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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
During the June 1967 War, about 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs
living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem came under
Israeli rule. Immediately after the war, East Jerusalem was
occupied and reunited with the rest of Israel's capital. Its Arab
inhabitants--about 67,000 after the war--became citizens of Israel
with the same rights as other Israeli Arabs. The West Bank, ruled
by Jordan since 1948, was economically underdeveloped but possessed
a relatively efficient administrative infrastructure. Its 750,000
people consisted of a settled population and refugees from Israel
who had led during the 1948 War. Both the refugees and the settled
population were Jordanian citizens, free to work in Jordan. Most of
the leading urban families and virtually all the rural clans had
cooperated with Hussein. The Gaza Strip, on the other hand, was
seething with discontent when Israeli forces arrived in 1967. Its
1967 population of 350,000--the highest population density in the
world at the time--had been under Egyptian rule, but the
inhabitants were not accepted as Egyptian citizens or allowed to
travel to Egypt proper. As a result they were unable to find work
outside the camps and were almost completely dependent on the UN
Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East. In the Gaza Strip, Israel implemented harsh security measures
to quell widespread unrest and root out the growing resistance
movement.
Labor's settlement policy in the occupied territories was based
on a plan formaulated during the summer of 1965 by Yigal Allon,
deputy prime minister of the Eshkol government. The plan, primarily
dictated by security concerns, called for rural and urban
settlements to be erected in a sparsely Arab-populated strip twelve
to fifteen kilometers wide along the western bank of the Jordan
River and the western shores of the Dead Sea. Labor governments
sought to interfere as little as possible in the day-to-day lives
of the Arab inhabitants. Political and social arrangements were, as
much as possible, kept under Jordanian or pro-Jordanian control,
the currency remained the Jordanian dinar, the application of
Jordanian law continued, and a revised Jordanian curriculum was
used in the schools.
Another aspect of Labor's occupation policies was the
integration of the territories into the Israeli economy. By the
mid-1970s, Arabs from Israel and the territories provided nearly
one-quarter of Israel's factory labor and half the workers in
construction and service industries. Moreover, the territories
became an important market for Israeli domestic production; by 1975
about 16 percent of all Israeli exports were sold in the
territories.
The final element of Labor's occupation policies was economic
and social modernization. This included the mechanization of
agriculture, the spread of television, and vast improvements in
education and health care. This led to a marked increase in GNP,
which grew by 14.5 percent annually between 1968 and 1973 in the
West Bank and 19.4 percent annually in Gaza. As a result, the
traditional elites, who had cooperated with Hussein during the
years of Jordanian rule, were challenged by a younger, better
educated, and more radical elite that was growing increasingly
impatient with the Israeli occupation and the older generation's
complacency. In the spring of 1976, Minister of Defense Shimon
Peres held West Bank municipal elections, hoping to bolster the
declining power of the old guard Palestinian leadership. Peres
wrongly calculated that the PLO would boycott the elections.
Instead, pro-PLO candidates won in every major town except
Bethlehem.
Israel's settlement policy in the occupied territories changed
in 1977 with the coming to power of Begin. Whereas Labor's policies
had been guided primarily by security concerns, Begin espoused a
deep ideological attachment to the territories. He viewed the
Jewish right of settlement in the occupied territories as
fulfilling biblical prophecy and therefore not a matter for either
the Arabs or the international community to accept or reject.
Begin's messianic designs on the territories were supported by the
rapid growth of religious nationalist groups, such as Gush Emunim,
which established settlements in heavily populated Arab areas.
The increase in Jewish settlements and the radicalization of
the settlers created an explosive situation. When in May 1980 six
students of a Hebron yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, were
killed by Arab gunfire, a chain of violence was set off that
included a government crackdown on Hebron and the expulsion of
three leaders of the Hebron Arab community. West Bank Jewish
settlers increasingly took the law into their own hands; they were
widely believed to be responsible for car-bomb attacks on the
mayors of Ram Allah and Nabulus.
Begin's policies toward the occupied territories became
increasingly annexationist following the Likud victory in the 1981
parliamentary elections. He viewed the Likud's margin of victory,
which was larger than in 1977, as a mandate to pursue a more
aggressive policy in the territories. After the election, he
appointed the hawkish Ariel Sharon as minister of defense,
replacing the more moderate Ezer Weizman, who had resigned in
protest against Begin's settlement policy. In November 1981, Sharon
installed a civilian administration in the West Bank headed by
Menachem Milson. Milson immediately set out to stifle rapidly
growing Palestinian nationalist sentiments; he deposed pro-PLO
mayors, dissolved the mayors' National Guidance Committee, and shut
two Arab newspapers and Bir Zeit University.
While Milson was working to quell Palestinian nationalism in
the territories, the Begin regime accelerated the pace of
settlements by providing low-interest mortgages and other economic
benefits to prospective settlers. This action induced a number of
secular Jews, who were not part of Gush Emunim, to settle in the
territories, further consolidating Israel's hold on the area.
Moreover, Israel established large military bases and extensive
road, electricity, and water networks in the occupied territories.
In November 1981, Milson established village leagues in the
West Bank consisting of pro-Jordanian Palestinians to counter the
PLO's growing strength there. The leadership of the village leagues
had a limited base of support, however, especially because the
growth of Jewish settlements had adversely affected Arab villagers.
The failure of the Village League Plan, the escalating violence in
the occupied territories, in addition to increased PLO attacks
against northern Israeli settlements, and Syria's unwillingness to
respond when the Knesset extended Israeli law to the occupied Golan
Heights in December 1981 convinced Begin and Sharon of the need to
intervene militarily in southern Lebanon.
Data as of December 1988
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