Israeli occupation of the West Bank

[7][d][8][9] Though its occupation is illegal,[e] Israel has cited several reasons for retaining the West Bank within its ambit: historic rights stemming from the Balfour Declaration; security grounds, both internal and external; and the area's symbolic value for Jews.

[l] According to Israeli historian Adam Raz, as early as 1961, the IDF had drawn up meticulous plans for the conquest and retention of not only the West Bank, but also the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

[61] According to an analysis by the Israeli think tank Molad in 2017, Israel deploys 50–75% of its active IDF forces in the West Bank,[62] while only one-third deals with Arab states, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other perceived external threats.

[69] Before the war ended, the IDF's research department under Shlomo Gazit drew up a proposal to pull back from the West Bank and Gaza almost completely in exchange for a peace treaty, since, they concluded, there was no need for retaining any territory on security grounds.

[u] The military arguments for retaining ground were supplanted by political considerations, that Arab acquiescence in agreed on borders is of greater importance, and that settlements, formerly placed along possible invasion routes, were no longer functional for security, if they were an obstacle to peace.

[v][w] 106 retired Israeli generals, such as Eyal Ben-Reuven, Moshe Kaplinsky and Gadi Shamni,[79] and Shin Bet heads, such as Yuval Diskin,[80] have publicly opposed Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that an independent state of Palestine would be a security threat, arguing variously that holding millions of Palestinians under occupation on ostensible security-related grounds, rather than pursuing an overall peace plan with Arab countries, endangers Israel's future.

[87] The Palestinian areas were encircled by Jewish new town developments which effectively closed them off from expansion, and services to the latter were kept low so that after decades, basic infrastructure was left in neglect, with shortages of schools, inadequate sewage and garbage disposal.

[97][98][99] According to the United Nations special rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Michael Lynk, the policies applied by Israel indicate an intention to annex totally Area C,[91] which has 86% of the nature reserves, 91% of the forests, 48% of the wells and 37% of the springs in the West Bank.

From 1957 to 1976 the IDF repeatedly requisitioned private Palestinian properties on the grounds of military necessity, only to turn them over for Jewish settlements, such as Matitiyahu, Neve Tzuf, Rimonim, Bet El, Kokhav Hashahar, Alon Shvut, El'azar, Efrat, Har Gilo, Migdal Oz, Gittit, Yitav and Qiryat Arba.

[129] From the mid-1990s to 2015 many of these, such as Amona, Avri Ran's Giv'ot Olam and Ma'ale Rehav'am – the latter on 50 dunams of private Palestinian land – were directly funded, according to Haaretz, by loans from the World Zionist Organization through Israeli taxpayer money,[130] since its approximate $140 million income derives from Israel and is mostly invested in settlements in the West Bank.

[158] The impression left of the landscape has been described as follows: Israeli settlements form an upper-middle-class oasis of green grass, shopping malls, and swimming pools amidst open desert and enclaves of Palestinian refugee camps, villages, and towns with limited access to water.

[205] The mainstay of Palestinian armed resistance techniques to the occupation during the First Intifada, which was generally non-lethal,[bb] consisted of throwing stones at Israeli troops during clashes, or at military and settler vehicles bearing their distinctive yellow number plates, together with tire-burning, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting up roadblocks.

Families composed of a Jerusalemite spouse and a Palestinian from the West Bank (or Gaza) face enormous legal difficulties in attempts to live together, with most applications, subject to an intricate, on average decade-long, four-stage processing, rejected.

In its decision regarding the practice, the Israeli Supreme Court in 2006 refrained from either endorsing or banning the tactic, but set forth four conditions – precaution, military necessity, follow-up investigation and proportionality[bs]- and stipulated that the legality must be adjudicated on a case-by-case analysis of the circumstances.

[301] The entire Palestinian population is kept under surveillance, regardless of intelligence concerns, using smartphones and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, some capable of seeing into homes, whose photos are then fed into the IDF's "Blue Wolf" tracking system, endowed with facial recognition technology.

"[307] Ben Ehrenreich, citing Gudrun Krämer's description of the British military suppression of the 1936 Palestinian Revolt, states that, aside from caning, all of the extreme measures adopted by the Mandatory authorities recur as standard practices in the way Israel manages the occupied territories.

[bx] Fathers were most frequently affected in the early days: sundering families, the practice was arrest household heads at night in their homes and take them to a desert south of the Dead Sea where they were forced, at gunpoint or gunshot, to cross over into Jordan.

[320] The forced transfer of Palestinians still takes place in the West Bank: in 2018 the Israeli Supreme Court gave the green light to expel the people of Khan al-Ahmar from their township to a rubbish dump outside Abu Dis.

[341] In 2016 Amnesty International stated that the various measures taken in the commercial and cultural heart of Hebron over 20 years of collective punishment have made life so difficult for Palestinians[cc] that thousands of businesses and residents have been forcibly displaced, enabling Jewish settlers to take over more properties.

[360] Many personal effects – photos of children or families, watches, medals, football trophies, books, Qur'ans, jewelry – are taken and stored away, and, according to one informant, intelligence officer trainees were allowed to take items of such Palestinian "memorabilia", called "booty", from storerooms.

[300] After international protests, in February 2014 a pilot scheme was begun to issue summonses instead of arresting children at night, and programmed to last until December 2015[361] The purpose of mapping raids is, reportedly, to work out how an area looks from Palestinian angles for future planning to enable an option for "straw widows" operations (mounting ambushes from inside those homes).

[365] An extrapolation from this figure would, according to the NGO WCLAC, suggest that from the time martial law was imposed in June 1967 up to 2015, over 65,000 night raids had been conducted by the Israeli military on Palestinian homes in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem).

[372] Taisir al-Arouri, a Bir Zeit University professor of mathematics, was arrested at night on 21 April 1974 and released on 18 January 1978, after suffering 45 months of imprisonment without trial or charges being laid, only after Amnesty International issued a public protest.

[374] In 2017 Amnesty International, noted that "hundreds of Palestinians, including children, civil society leaders and NGO workers were regularly under administrative detention",[375] and regards some, such as Khalida Jarrar and Ahmad Qatamesh, as prisoners of conscience.

[387] The First Intifada saw exceptionally high involvement by Palestinian teenagers, prompting Israel to declare stone throwing a felony under occupation law, a categorization that applied to children as well as adults and allowed for protracted incarceration of minors.

[412] Following an Ottoman practice of uprooting olive trees to punish tax evasion, Israel began destroying groves, but with the expressed purpose of increasing security for settlements, and visibility for its internal West Bank road system servicing the colonial infrastructure.

[413][cn] Aside from state practices, settlers have waged what one scholar terms "tree warfare" consisting in the stealing, uprooting, chopping or burning of native Palestinian olive groves, often as part of price tag operations.

[425] Israel, it is argued, has used the West Bank as a "sacrifice" zone by placing 15 waste treatment plants there under less stringent rules than those required in the Israeli legal system, thereby exposing the local people and environment to hazardous materials.

[cp] The Paris Protocol undersigned in 1994 allowed Israel to collect VAT on all Palestinian imports and good from that country or in transit through its ports, with the system of clearance revenue giving it effective control over roughly 75% of PA income.

[466] Attempts have been made to silence several high-profile critics of Israeli policies in the territories, among them Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Massad, Nadia Abu El-Haj and William I. Robinson,[467] prompting concerns that the political pressures circumscribing research and discussion undermine academic freedom.