olivewire.org

The 1967 Occupation: How One Week Created Today’s Reality in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem

In the early hours of June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Six days later, the map of the Middle East had been redrawn — and the lives of roughly one million Palestinians living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem had changed in ways that have never been reversed.

The war is often discussed in terms of military strategy, superpower rivalry, and Arab state politics. But this piece is about something narrower and more immediate: what the conquest meant for ordinary Palestinian families in those first days and weeks — the moment the soldiers arrived at the checkpoint, the moment the currency changed, the moment a new set of laws landed on a life that had not been consulted.

East Jerusalem: Annexed Within Days

East Jerusalem fell under Israeli control on June 7, 1967, when Israeli paratroopers entered the Old City through the Lions’ Gate. Within three weeks — on June 27, 1967 — the Israeli Knesset passed amendments to the Law and Administration Ordinance and the Municipalities Ordinance that effectively extended Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration to East Jerusalem and its surroundings. The move incorporated approximately 70 square kilometres into the Jerusalem municipality, a boundary drawn not along historic city lines but to maximise land and minimise the Palestinian population brought inside it.

This was annexation in substance, though Israel has consistently avoided the word. The international community has consistently rejected it. UN Security Council Resolution 252 (1968) declared Israel’s measures to change the status of Jerusalem “invalid” and called on Israel to rescind them. Resolution 478 (1980), passed after Israel’s Basic Law declared Jerusalem its “complete and united” capital, reaffirmed that position — fourteen votes in favour, the United States abstaining.

For Palestinians living in East Jerusalem in June 1967, the legal transformation was immediate and disorienting. They were not offered Israeli citizenship. Instead, they were classified as permanent residents — a status that is conditional, revocable, and has been revoked from thousands of Jerusalemites in the decades since. Residency rights, the Israeli Interior Ministry decided, could be lost if a Jerusalemite was deemed to have established a “centre of life” elsewhere: studying abroad, marrying a spouse from the West Bank, or simply spending too many years outside the city’s administrative boundaries. According to B’Tselem, Israel revoked the residency of more than 14,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites between 1967 and 2020.

Military Law and the Architecture of Control

In the West Bank and Gaza, no annexation was declared — but military rule was imposed immediately. The legal instrument was a series of military orders issued by the Israeli military commander, which replaced Jordanian law (in the West Bank) and Egyptian administrative regulations (in Gaza) and placed virtually every dimension of daily life under military authority.

The framework drew heavily on British Mandatory emergency regulations from 1945 — the same regulations that Jewish legal scholars had denounced as draconian when applied against the Jewish community under the British. As Israeli legal scholar Raja Shehadeh and others have documented, these regulations gave military commanders the power to detain without charge, to place individuals under administrative detention for renewable six-month periods, to impose curfews, to demolish homes, and to declare land “closed” or requisitioned for military purposes — all without civilian judicial oversight.

Within weeks of the conquest, military orders had restructured the Palestinian economy. Movement between the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel required permits. Palestinian workers could enter Israel to work, but on Israeli terms and without labour rights protections. Palestinian exports were subject to Israeli approval. The Israeli shekel — and, initially, the Israeli pound — became the dominant currency alongside the Jordanian dinar. Palestinian banks were closed for months; when they reopened, they operated under Israeli oversight.

The Land: What Occupation Looked Like on the Ground

The conquest of land and the control of people went hand in hand from the beginning. On September 21, 1967 — fewer than four months after the war ended — the Israeli government approved the establishment of Kfar Etzion, the first Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. By December 1967, more settlements were being planned.

The legal mechanism that enabled large-scale land seizure was the declaration of land as “state land” — absorbing territory that had been used communally by Palestinian villages for generations but was not individually registered under the Ottoman and British-era cadastral systems. Israeli military orders also allowed the requisition of land for “military purposes,” a category that frequently became permanent. Historian Benny Morris, in Righteous Victims, and Walid Khalidi, in All That Remains, have both documented the systematic nature of early land policy in the occupied territories.

For Palestinian farmers, the effect was tangible and sometimes sudden. A field planted with olive trees — a crop that takes years to bear fruit and represents intergenerational investment — could be declared off-limits or seized with little legal recourse available to its owner. The Israeli settler enterprise that now encompasses more than 700,000 settlers across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Peace Now’s Settlement Watch data, had its roots in those first months of military administration.

The Naksa and the People It Displaced

Palestinians call 1967’s defeat the Naksa — the setback — to distinguish it from the Nakba of 1948, though the two catastrophes are understood as continuous chapters of the same story. The 1967 war produced a new wave of displacement. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) estimated that approximately 300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza during and immediately after the fighting, many of them crossing to Jordan. Significant numbers were Palestinians who had already been displaced in 1948, now displaced a second time.

Unlike Palestinian citizens of Israel who had remained inside the 1948 armistice lines, these new refugees had no path of return recognised by their conqueror. Military Order No. 1 — one of the first orders issued after the conquest — gave the military commander authority over persons in the territory. Those who had left were outside that territory, and Israel did not permit them to return. Families were divided along lines drawn by the speed of flight and the accident of which side of the Jordan River they happened to be on when the shooting stopped.

A Reality That Has Never Been Temporary

International humanitarian law, specifically the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governs the conduct of an occupying power toward a civilian population. Its provisions — prohibiting collective punishment, forced transfer of civilians, and settlement of the occupier’s own population in occupied territory — have been affirmed as applicable to the West Bank and Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall, and by repeated UN Security Council resolutions.

Israel disputes the Convention’s applicability to the West Bank, a position the international community has consistently rejected. The occupation, which international law frames as a temporary condition pending a negotiated resolution, has now lasted more than five decades. The infrastructure built within it — settlements, roads, checkpoints, the administrative and legal architecture of military rule — has grown more elaborate with each passing year.

What changed for ordinary Palestinians in June 1967 was not, in the end, temporary. The currencies changed. The permits began. The soldiers stayed. And the children born under occupation have grown old within it, raising children of their own who have never known anything else.

Sources

Étiqueté , , , , ,

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *