When taking land, where other people are living, the conquering country has basically three options:
Firstly, if the conquered people submit, there is the option of letting them continue living more or less as they have always done. It is only the sovereign that has changed, so taxes are paid to the new sovereign and some laws may change. This was the most common option in medieval Europe, before the birth of the nation state and the concept of nationality. What bound the people together was obedience (and paying taxes) to a sovereign, normally a King or a Prince, while there often would be different customs and spoken languages inside these Kingdoms or Principalities. The Roman, Ottoman and Mongol empires are other examples. They required obedience and taxes but did not interfere much in the conquered people’s lives, as long as these submitted themselves – if they didn’t the punishment would be very cruel (particularly the Mongols were known for being extremely cruel, but the Romans were not softies either). In Europe, religion was another thing, and here there was little or no tolerance (take the oppression against the heretics and the driving out of the Moors and the Jews from Spain).
Secondly, and particularly after the birth of the nation states, there is the option of assimilation. In this case, the conquered people are by convenience or by force changing their way of life, including their language and in cases also their religion, but they become full citizens (according to their social status). Take for example England’s conquest of Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the 14th to 16th century, the Swedish conquest of the Danish core lands in Skaane in the 17th century, and the Russian conquest of Caucasus and Siberia, just to mention a few cases.
Denmark lost in 1645 Skaane (Scania), Danish core territory, to Sweden. Despite several wars, and some successful battles (the painting depicts the battle of Öland), it did not get Skaane back at the Roskilde peace conference in 1658. There were some guerilla activities for a couple of years (“snaphanerne”), which were ruthlessly suppressed, and the local population was afterwards gradually (some say forcefully) assimilated.
Thirdly, there is the option of getting rid of the people living there, either killing them (in modern terms called genocide) or, alternatively, driving them out of their territory (nowadays called ethnic cleansing), and often a combination of the two. This is attractive for the conqueror when the main objective is to get more land, and he is not interested in the people. This is what happened in many colonies, when the colonizer brought in colonists in big numbers (for example North America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Algeria). The original population was gradually killed or chased off its lands and confined to some limited territories (reserves, bantustans), while the colonists would take over the land. In the case of the Caribbean islands and what later became the United States of America, there was actually also a need for more people (for the sugar, tobacco and cotton farming), but the natives were considered too hostile to be domesticated and made to work, so the conquerors opted for getting rid of them and bringing in slaves from Africa instead.
In cases when the colonizer brought in a large number of colonists, as in the English conquest of America and later the USA, killing and driving out the natives was the most common strategy. The photo shows a mass grave of natives after the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.
There is a variant of this third option, which is what happened in much of Latin America. Here the Spanish conquistadores were actually interested in the people also, as the colonists were few in numbers so they needed someone to work for them (in the mines, agriculture, domestic workers etc.), but due to epidemics and over-exploitation the native population was heavily reduced, close to extermination (and in the case of for example Cuba and Jamaica, exterminated). In some countries they opted instead for importing slaves from Africa (for example Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Coastal areas of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador) and later ‘coolies’ from China (for example for guano mining and railway construction in Peru).
But back to Israel. A movement for the return of Jewish people to the historic Land of Israel and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there, called Zionism, started in the late nineteenth century to organise the migration of Jews to Palestine, at that time under Ottoman rule, and later, after first World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, under British Colonial Rule. There was obviously the problem that the land for almost two millennia had been inhabited by other people: the Palestinians. Most of them were Muslims, but there was also Christian and Jewish minorities (in 1922 9% and 11% respectively). To get a territory of their own, the Zionist movement succeeded during the 1947 Palestinian Civil War in chasing most of the original population off the land – an act that can only be described as ethnic cleansing. A Jewish state was then created in 1948 on part of the territory of Palestine, which in a rare case of East-West cooperation got the support from both Western powers and the Soviet Union, and the new State was recognized by the UN (the Arab countries voted against and nobody asked the Palestinians about their opinion). Israel has since expanded its territory beyond the UN-recognized borders, and continues to do so, as is well-known.
It is obvious that Israel, as the conquering nation, has chosen the third option above: getting rid of the native population of the conquered land, in a mix of killing and ethnic cleansing.
The question is, why they have chosen that option instead of the other two, more humane options? The reason is that Israel has defined itself as a Jewish State and people who can show that they have Jewish ancestors are through the Law of Return entitled to become Citizen with full rights. Judaism, contrary to Islam and Christianity, doesn’t encourage recruiting and converting non-Jews. Non-Jewish migrants can in principle also become Citizen through a special procedure (if they are not Arabs), but this doesn’t happen often in practice. So assimilation, voluntary or forced (the second option), is not an option.
It can be said that Israel actually has followed the first option in the case of the Arabs that did not flee in 1948 (with their descendants now numbering around a half million people), who are living within the UN-recognized borders, mostly Muslims but also Christians. They have for example the right to vote in elections (and there are Arab members of the Parliament and even some Arab judges). Critics say that both de facto and de jure, there is discrimination against non-Jews, but this is another story. The main challenge is not related to this relatively small non-Jewish population (around 20% of the Israeli population), but to the big Arab population in the occupied areas (West Bank and Gaza), many of these refugees (and their descendants) from the 1947 and later wars.
Basically, there have been two options on the table for the last decades: A two-state solution and a one-state solution. In the two-state solution, a sovereign Palestinian State is created on the West Bank and Gaza, and in the one-state solution a Palestinian-Israeli State is created uniting the West Bank and Gaza with Israel.
The problem is that Israel in reality rejects both. And they are the de facto rulers. They don’t want to see an independent Palestinian State on their door-step, as they see it as a security threat, and while they will happily annex the occupied lands, they don’t want to give the people there full Citizen Rights, as the Palestinians could end up as a majority and that would be the end of Israel as a Jewish State.
When the late Yasser Arafat recognized the existence of Israel as a condition for the two-state solution (the so-called Oslo accords, sponsored by the US), he was criticised by many Palestinians as this meant that he accepted that the people who fled their land and property in 1947 would forever lose their right to return and get their property back. It can be argued that Arafat simply accepted the “reality on the ground”, as the Americans like to call it, and that the 1947 ethnic cleansing was a “fait-accompli” that could no longer be reversed. In the end, the Oslo Accords were never implemented. A sort of limited Palestinian home-rule was created on the West Bank, based in Ramallah, but the Israeli occupation continued, and to make sure that the two-state solution could never become a reality, Jewish colonisers were settled on the West Bank and in Palestinian East Jerusalem, amounting in 2023 to an estimated 500,000 on the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem. So now the Israeli population on the West Bank amounts to around 700,000 Jewish settlers against around 2.7 million Palestinians (plus 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip). A two-state solution would mean that the settlers would either have to live in a Palestinian State or return to Israel and settle there.
Support for the two-state solution is still the official policy of most of the international community, including the US, EU, China and Russia, but there are voices now claiming that the time for the two-state solution has passed, and now only the one-state solution remains.
It is clear that the Israeli Government’s preferred solution is to get rid of the Palestinians. The dream scenario is to chase them away to Jordan and Egypt in a new wave of ethnic cleansing. However, both Jordan and Egypt have made it clear that they will not accept that, so if Israel tries to do that, they will close the borders. In the present war with Hamas, the likely outcome is a renewed Israeli occupation of what is left after the Israeli carpet bombing.
There are regular uprising among the Palestinian population in the occupied areas, called Intifadas (1987, 2000, 2017) (the photo is from the first Intifada). The uprisings have been crushed by the Israeli occupying forces.
As we can be sure that uprisings will continue in the future, both in Gaza and the West Bank, given the desperate conditions in which the people there live, the Israeli will have to increase repression in the coming years. This will not be easy. They should look at the track record of other occupier nations in recent times, for example the German occupation of most of Europe 1939-1945. In the most unruly countries, mainly in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the Germans had to use extreme measures to maintain control. The general rule was that one killed German soldier was to be paid for with 20 locals executed, often in public, sometimes selected at random. Greater rebellions were cruelly repressed, as for example the 1943 uprising in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw (which has striking similarities with the uprising in Gaza).
The heroic uprising in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw in 1943 was brutally crushed by the German occupying army. Defenders of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza feel extremely intimidated when comparisons are made with the Gaza Strip, but the similarities are striking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising#/media/File:Stroop_Report_-_Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising_BW.jpg
The conclusion is that it is not easy to be an occupier. Unless the occupier can kill all the people on the occupied land, new uprisings tend to occur regularly despite the repression. This is a never ending story.
So my advice would be not to take other people’s land, particularly if there are other people already living on it. Those who do, will have to be prepared to exercise extreme cruelty. Being an occupier is not for the faint-hearted. And they will not look good in the history books.
Israel has painted itself into a corner from which it will be difficult to get out. The Oslo agreements gave them a historic chance, which they did not seize. As things stand now, there is no solution in sight, so the spiral of violence will undoubtedly continue. The Palestinians have only lukewarm support from the Arab countries, while Israel has the unconditional support of the EU and the US, so it can be said that the odds are that Israel can continue as usual. But even the support from the EU and the US has its limits, as it entails political costs for the Europeans and the Americans (this Financial Times article is informative in this regard). I think Israel is in for an unpleasant awakening sometime in the future if they do not realize that they cannot be sure of maintaining their current military supremacy forever and start thinking about finding a solution that respects the rights of the Palestinians. But don’t keep your breath.
