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Legal Acrobatics: The Palestinian Claim that Gaza is Still "Occupied" Even After Israel Withdraws

(Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Dore Gold - * Remarkably, even as Israel completes its withdrawal from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, official Palestinian spokesmen are already making the argument that Gaza remains "occupied" territory. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas stated that "the legal status of the areas slated for evacuation has not changed." * Palestinian spokesmen have used the grievance of being under Israeli occupation as their cutting-edge argument against the policies of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have effectively been territories under dispute since 1967 when they were captured by the Israel Defense Forces from Jordan and Egypt in the Six-Day War. * The foremost document in defining the existence of an occupation has been the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention "Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War." Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly states that "the Occupying Power shall be bound for the duration of the occupation to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory...." If no Israeli military government is exercising its authority or any of "the functions of government" in the Gaza Strip, then there is no occupation. * What Israel essentially did with the Oslo implementation agreements was to withdraw its military government over the Palestinians and replace it with a Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat. Oslo didn't create a Palestinian state, but it would be hard to argue that by the mid-1990s, with Arafat ruling the Palestinians, that the Palestinians were under Israeli military occupation. * The fact that a wide variety of Palestinian spokesmen will charge that the Gaza Strip is still "occupied" even though the Palestinians exercise self-government and the Israeli civilian and military presence in this territory have been removed is revealing. It means that the charge of "occupation" is less a rigorous legal definition and more a blunt political instrument to serve the PLO's diplomatic and military agenda against Israel.
2005-08-26 00:00:00
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