A rchive Date
[ 15-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Palestine ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1952116
`Occupied' at center of dispute
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
June 13, 2003, 9:06PM
What's in a word?
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon learned that in the Middle East, a word can explode like a bomb.
"The thinking and the ideas that it is possible to continue holding (people) under occupationone may not like the word," he said on May 26, showing that he was aware of the furor his use of it would create, "but what is happening here, is occupation. To hold 3 1/2 million Palestinians under occupation ... is bad for Israel, also for the Palestinians, also for Israel's economy." Coming from Sharon, builder and defender of settlements for more than a generation, the word stunned longtime fellow hard-liners.
The burly former general had for years pointedly referred to land claimed by Palestinian Arabs as Judea and Samaria, in the hope that the reminder of the biblical heritage of the ancient Jews would lend historical authority to Israel's right to the land west of the west bank of the Jordan River. Sharon refused to call those 1.45 million acres "the West Bank," as most of the Western media did, because it seemed to suggest that the land was not part of Israel.
He was among the many hard-liners who resented what they considered an even more pro-Palestinian usage, "the occupied West Bank." Although Jordan claimed that territory from 1948 to 1967, its claim was not recognized by most of the world's nations; after Israel defeated an Arab attempt to destroy the Israeli state in 1967, Israel moved into the land to ensure what it called "defensible borders."
In light of U.N. resolutions calling for a withdrawal from "territories"but specifically not all territories seized in Israel's defensive war, Israelis tried out the phrase administered territories. Those sympathetic to the cause of an independent Palestinian state preferred occupied West Bank, which imputed impermanence to the arrangement.
As the usage war tilted toward the Palestinians, Israelis recalled that the legal status of Judea / Samaria or the West Bank had, since the Yom Kippur war, been "areas in dispute." A neutral term was floated out to provide occupied with competition: disputed territories.
"There is a world of difference," wrote the Sharon adviser Dore Gold last year, "between a situation in which Israel approaches the international community as a `foreign occupier' with no territorial right and one in which Israel has a strong historical right to the land."
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endeared himself to embattled Israelis by showing his understanding of the nuances as he referred to "the so-called occupied territories."
Then Sharon deliberately used the word occupation.
Israel's nonpartisan attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, promptly rebuked the prime minister, reminding him that the proper legal term was disputed territories. Sharon accepted that, asserting: "We are not occupiers. In the diplomatic dictionary these are disputed lands." He told supporters in Haifa that he was referring to the inhabitants, not to the territory: "We don't want to rule 3 1/2 million Palestinians. That's what I meant when I used the word occupation."
But the cat word occupiedwas out of the bag.
The Hebrew word Sharon used was kibush, often translated as "conquest." The root of occupied is the Latin occupare, "to seize by force," as the United States and its allies did in Iraq, where we are now officially "the occupying force," acting as sovereign and responsible for order.
Neither is a word that most Israelis want to use in negotiation, which is why hard-liners were stunned and Palestinians were pleased.
Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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