Blessed be the Negative Peacemakers: Israel, Palestine, and Perpetual Occupation

October 7th was the single greatest loss of Jewish life in a day since the Holocaust, but it was also the culmination of 56 years of occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel. Israel captured these territories during 1967's Six-Day War, and since then it has governed over millions of Palestinians with security measures that repress Palestinians in varying modes and intensity. To date, it is the longest ongoing military occupation by far. However, in the seventeen years between the Second Intifada and October 7th, Israeli security forces in the West Bank experienced an era of reduced violence. October 7th was the end of roughly seventeen years of relative peace within Israel and the West Bank, a "negative peace" under Johan Galtung's framework, where there was a relative absence of lethal violence but also a failure to achieve social justice for the Palestinian civilians living under occupation. Israel's success in this era is at odds with several academic theories about military occupations and terrorism. If modern democracies are susceptible to political fallout from suicide terrorism, how did Israel, a democracy with a highly technological military, manage to control the West Bank and suppress political violence through a widely hated occupation? And why did the peace fall apart on October 7? Why have other counterterror occupations, such as Northern Ireland, resulted in political settlements that created lasting peace and improved social justice, albeit imperfectly? This paper will argue that occupations cannot create a "positive peace" (Galtung, 183) that includes social justice because of their inherent structure, which prioritizes the security concerns of the occupier over the social, economic, and political wellbeing of the occupied. The occupation cannot erase the social grievances that violent organizations can exploit to fill the ranks of a terrorist campaign or an insurgency. Inevitably, bouts of social unrest will erupt that have the potential to become full blown uprisings, which TOs can exploit to wage their own violent campaigns against the occupier. This is especially true if the occupier attempts to suppress social unrest with large levels of lethal violence. Without addressing social grievances permanently, the occupier can suppress outbreaks of political violence by prioritizing generally nonlethal security measures that work in tandem with a comprehensive human intelligence network, such as local collaborators, to neutralize TOs within the occupied area. But this requires a careful and indefinite deployment of tactics, as well as constant vigilance that few states can maintain over a long period, and if this strategy is pursued imperfectly, the occupier runs the risk of experiencing an unending cycle of terrorist campaigns and subsequent state repression with high costs to both sides. To evaluate this argument, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip provides an ideal case study. Israel and the occupied territories had been plagued by almost two decades of Palestinian terrorism and political violence in the First Intifada, the Islamist suicide bombing campaign of the 1990s, and the Second Intifada of 2000-2006. Even before this, Palestinian terrorists had attacked Israel from foreign bases such as Lebanon. These uprisings and terrorist campaigns were clearly in defiance of the Israeli occupation, but it is up to debate as to which aspects of the occupation provoked many Palestinians to engage in violent dissidence. There is, of course, the very presence of the occupation itself. The occupation exists in place of a sovereign Palestinian state. In Area C of the West Bank, which contains the Israeli settlements and over sixty percent of the West Bank's total area, the occupation supplants Palestinian civil authority completely. Restrictions on Palestinian movement throughout the West Bank are frequently tied to the presence of Israeli settlements. In Israel, the settlements are often framed in public discourse as a security measure. Within Israel proper, Jews, especially religious Jews, tend to view the settlements as improving national security (Silver and Smerkovich 2024). Getmansky and Sinmazdemir (2018) argue that illegal outposts have immediate security benefits when they expand into the home districts of suicide bombers immediately after said bombers commit attacks (241). Meanwhile, Israeli Arabs and secular Jews tend to view the settlements as hurting national security (Silver and Smerkovich 2024). There are clearly strong reasons to believe that the settlements have an impact on security measures, one way or another. However, not everyone believes that the settlements have a significant impact on Palestinian political violence. Twenty-one percent of Israeli adults believe that settlements neither hurt nor help (Silver and Smerkovich 2024). This neutral view is not entirely without merit. Alimi (2007) points out that there is no clear relation between levels of Palestinian dissidence and settlement construction between 1967 and 1987 (84). In any event, the settlements are more of a political component of the occupation rather than a security measure, and thus they are not the primary focus of this paper. Instead, this paper will examine the role of several ostensibly nonlethal security modes present in the Israeli occupation. Here, the preexisting literature focuses on the effects that state repression has on the individual participants rather than the militant organizations that recruit them. These are measures which impact a far greater number of Palestinians in the West Bank, as they also did in the Gaza Strip before unilateral disengagement in 2005. The oldest and most ubiquitous of these is incarceration. Arrests are relatively common under the Israeli occupation, and while the system of incarceration and interrogation is complicated, it has two main components. First is imprisonment of convicted terrorists, who unlike Israeli citizens go before an Israeli military court. Second is administrative detention, a holdover from the British Mandate period. Administrative detention allows Israeli security forces to detain a suspected terrorist indefinitely as a preventative measure against the detainee committing an act of terror in the future. Administrative detention, in theory, has no time limit, although very few detainees at any given time have been under Israeli custody for more than two years (B'Tselem). Arrests and incarceration are also occasionally tied in with deportations, the targets of which have been militants, close associates and relatives, and/or general civilians. The Israeli occupation, especially during times of heightened violence like the two Intifadas, has also utilized house demolitions. Like administrative detention, this policy originated under the British Mandate, and it was first deployed en masse by Israel in the late 1960s, after the Six-Day War (Benmelech et al. 2015, 30). They became common again during the First Intifada and yet again during the Second Intifada. Benmelech et al. divide the forceful demolition of Palestinian houses into two general categories. The first is precautionary house demolitions, or "clearing operations," as the IDF often refers to them (29). Precautionary demolitions are intended to deny enemy snipers a position from which to ambush security forces. They can involve demolishing a single home, or they can target a whole area to be cleared of unapproved structures, such as the "no-go areas" that the IDF carved out of the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada (29). The second category is punitive house demolitions, which are employed as a tactic to punish known terrorists and to deter other Palestinians from committing violence against Israel. These generally make up a minority of the demolitions. From Israel's perspective, punitive demolitions are a necessary deterrent against terrorism, and precautionary demolitions address legitimate security concerns. But from a Palestinian perspective, the loss of one's home can be devastating and humiliating. Another measure is the deployment of IDF checkpoints on Palestinians roads. Checkpoints are intended to track the movements of Palestinian militants and intercept terrorists en route to committing a terror attack, but they also have impeded the movement of Palestinians throughout the West Bank, often making commutes that would take twenty minutes last several hours. In some cases, soldiers manning the checkpoints have also assaulted or humiliated Palestinians without cause (Longo et al. 2014, 1008). In addition, sixty-one women were forced to give birth while stuck behind an Israeli checkpoint between 2001 and 2004, with thirty-six infants dying as a result (United Nations 2005). It is consequences like these that led one Palestinian journalist to claim, ''The legal father of the suicide bomber is the Israeli checkpoint, whilst his mother is the house demolition" (Byman 2012, 837). However, other empirics suggest that, as oppressive as these ostensibly nonlethal measures can be to ordinary civilians, who question why they must tolerate this decade after decade, these measures do not directly contribute to overall levels of Palestinian terrorism and political violence. However, when applied excessively, they can create a powder keg of grievances that can easily explode into violent conflict with just the right provocation, typically in the form of lethal state violence. This paper's findings have many broader implications for the body of preexisting literature. Throughout many military occupations, it has been assumed that the occupier had to win local hearts and minds to defeat native-borne insurgents and terrorists. In this vein, it has also been assumed that security measures which severely restrict the civil liberties of occupied people will encourage more individuals to commit violence against the occupier. There are not many academic