Middle East

Disingenuous ‘Disengagement’: Israel’s Occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Protective Function of the Law of Belligerent Occupation

[Valentina Azarov is a Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights, Al-Quds Bard College, Al-Quds University, Palestine (on leave)] This is the third post of our Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation. Earlier posts can be found in the Related Links at the end of this post. By far one of the most challenging questions for the international law of belligerent occupation pertains to the termination of occupation. The law states that “occupation comes to an end when an occupant withdraws from a territory, or is driven out of it” (Oppenheim, International Law (1952) 436). According to Sir Adam Roberts, an occupation ends either through a complete withdrawal of troops, through the conclusion of a treaty permitting the continued presence of some troops, or through a treaty that transfers sovereignty back to the displaced sovereign, without withdrawal of troops. In his seminal work on the law of occupation, Arai-Takahashi’s discussion of termination makes no mention of the possibility of a gradated or phased application of the law. Sir Roberts holds that,

the question of when an occupation can be said to have begun, or ended, is sometimes easy to answer but is by no means always so. Even when it can be answered with confidence, there may still be many gradations between direct foreign military control on the one hand and complete independence and freedom from foreign military forces on the other. (260)

Similarly, in an article on the termination of occupation, Benvenisti notes that “unilateral withdrawals can be events as painful as other situations of political transition in which the protection of individual rights is particularly important”, underscoring that “the determination whether such control exists or not at the relevant times and in the relevant place will be based on a case by case analysis.” Whilst the law of occupation does not explicitly provide for a "transitional" legal framework that regulates the process of termination, the simplicity of the above mentioned criteria for termination falls short of answering more demanding practical questions, such as: What duties does an occupying power have during the transition to restoration of lawful sovereignty? How can occupation law be applied to situations in which an occupying power has partially retreated but continues to exercise governmental functions?

In Reluctant Defense of the Law of Occupation

[Sari Bashi is Executive Director at Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement.] This is the second post of our Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation. Earlier posts can be found in the Related Links at the end of this post. I am grateful to Opinio Juris for hosting this symposium in its best tradition of fostering robust debate on cutting-edge issues in international law and to Aeyal Gross for providing the theoretical framework for understanding Israel's obligations in Gaza. As the director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization working to protect the rights of Palestinian residents of Gaza, I co-wrote Scale of Control about the legal status of the Gaza Strip, because I believe that the law of occupation, flawed as it is, provides a useful framework for understanding and regulating Israeli control over Gaza. Whether Gaza is considered occupied is not only an intellectually compelling question but also a question whose answer has significant consequences for the ability of 1.6 million people to overcome movement restrictions in order to lead normal lives. In this post, I want to explain why I believe Israel bears the responsibility of an occupying power in the spheres over which it exercises control in Gaza and also – why that matters. Israel's regulation of access into and out of Gaza is influenced by the way in which important actors – including the Israeli Supreme Court, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and key Western powers – view Israel's obligations to Palestinians living in Gaza. Public opinion within Israel and concern over diplomatic pressure help determine the standard that Israel observes in regulating movement – whether mathematical formulas are used to determine how much food will be permitted into the Gaza Strip, as was the case between June 2007 and June 2010, or whether, as is the case today, incoming goods are permitted but outgoing goods banned, and movement of people is restricted in seemingly arbitrary ways (the current rules allow football players to travel between Gaza and the West Bank but ban university students). The Israeli government claims that its detailed criteria outlining who may travel between Gaza and the West Bank (male merchants may travel, but female hairdressers are banned), its determination of which kinds of export goods may leave Gaza and where they may be marketed, and its insistence that parents in Gaza register their newborn children in the Israeli controlled population registry as a condition of allowing those children to cross borders – are actions taken under the law of armed conflict. Under the law of armed conflict, Israel claims, it owes minimal obligations, primarily to allow the entry into Gaza of items essential to the survival of the civilian population and to allow exit from Gaza under exceptional humanitarian circumstances, with an emphasis on urgent medical cases.

So, according to the Israeli government, it may control many of the spheres of life that determine whether civilians will lead normal lives, including the movement of persons and goods critical to the economy, educational system, family unity, and civil society, but may use such control to disrupt normal life in Gaza, as long as it allows in basic foodstuffs and other humanitarian necessities.

That doesn’t seem right to me as an activist who cares deeply about human rights, and as a lawyer specializing in international humanitarian law, I think it reflects a misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of the law of occupation.

Rethinking Occupation: The Functional Approach

[Aeyal Gross is a Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Law.] This is the first post of our Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation. Questions regarding the existence of an occupation, and especially its end, came to the fore in 2004-2005 with Israeli pronouncements about the end of its occupation of Gaza, and UN, US, and UK statements about the end of the occupation in Iraq. In the years that followed, I found myself at various events where the question of whether Iraq or Gaza were still "occupied territories" was discussed, at times seemingly ad absurdum. Seated at a conference on “Occupations and Withdrawals” at the University of Glasgow in 2006 and listening to the discussions around me as to whether those territories were still occupied and whether “boots on the ground” are required for an occupation to exist, I felt I was attending a real life enactment of Felix Cohen’s “Heaven of Legal Concepts,” where legal concepts are “thingified” in a way that Cohen characterizes as “transcendental nonsense.”  [See: Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach (1935)]. Some of the discourse on the existence (or absence) of "occupation" was, I thought, an example of legal analysis ignoring practical questions of value or positive fact. Instead, discussions took refuge in "legal problems" that, according to Cohen, can always be answered by manipulating legal concepts in certain approved ways that bar the way to "intelligent investigation of social facts and social policy." While Israel had removed its settlers and permanent military presence from Gaza, and while the Security Council had proclaimed that the occupation of Iraq was over, the occupying powers continued to exercise extensive control over the daily life of the people residing in these territories. Some of my international law colleagues argued that these territories are no longer occupied, while others disagreed. Listening to this debate,  I began to think that "occupation" should be included in the category Cohen calls “magic solving words” – words that  are actually incapable of solving anything if we remain within the binary on/off framework of the traditional international law of occupation. Article 42 of the Hague Regulations determines that “[t]erritory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army” and that “[t]he occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.” The discussions of Gaza and Iraq illustrated to me that by relinquishing some of the control or by transforming it, occupants may attempt to absolve themselves of their responsibility by claiming that the territory is no longer occupied within the framework set out in Article 42. Reflecting upon Cohen’s insights, I recalled that, in his legal realist suggestion, norms should not follow from abstract concepts but rather the opposite. For instance, rather than saying that a labor union can be sued because it is “a person” or “a quasi-corporation,” it should be said that a labor union is “a person” or “quasi-corporation” because it can be sued. Whereas the first approach is one coined in “transcendental” terms by asserting something that sounds like a proposition but cannot be confirmed or refuted by positive evidence or ethical argument, the latter avoids this circularity. To follow Cohen, then, we can address the “thingification” of occupation. As is well known, it is by virtue of the determination that the situation is or is not one of occupation that parties are assigned rights and obligations under international law. But an alternative to reliance on “heavenly legal concepts” and “transcendental nonsense” is  a “functional approach” that, in Cohen’s words, “represents an assault upon all dogmas and devices that cannot be translated into terms of actual experience” and from which “all sorts of empirical decisions are supposed to flow.”  “If the functionalists are correct,” argued Cohen, “the meaning of a definition is found in its consequences.” To apply Cohen’s approach to the law of occupation, then, when we ask whether there is an occupation we should consider whether the liabilities and duties of an occupier should be attached to certain acts. This is an ethical question that cannot be answered in purely legal terms since that would make it circular. Rather, we should consider the ethical character of the legal question and the conflicting human values in every controversy. This approach will prevent occupiers from relinquishing responsibility when control is transformed, and will ensure that as long as an occupying party continues to exercise some degree of control, it will continue to be held accountable. In the functional approach, legal decisions are not “products of logical parthenogenesis born of pre-existing legal principles but are social events with social causes and consequences. Law and legal institutions should thus be appraised in terms of some standards of human values.”