Reviewed by Waqar Zaidi

Writing for Life magazine following the end of Israel’s astonishingly successful 1967 war, defence minister Moshe Dayan described how, “as the Syrian troops retreated through the villages, the civilian population took their families and their herds and fled eastwards, afraid of being caught in the cross-fire between the lines or becoming targets of bombing or shelling.”

Yet, as Ahron Bregman’s Cursed Victory points out, this was not the whole story. Yes, the Arab populations were afraid. But not of being “caught in the cross-fire.” Instead they feared the invading Israeli army with its reputation for brutality. They did not flee voluntarily, but were forced out through a planned and co-ordinated policy of terror and bureaucracy-based ethnic cleansing. Over the next few decades the Israeli state systematically expelled local Arab communities in an attempt to create an ethnically pure Jewish Greater Israel.

Although a British-Israeli political scientist, Bregman pulls no punches in this critical and accessible survey of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Indeed, his first-hand experience serving in the Israeli Defence Forces helps give the book some of its bite. Bregman’s account is also based on unique source material, including a transcript of Bill Clinton’s telephone call with Hafez Assad (taped, presumably, by the Israeli secret services) as well as a letter from Madeleine Albright to Ehud Barak promising “a thorough consultation process” with Israel before sharing peace proposals with the Palestinians. There is also a top-secret memo from the Shabak, Israel’s general security service, suggesting that Israel would prefer it if Yasser Arafat died. He also makes full use of the oral interviews conducted for the two BBC series for which he was a producer and academic advisor: The Fifty Years War and The Elusive Peace.

Bregman begins his history with the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. He focuses on the bureaucratic methods, backed by military force, used by the Israeli government to carry out its policy of annexation and ethnic cleansing. In East Jerusalem, in June and July 1967 immediately following the occupation, for example, the entire Magharbeh Quarter was demolished after 135 Arab families were forced out. The few who refused to leave were buried alive under the rubble of their houses. The Arab elected council of East Jerusalem was dissolved, and East Jerusalem was merged into West Jerusalem’s administrative structure. The municipal boundaries of Jerusalem were expanded from a combined 44 square kilometres to a staggering 108.8 square kilometres. Moshe Dayan, the so-called “Sultan of the territories,” placed his stamp on the Israeli occupation by imposing a policy of non-interference in the daily affairs of the Palestinians. Tellingly, he saw parallels between the American occupation of Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Arab territories, and wanted to avoid the clearly failing experience of American oppression in Vietnam. He wrote to Jerusalem’s military governor, Chaim Herzog, in 1967, urging him: “Don’t try to rule the Arabs. Let them rule themselves … I want a policy whereby an Arab can be born, live, and die without ever seeing an Israeli official.” He told military commanders to deploy out of major towns, “Give them the feeling that the war is over and that nothing has changed.” This was to be an “invisible occupation” in which the Israelis would rule through rules and regulations, and through Arab collaborators.

An important aspect of Dayan’s “invisible occupation” was to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from as many parts of the Occupied Territories as possible, and to do this as covertly as possible. One former Israeli soldier recalls how he obtained signatures, from deported Palestinians, stating that they had left willingly: “We forced them to sign … [they] did not want to leave, and were dragged from the buses while being kicked and hit with rifle butts. By the time they reached my [signing] stall, they were usually already completely blurred and they would not care any longer about the signing … frightened, they would cross to the other side running … When someone would refuse to give me his hand [the soldiers] would beat him up badly. Then I would forcibly take his thumb, immerse it in ink, and fingerprint him…”

Within a year of the occupation a bureaucratic structure was in place which created new rules and regulations for the Occupied Territories, whose sole aim was to, in an insidious and “invisible” manner, increase the burdens of living in the Occupied Territories, and so encourage the migration of the local Arab population. The regulations were also designed to promote the loss of title to land by Palestinians. Palestinians were required to obtain government permits for a wide-range of activities, including for financial activities, building homes, travelling abroad, studying or living outside a village or city where one was registered, grazing livestock in certain areas, and even growing certain types of fruits and vegetables. Obtaining these permits was often a complicated and expensive process, and non-compliance was zealously punished.

Bureaucratic regulations, mostly enacted through local Palestinian officials, were also used to remould the economy of the West Bank. Water resources were channelled away from Arab communities, agriculture impoverished, and the increasingly under-employed population pushed into manual labour or low-skill industries which supplied basic goods for Israeli industry. Occupation was more brutal in the Gaza Strip, with comparatively larger forced deportations and a particularly ruthless wave of oppression in 1971 carried out by General Ariel Sharon. In the Golan Heights the entire Syrian population was expelled, save for some of the local Druze who were allowed to stay as they were seen as valuable allies against other occupied Arabs. A systematic and centrally planned process of settlement was begun in all territories save for Sinai which, the Israelis (correctly) assumed, could be profitably traded with Egypt for peace.

Bregman’s coverage of the “Second Decade” of the Israeli occupation, 1977 to 1987, is much briefer than the first. He focuses on a small number of important episodes in the occupation, the most important of which are the 1978 Camp David Accords through which Israel returned Sinai to Egypt in exchange for implicit recognition of Israeli occupation of the remaining Occupied Territories, and the beginnings of the Intifada in December 1987. The Israeli occupation authorities were unable to crush the uprising quickly or quietly, he argues, due to the military’s unpreparedness (Ehud Barak, who had then been the deputy chief of staff, openly admitted this to the author), leading to increased international focus on the Israeli occupation and its brutality and illegitimacy.

The third and final section of the book covers the period 1987 to 2007, and begins with the Israeli army’s response to the Intifada. The army took a three-pronged approach: as well as targeting the Intifada leadership, it carried out collective punishment of whole towns through curfews and sieges, and wholesale detention and torture of protestors. Some 23,000 Palestinians were detained and tortured by Shabak between 1987 and 1994. Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait allowed the Israelis to intensify their oppression, but also forced them into a series of peace talks culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accords in which Israel recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), withdrew from parts of the Occupied Territories, and allowed the formation of a Palestinian Authority.

The period 1995 to 2000 is described as one of missed opportunities, due first and foremost to the intransigence of the incoming right-wing Likud party prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The subsequent Labour prime minister Ehud Barak is faulted for failing to reach an agreement on the return of the Golan Heights to Syria at the 2000 Geneva Summit. The failure of the 2000 Camp David negotiations between Barak and Yasser Arafat, which the author goes into in significant detail, is put down to Clinton’s refusal to pressure the Israelis.

The year 2001 marks the final phase of Bregman’s history. The new Israeli prime minister, Likud’s Ariel Sharon, was elected in a landslide victory in March 2001 during a Palestinian uprising set off by his visit to the Haram al Sharif shortly before the election. Palestinian attacks during this uprising were countered by a whole-scale Israeli invasion of the West Bank and Arafat’s incarceration in his headquarters in Ramallah. Yasser Arafat died whilst under siege, possibly killed, Bregman suggests, by Israel.

But Sharon’s most lasting imprint on the Israeli occupation, Bregman tells us, was his policy of “unilateral disengagement” in which the Israelis would physically separate and isolate the occupied Palestinians from each other and from Israel. The Israelis tried to keep as much of the Occupied Territories as they could, the rest were to be bantustanised into separate areas and separated from an enlarged Israel through the construction of a large wall. Gaza, and parts of the West Bank, were emptied almost completely of physical Israeli presence. Yet even in these areas the occupation continued, though in more indirect ways. In Gaza, for example, Israel continued to control the airspace, territorial waters and land crossings, and bomb and interfere with civic services at will.

Back in 1967, Bregman notes in conclusion, “Moshe Dayan observed that if he had to choose to be occupied by any force from among the nations of the world, he doubted he would choose Israel. He was right; looking back it is clear that Israel was — and in the time of writing is still — a heavy-handed and brutal occupier.”

Given this history of violence and brutality, it is perhaps unsurprising that Bregman’s conclusion is that the occupation has been a failure, and that the 1967 war was a “cursed victory” for Israel. Israel has tried, and continues to try, to subsume the occupied territories, but is increasingly unable to do so. Conciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians will come eventually, he believes, though not any time soon, and certainly not until the brutality has ended.

Bregman’s book is a well-written and researched introduction to Israel’s occupation for the general reader, in particular with regard to the bureaucratic, military and diplomatic machinery of occupation. Important themes, and the experiences of both the occupiers and the occupied, are brought to life through extensive use of interviews and secret Israeli documents. The coverage is necessarily brief, and sometimes patchy too — Israeli surveillance, Palestinian resistance groups (other than the PLO), and the role of Arab states, amongst other topics, cry out for more coverage. But this limitation is to be expected when the author is attempting an overview of such an extensive and contentious subject.

The reviewer is assistant professor of history at LUMS

Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories

(HISTORY)

By Ahron Bregman

Allen Lane, UK

ISBN 0713997753

416pp.