The Biggest Prison on Earth Read online

  Also by Ilan Pappe and published by Oneworld

  The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

  To the Palestinian children, killed, wounded and traumatized

  by living in the biggest prison on earth.

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Preface: One Hill, Two Prisons and Three Agencies

  Introduction: Re-reading the Narrative of Occupation

  1 The War of Choice

  2 Devising the Mega-Prison

  3 The Greater Jerusalem as a Pilot Project

  4 The Alon Vision

  5 Economic Rewards and Punitive Reprisals

  6 The Ethnic Cleansing of June 1967

  7 The Labour Legacy, 1968–1977

  8 The Bureaucracy of Evil

  9 On the Road to the Intifada, 1977–1987

  10 The First Intifada, 1987–1993

  11 The Oslo Charade and the Second Intifada

  12 The Ultimate Maximum Security Prison Model: the Gaza Strip

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Maps

  Index

  List of Maps

  Pre-1948 Historical Palestine

  UN Partition Plan 1947

  1967 Post Six-Day War

  Settlements and the West Bank Barrier 2006

  The West Bank in 2006 showing the Green Line vs. West Bank Barrier

  East Jerusalem 2007 showing the development of new settelements in the West Bank

  Areas A, B and C in the West Bank 2010

  Preface: One Hill, Two Prisons and Three Agencies

  The University on the Hill

  Givat Ram, the Hill of Ram, is a sprawling, hilly neighbourhood on the very western edge of present-day Jerusalem. Various government ministries, the Knesset, part of the Hebrew University and the Bank of Israel are located there. Israelis of a certain age, ethnic origin and socio-economic background have developed a great nostalgia for the place. The hill makes a very brief and pastoral appearance in Amos Oz’s first and most famous novel, My Michael, published in 1968. It is the place ‘where a small herd of sheep graze alongside the Prime Minister’s Office’.1 There are no sheep to be seen these days and the grazing fields of yesteryear are long gone. They have been replaced by an elaborate system of highways, metal gates, suspension bridges and a rather beautiful rose garden.

  It is highly unlikely that sheep were to be found anywhere near the Prime Minister’s Office when Oz’s book was first published. However, sheep did graze this hillside when the rural Palestinian village of Sheikh al-Badr was situated there. A few of its houses still remain, next to the American hotels frequented by Israeli members of the Knesset who do not live in Jerusalem. The village was gradually swallowed by the city, becoming part of the urban sprawl until it was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. It was a famous part of the city, as it overlooked one of Jerusalem’s best-known landmarks: the Valley of the Cross. Tradition has it that the tree that provided the wood for Christ’s cross stood there and this is why it is said that on that spot Greek Orthodox monks built an impressive monastery, still there today, albeit surrounded by new Jewish neighbourhoods and ring roads.

  West of the monastery lies one of the two main campuses of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was built on land confiscated from Sheikh al-Badr and sold to the university by the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property2 (allegedly held pending a decision about its future, but in reality sold to any Jewish individual or enterprise prepared to pay the ridiculously low price for it). Until 1948 the university was situated on Mount Scopus, which became a ‘no man’s land’, an island within the Jordanian party of the city, and therefore inaccessible. After the June 1967 war, many of the Givat Ram campus’s departments were transferred back to the old campus on Mount Scopus, which was then expanded significantly over confiscated Palestinian land.

  North of the newly built campus, and at roughly the same time, a new home for the Israeli government was erected. Whereas the buildings of the campus were modest in appearance and laid out with pleasant lawns and accompanying greenery, the serene charm of this hilltop did not apparently inspire the architects who designed the government site of the Jewish State. Paying little attention to the pastoral scenery or its biblical heritage, they opted for what look like huge lumps of concrete spreading all over the hill, scarring the natural beauty of this crest of the Jerusalem mountains.

  In summer 1963 a group of unusual students were enrolled on this campus for a month-long course. Almost all of them had a legal background of one sort or another. Some were members of the military administration that was controlling the areas in which the 1948 Palestinians (the Israeli Arabs as they were called then) lived under a strict rule that robbed them of most of their basic rights. Others were officers in the legal section of the Israeli army or officials of the Ministry of the Interior, and one or two were private lawyers.

  They had been invited by the Department of Political Science in the Hebrew University. The course included lectures on military rule in general and on the political situation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as a discussion on the lessons to be learned from Israel’s military rule in the Sinai and Gaza in 1956 and inside Israel since 1948. A short introduction to Islam was also part of the curriculum and it closed with a lecture on the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem (though of course not described in this manner by the lecturer, who probably referred to it as Operation Yevusi of April 1948), in which scores of Palestinian villages were wiped out and their inhabitants expelled. This, reported one of the participants, was followed by ‘a celebratory meal and everyone was in an excellent mood’.3

  Their presence on Givat Ram in 1963 was part of a new overarching military strategy initiated by the Israeli Chief of the General Staff. The strategy was presented by the CoGS to the army on 1 May 1963 and was meant to prepare the army for controlling the West Bank as an occupied military area.

  The West Bank, of course, was not yet occupied, but the fact that four years before the actual occupation the Israeli military was ready with a judicial and administrative infrastructure for ruling the lives of one million Palestinians is highly significant.

  Discussion in Israel of how to run occupied Arab areas began during the Sinai operation, when, in collusion with Britain and France, the Jewish State tried to topple the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in October 1956. As part of the campaign the Gaza Strip was occupied for a few months, and the sense among the strategists and army commanders was that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) was ill-prepared for the mission. The lesson learned was that a more systematic approach was needed. The opportunity to devise a more structured strategy arose in 1963. That year, growing instability in Jordan led the chiefs of staff to prepare seriously for the eventuality of the fall of the Hashemite Kingdom, which would lead to a possible war with Israel. They began contemplating more seriously the occupation of the West Bank.4 For this they needed a plan.

  In the first chapter of this book, this plan will be seen to have been located within a wider historical context that shows that since 1948, and even more since 1956, Israel’s military and political elite was looking for the right historical moment to occupy the West Bank.

  The plan was code-named the ‘Shacham Plan’ and it divided the West Bank into eight districts so as to facilitate the imposition of an organized military rule. Mishael Shacham was the general military governor of the Palestinian territories inside Israel (and one of the founders, together with Ariel Sharon, of unit 101, a notorious commando unit that carried out daring, and brutal, retaliatory operations against Palestinian guerrillas and farmers attempting to smuggle their way into Palestine). The official name of the programme was ‘the Organization of Militar
y Rule in the Occupied Territories’.5

  There were three groups behind the plan: members of the legal section of the army, academics of the Hebrew University and officials of the Ministry of the Interior. The latter were mainly people already serving in one capacity or another in the military administration imposed on the Palestinians in 1948, which was still intact in 1963.

  The plan included the appointment of a legal advisor to the future Governor General of the Occupied Territories and four military courts. The appendices to the plan consisted of a translation into Arabic of the Jordanian law as well as the 1945 Mandatory regulations. Although the latter were already used inside Israel, for some reason the Israelis did not have the Arabic translation. This may have been because theoretically, according to Israeli law, these draconian measures, of which more later, were imposed on Jews and non-Jews alike. In the case of the West Bank it was meant to apply to Palestinians only (and indeed when the Jewish settlers arrived they would be exempt from this legal regime).

  Zvi Inbar was a senior member of the military Attorney General’s team – he was the Attorney General for Southern Command. In his memoirs he revealed for the first time the details of the plan, explaining that every term had to be transferred from the reality of the Mandatory period, when these regulations were issued by the British government in 1945, to the prospective occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1963. Thus, the ‘High Commissioner’ and ‘His Majesty’s government’ were irrelevant terms and were replaced by ‘a general military governor’ and the IDF, respectively.6

  Other parts of the plan suggest that the compatibility of international law and the Geneva Convention with just such an occupation was also a matter of concern during these deliberations. Ominously for the Palestinians, the main concern was that the Geneva Convention did not permit executions. As this book will show, a year into the occupation Israel decided that the Convention did not apply to the occupation and, as for executions, the Israelis would not adopt the death penalty but instead resorted to other equally lethal means of execution.

  Jordanian law was also studied to ascertain which of the Hashemite laws would need to be abolished immediately so as not to interfere with the Israeli strategy and objectives. ‘It is impossible for us to leave a law which would contradict, or render illegitimate, Israeli laws,’ recollected Inbar. But in other respects the mode of rule in the Jordanian period fitted the Israeli conceptions of control well. It was as comprehensive as the Israelis hoped it would be; it even included a list of the books censored in the West Bank, especially for children. The Jordanian list included The Diary of Anne Frank, while the Israeli list named Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (presumably because it contained in the title the word ‘revolution’).7

  The Shacham Plan also suggested the names of people who should be appointed to senior posts in the future occupation. Some of them would indeed be there in 1967, men such as Chaim Herzog and the plan’s mastermind, Colonel Mishael Shacham himself. In 1963 Herzog was released from active military service with the rank of a general. He was immediately appointed the future Governor General of the West Bank. The appointment of such a senior officer indicated the significance of the military and judicial preparations in 1963 Israel.

  Herzog appointed a bank director by the name of David Shoham as the ‘finance minister’ in waiting of the Occupied Territories, and Memi De-Shalit to be the ‘minister of tourism’. The official titles were Staff Officer for finance and tourism, respectively.8

  One major result of these preparations was a dossier on economic conditions in the West Bank. The report was put together by the head of the national military college near Tel Aviv and later the Chief of the Central Command during the 1967 war, Uzi Narkiss. At the time he rejected requests from Shacham and his colleagues to prepare an even more detailed plan of how to rule the West Bank (in 1963 he did not foresee such a scenario as imminent). Shacham received a more encouraging response from the military intelligence, which began to prepare files on personalities, installations and institutions in the West Bank (and of course the Gaza Strip). The preparations in 1963 culminated in an exercise in which the early days of takeover were practised.9

  A year later Shacham invited another group of potential recruits to the Hebrew University. For this new course, the university produced with the army a special guidebook for the ‘students’ titled ‘Military Rule in Occupied Territories’.10 The detailed guidebook provided precise instructions on how to deal with local municipalities and councils in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and how to manage the educational system. In summarizing the guidebook, Shlomo Gazit, who became the military officer coordinating government policy in the Occupied Territories, said it explained how ‘to cleanse it from hostile elements’ and ‘encourage collaborators and punish those who would resist the occupation’. All in all, ‘The aim was to encourage the emergence of new local collaborative leadership with the occupation (unless of course the local leadership on the ground would behave well; then it can remain intact.’)11

  Within three years the team was ready for the eventuality of a military occupation, which indeed occurred in June 1967. The various courses moved to Beit Hayahl, ‘the soldiers’ dormitory’ of Jerusalem. The structure of the courses and their main purpose were the same: to prepare for the day when the military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would commence on the ground.

  The military Attorney General’s team had its own code name for the plan, Granit (‘granite’), which was combined with the overall Shacham Plan and became far more workable by May 1967. At this point, military governors and military judges had already been appointed to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Shacham Plan became fully operational (it even included preparations for installing a regime in what the army referred to as ‘Syria’). The Granit Plan was the most detailed and structured of all of Israel’s pre-1967 preparations for how to manage the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  In May 1967 each potential military governor as well as legal and political advisors received a box (argaz). Each box included the following: instructions on how to govern an occupied Arab area; the Geneva and the Hague conventions; the Arabic translation of the emergency regulations; The Occupation of Enemy Territory: a Commentary on the Law and Practice of Belligerent Occupation by Gerhard von Glahn; and lastly a set of international law reports on administrative rule published in 1929 by Elihu Lauterpacht, C. J. Greenwood and A. G. Oppenheimer.

  The major source was von Glahn’s book. Had it indeed been the book on which future policies in the Occupied Territories were to have been based, the history of these areas would have been quite different from the way it unfolded. This book determined that occupation cannot change the de jure status of an area, that occupation is only temporary and the occupier can only use assets of any kind (such as land, houses, etc.) but cannot own, sell or buy them.

  I mention these materials in the box in detail because they were either prepared before the occupation of Germany in 1945 or based on lessons learned from that occupation. In hindsight, however, one can say that despite the elaborate preparations, in practice an easier way was chosen: a simple extension of the military rule imposed on one Palestinian group (the minority inside Israel) to another Palestinian group (the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). The Palestinian minority in Israel was put under military rule between 1948 and 1966 (in fact, Mishael Shacham was the last Governor General of that rule); thus there was a ready-made rule that could be reimposed in the Occupied Territories. The basis for the old and the new imposition was the same: the British Mandatory emergency regulations. The Israeli interpretation of these regulations – in 1948 as well as in 1967 – gave a military governor unlimited control over every aspect of the life of the people in his area. The rulers became what the first head of the military rule regime in 1948, Colonel Elimelech Avner, described as ‘absolute monarchs’ in their own small domains.12

  When these regulations were
first imposed in 1948 and again in 1967, no one mentioned the fact that when they were originally introduced by the British Mandate they were condemned by all Zionist leaders as Nazi legislation. These leaders described them as regulations with ‘no parallel in any enlightened country’, and continued that ‘even in Nazi Germany there were no such rules, and the actions of Maydanek and its like had been done out of violation of the written law’.13

  The two most notorious regulations were and still are No. 109, allowing the governor to expel the population, and No. 110, which gave him the right to summon any citizen to a police station whenever he saw fit. Another infamous regulation was No. 111, which sanctioned administrative arrest – an arrest for an unlimited period with neither explanation nor trial. This would become a more familiar feature of the 1967 occupation than the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel. One practice that stemmed from an interpretation of several regulations was the right of governors to resort to pre-emptive measures, the most common of which was to declare entire villages ‘closed military areas’ whenever the Shin Beit or the Shabak (the General Security Services – GSS) had prior knowledge of a forthcoming meeting or demonstration. This was first used in Israel in 1949 when the Palestinians demonstrated against land expropriation and would be constantly used to silence protests in the West Bank up to the present day and in the Gaza Strip until 2005.

  The Mandatory emergency regulations became the legal infrastructure for the military courts, those institutions through which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would pass, arrested without trial, sent to be tortured and abused. Only rarely did they emerge from them unscathed. The judges were all army officers, and were not required to have a legal background. Courts had either one, two or three judges. Those courts with three judges had the right to order executions or sentence people to life imprisonment. Among the theoretical institutions envisaged in 1963 was a special military court of appeal that would become operational in 1967, sanctioning the decisions of the lower courts in order to show to the world a system that apparently had the right to appeal built into it.