BICOM

In this analysis, first published in Fathom, Oded Haklai reports on research suggesting that for the generations of Israeli Jews born after 1967, the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel are becoming less and less real. As time has passed since 1967, Israeli Jews have increasingly come to believe that the territories are an integral part of Israel. Noting the importance of time for conflict entrenchment he warns that “the longer Israel holds on to the contested territories, the older grows the generation that remembers Israel in its pre-1967 borders gets, and the larger the number of Israeli Jews who accept the control of Judea and Samaria as the natural state of affairs”.

The research problem

This research project emanates from the book Settlers in Contested Lands: Territorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflicts. In that text my co-editor, Neophytos Loizides, and I compared the Israeli case to a number of other cases where there are territorial disputes that feature settlers as one of their prominent aspects; for example, Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus, Moroccan settlers in West Sahara and Indonesian settlers in East Timor. We identified some common patterns and peculiarities and, as we finished the book, an Israeli peculiarity stood out to me that I wanted to investigate further: Israel never formally pronounced a change in the status of the territory.

In most other cases around the world, the state that sent its settlers to the disputed territory usually made a formal pronouncement about the changing status of the territory. When Turkey sent its settlers to Northern Cyprus it also created the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), while Morocco formally annexed Western Sahara. By contrast, the Israeli settlement project was never accompanied by a formal pronouncement on changing the territory’s status. It was a conscious Israeli decision in the late 1970s to leave the status of the disputed territories open. Menachem Begin was fully committed to the ideology of the Jews owning the whole Land of Israel, but he was also committed to making peace with Egypt. He realised that a formal annexation would jeopardise peace-making with Egypt, so he decided to leave the issue of sovereignty open.

Read the full article in Fathom.