security asset that would prove useful in the Yom Kippur War six years later.
Effectively, from June 1967, Israel has exercised military rule in subjected territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which specifies international law for military rule in occupied areas. East Jerusalem was the only exception from this order, and it was effectively added to Jerusalem municipal area as early as 1967, and extending Israeli law to the area (effectively annexing it).
The military government's authority was effectively cancelled with the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, which led it to give up the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 and rename the military rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as the Israeli Civil Administration in 1981, which is run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The creation of a civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza Strip was included within the Camp David Accords signed by Egypt and Israel in 1978. [12] The nature of this civil administration body was defined in Military Order No. 947, by the 1981 military government of the West Bank and Gaza. The Western part of Golan Heights was effectively annexed to Israel the same year, thus abolishing the Military Governorate system entirely.
Even before the end of the 1967 June War, Israel invested all "powers of government, legislature, appointment and administration in relation to the region or its inhabitants" in the hands of the Military Governor. [13] General Chaim Herzog announced on 7 June 1967, that all previously existing laws would remain in force, save in cases where they conflicted with the rights of Israel as Occupying Power to ensure security for both its forces and public order. Israel justified the retention of what it considered the Jordanian maintenance of British occupation regulations, believing them consonant with Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which properly concern the treatment by a hostile power of the occupied population. The Jordanian position is that Israel is not heir to its laws in this regard in that they were abolished decades earlier. Called on to adjudicate between competing claims, the United Nations, in its Special Committee Report of 1970, [14] stated that the Mandatory Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, which the British themselves subsequently repealed, [15] did not constitute a warrant for applying them to the Palestinian Territories since they were invalid, in conflicting with the protocols of the Fourth Geneva Convention. [lower-alpha 1]
The Israeli Military Governorate instituted to rule the territories was dissolved in 1982 and replaced by the Israeli Civil Administration, which is actually an arm of the Israeli army. Set up in November 1981 [17] under military order no. 947, it has a mandate which stipulates that the function of the body is to "administer the civil affairs in the area [West Bank]... for the welfare and benefit of the population and for provision and operation of public services, considering the need to maintain proper administration and public order in the area." [18] The creation of this new body unleashed a wave of protest in the first few months of 1982, repressing which caused more Palestinian casualties than had occurred in the preceding 15 years of occupation. [17] From 1967 to 2014, the Israeli administration issued over 1,680 military orders regarding the West Bank. [19] Though formally the IDF was obliged to be neutral, it was drawn into the politics of the conflict, caught between the administration of the occupied people and the defense of settlements, [20] which were originally thought of as a military burden whose defense should be left to the settlers, [21] but whose early militias were salaried, trained, and furnished with arms by the IDF, [22] which now operates to defend them. [23]
By the time of the Oslo Accords, 47% of West Bankers were refugees, and 11% of the total population dwelt in refugee camps. [24] As part of Ariel Sharon's strategy, [25] the Civil Administration had extended to all areas of the West Bank the Village Leagues (rawabit al-qura) originally developed only for the Hebron area in 1978. These were used to circumvent direct political representation. [26] Elections themselves, even for union officials, had been banned in the wake of the 1976 municipal elections which turned in an overwhelming majority of nationalist candidates, and most of the mayors where eventually dismissed, with some suffering deportation. [27] The Village Leagues by contrast were supposed to resolve disputes and promote rural development, but stoked peasant resentments against Palestinian urban centres and were manned, according to George Bisharat, with men from the lower middle class many of whom had reputations for laziness and criminal pursuits, who were harshly criticized as quislings collaborating with Israel, which furnished them with militias and Uzi machine guns that they purportedly used to intimidate civilians. [26] [28]
In the Accord, Palestinian authorities were given a limited zone of autonomy in a restricted number of areas. Various analysts have argued that the agreement saw Israel outmanoeuvring the local Palestinian delegation, which had led the Intifada, by getting the PLO representatives abroad to relinquish demands the West Bank and Gaza opposition insisted on – an end to settlements and the formation of a Palestinian state – and thereby securing their own return. They were thus allowed to assume political and economic authority within the territories which they had never managed to achieve alone. [lower-alpha 2] Thus the Palestinian Authority itself is often viewed as a Quisling regime, [30] or Israel's proxy, since Israel remains in total control of all three zones. Peter Beinart calls it Israel's "subcontractor". [lower-alpha 3] For Edward Said, Meron Benvenisti and Norman Finkelstein, the agreement merely delegated to the PLO a role as "Israel's enforcer", continuing the occupation by "remote control", lending a form of legitimacy to Israel's claims to possess "rights" in what then became in its view "disputed territories", despite the international consensus Israel was under an obligation to withdraw from all of the land it held as occupying power. In Finkelstein's reading, it ratified an extreme version of the Allon Plan. [32] [lower-alpha 4] Others speak of Israel outsourcing the occupation. [34]
The Palestinian Authority also underwrote an agreement which absolved Israel of liability for recompense for all omissions to, or violations of, its obligations as an occupying power committed during the previous three decades of Israeli military rule. Indeed, were Israel convicted of any crime for that period, the burden of Israel paying reparations would fall on the Palestinian authorities who would be obligated to reimburse Israel. [35] The Accords further weakened the Palestinian cause, it has been argued, because it undermined the strength of the Palestinian position by transforming negotiations into endless bargaining between unequal parties. [lower-alpha 5]
In an analysis by the Israeli think tank Molad in 2017, it is noted that Israel deploys from 50% to 75% of its active IDF forces in the West Bank. The deployment consists of seven regional brigades, assisted by auxiliary combat battalions, together with Israel's Border Police, the IAF and various special units. Their function is not to counter what Israel defines as terrorism – only 20% perform that task – but to defend settlements, which require 80% of those reserves to undertake guard duty. [37] In Hebron alone some 2,000 soldiers, an entire infantry division, together with 3 border police companies, serve in rotation to protect the settlement of from 500 to 800 Israelis established in that city. [38] [39] Molad's conclusion is that defending settlements has a negative impact on Israel's security. [lower-alpha 6]
Israeli settlements or colonies are civilian communities where Israeli citizens live, almost exclusively of Jewish ethnicity, built on lands occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. The international community consider Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
The Six-Day War or June War, also known as the 1967 Arab–Israeli War or Third Arab–Israeli War, was fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states from 5 to 10 June 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (S/RES/242) was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. It was adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. The resolution was sponsored by British ambassador Lord Caradon and was one of five drafts under consideration.
The history of the State of Palestine describes the creation and evolution of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian territories are the two regions of the former British Mandate for Palestine that have been militarily occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967, namely: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has referred to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as "the Occupied Palestinian Territory", and this term was used as the legal definition by the ICJ in its advisory opinion of July 2004. The term occupied Palestinian territory was used by the United Nations and other international organizations between October 1999 and December 2012 to refer to areas controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, but from 2012, when Palestine was admitted as one of its non-member observer states, the United Nations started using exclusively the name State of Palestine. The European Union (EU) also adopts the term occupied Palestinian territory, with a parallel term Palestinian Authority territories also occasionally used. The government of Israel and its supporters use the label "disputed territories" instead.
The Camp David Accords were a pair of political agreements signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on 17 September 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David, the country retreat of the President of the United States in Maryland. The two framework agreements were signed at the White House and were witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The second of these frameworks led directly to the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty. Due to the agreement, Sadat and Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The first framework, which dealt with the Palestinian territories, was written without participation of the Palestinians and was condemned by the United Nations.
Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a state located in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it claims the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as its territory, though the entirety of that territory has been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War. The West Bank is currently divided into 165 Palestinian enclaves that are under partial Palestinian rule, but the remainder, including 200 Israeli settlements, is under full Israeli control. The Gaza Strip is ruled by the militant group Hamas and has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007.
United Nations Security Council resolution 446, adopted on 22 March 1979, concerned the issue of Israeli settlements in the "Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem". This refers to the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as well as the Syrian Golan Heights.
Between 1949 and 1967, the present-day Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces from, firstly, the Kingdom of Egypt and, secondly, from 1958 onwards, the United Arab Republic (UAR). The Egyptian occupation of Gaza began with the inception of the territory in 1949 following the First Arab–Israeli War, and ended after Egypt's defeat to Israel in the Third Arab–Israeli War of 1967, after which the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip commenced. Egyptian rule in Gaza before the 1967 war had been continuous with the exception of a brief period from October 1956 to March 1957, when Israel invaded and occupied Gaza as well as the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez Crisis.
The International law bearing on issues of Arab–Israeli conflict, which became a major arena of regional and international tension since the birth of Israel in 1948, resulting in several disputes between a number of Arab countries and Israel.
The Green Line, (pre-)1967 border, or 1949 Armistice border is the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between the armies of Israel and those of its neighbors after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It served as the de facto borders of the State of Israel from 1949 until the Six-Day War in 1967, and continues to represent Israel’s internationally recognized borders with the two Palestinian territories: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israeli-occupied territories are the lands that were captured and occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. While the term is currently applied to the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights, it has also been used to refer to areas that were formerly occupied by Israel, namely the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon. Prior to Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, governance of the Palestinian territories was split between Egypt and Jordan, with the former having occupied the Gaza Strip and the latter having annexed the West Bank; the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights were under the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria, respectively. The first conjoined usage of the terms "occupied" and "territories" with regard to Israel was in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was drafted in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and called for: "the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" to be achieved by "the application of both the following principles: ... Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict ... Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."
The status of territories captured by Israel is the status of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula; all of which were captured by Israel over the course of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The Arab–Israeli conflict began in the 20th century, evolving from earlier Intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine. The conflict became a major international issue with the birth of Israel in 1948. The Arab–Israeli conflict has resulted in at least five major wars and a number of minor conflicts. It has also been the source of two major Palestinian uprisings (intifadas).
The Arab–Israeli conflict is an ongoing intercommunal phenomenon involving political tension, military conflicts, and other disputes between various Arab countries and Israel, which escalated during the 20th century, but had mostly faded out by the early 21st century. The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict; this in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s.
The modern borders of Israel exist as the result both of past wars and of diplomatic agreements between the State of Israel and its neighbours, as well as an effect of the agreements among colonial powers ruling in the region before Israel's creation. Only two of Israel's five total potential land borders are internationally recognized and uncontested, while the other three remain disputed; the majority of its border disputes are rooted in territorial changes that came about as a result of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, which saw Israel occupy large swathes of territory from its rivals. Israel's two formally recognized and confirmed borders exist with Egypt and Jordan since the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty and the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, while its borders with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories remain internationally defined as contested.
Palestinian fedayeen are militants or guerrillas of a nationalist orientation from among the Palestinian people. Most Palestinians consider the fedayeen to be "freedom fighters", while most Israelis consider them to be "terrorists".
Towards the War of June 1967: Growing tensions in the region were clearly visible long before Israel's November attack on Samu and two other West Bank towns. An escalating spiral of raid and retaliation had already been set in motion...
The Jordanian leadership's appraisal of the repercussions of the Samu' raid was a major factor in King Husayn's decision to join Nasir's war chariot by signing a joint defense pact with Egypt on May 30, 1967. This was the determining factor for Jordan's participation in the war that would soon break out.... Convinced after the Samu' raid that Israel's strategic goal was the West Bank, Husayn allied himself to Nasir out of a genuine fear that, in a comprehensive war, Israel would invade the West Bank whether or not Jordan was an active participant.
By the fall of 1966 and spring of 1967, things seemed to be getting out of hand. Israeli-initiated encroachments into the demilitarized zones (DMZ) along the Syrian border became more frequent and intense. Israeli leaders made repeated statements to the effect that the Syrian regime was directly responsible for the border clashes and that Israel may act directly against the Syrian regime
Nasser responded by taking three successive steps that made war virtually inevitable: he deployed his troops in Sinai near Israel's border on 14 May; expelled the UNEF from the Gaza Strip and Sinai on 19 May; and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping on 22 May.