ISRAELI VIOLATION: HISTORY & THEORY

Following the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military began a long-term occupation of these Palestinian territories marked by:

• (1) Outright annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights;
• (2) The expropriation of huge amounts of Palestinian lands for their own use, including the establishment of many illegal Israeli civilian settlements;
• (3) The isolation of the Palestinian population centers strangling Palestinian society;
• (4) Exploitation of the Palestinian economy for the sake of the Israeli economy.

These steps involved the radical transformation of the legal system present in the West Bank and Gaza. For example:

• (1) Passing Israeli military orders in the occupied territories and laws in Israel itself changing the legal status of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to make it part of Israel itself;
• (2) Replacing Arab government institutions in the occupied territories with Israeli military committees controlling every aspect of Palestinian life and commerce;
• (3) Passing huge numbers of military orders expropriating Palestinian lands, and then creating a separate legal system for the Israeli civilian settlements on those lands, and then finally applying many Israeli laws and government systems to those settlements creating de facto annexation of those areas of the occupied territories.
• (4) Building physical structures to physically isolate the Palestinian areas - in addition to the civilian settlements there was a web of Israeli-use only highways, Israeli military buffer zones, wilderness preserves, and then the Israeli-built separation barrier which was actually built through many communities destroying them;
• (5) Through military orders establishing a permit system covering every aspect of the Palestinian economy which the Israeli government then manipulated to the benefit of Israel.