Opinion
Militaries are rarely good occupiers. Time and demographics usually wear down the occupying power, and the reasons why occupation initially made sense rarely apply at the end. A displaced population will want their land back, making life increasingly hard for the occupiers and their political masters.
Next year will mark 60 years that Israel has occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Syria’s Golan Heights has been under de facto Israeli control for more than half a century. Following its response to the October 7, 2023 attacks, Israel now occupies 70 per cent of Gaza – territory it withdrew from in 2005. It has also grabbed strategically significant Syrian land including the summit of Mount Hermon after the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, and expanded its hold on Lebanese territory with a major ground operation in March.
There are sound tactical and even strategic reasons for temporary occupation. But temporary has an unerring tendency to lean towards the permanent in recent Israeli history. More than 30 years ago, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said his “foremost consideration regarding the Golan Heights is the security value … Peace is for me a more important value for the future security of Israel than a group of settlements”.
Last month, in celebrating Colombia becoming the second country after the United States to recognise Israeli sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the territory was “vital to our security, and the Israeli flag flies here and it will continue to fly here because this is our land”.
Rabin was a strategist who saw occupation as a means to an end. Netanyahu sees occupation and devastation as the guarantee of security. In Gaza, great swathes of the territory have been laid waste in the past three years. In southern Lebanon, a large proportion of the Shiite population has been displaced – their towns and villages destroyed since Israel’s major ground incursion earlier this year that sought to damage Hezbollah’s weapons caches and infrastructure.
But long-term military occupation without parallel political progress towards a peaceful outcome often causes moral and reputational damage to the occupiers, and lays the foundations for future conflict. Continued occupation of the West Bank, the building of settlements and aggressive settler activity against Palestinians is becoming a bigger domestic political issue in the West. The recent announcement by the UK and 11 other countries of economic measures against Israeli settlements in the West Bank has been criticised by a group of senior UK lawyers and academics as being too soft.
Meanwhile, the longer Gaza remains a wasteland awaiting the much-heralded International Stabilisation Force and the much-needed reconstruction efforts, the more deeply felt the hostility towards Israel and its military will be, at the expense of enmity towards Hamas who began this current conflict.
The same goes for Lebanon. Hezbollah has been one of the causes of decades of Lebanese political instability. And while the armed militia group and political party hybrid may have been the 1982 creation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, it is also the product of centuries of anti-Shiite discrimination within Lebanon. It has been allowed to grow and become a state within a state through Lebanese government weakness, regional states’ permissiveness and through the desire of many within the Lebanese Shiite community to embrace them.
The Israeli military spent nearly 20 years occupying southern Lebanon but withdrew in 2000, accepting that the cost of occupation outweighed the security benefit. For the Netanyahu government, devastating pro-Hezbollah towns and villages to create a southern Lebanon buffer zone, as it has since March, then expecting the Lebanese military to guarantee Israel’s security by taking on Hezbollah might sound like a good plan.
But if the Israeli military with its air supremacy and overwhelming technical superiority can’t destroy Hezbollah, there’s little chance the relatively poorly equipped Lebanese military can. Lebanese Shiites returning to shattered villages and destroyed agricultural land will more likely than not express anger at the Israeli military than Hezbollah.
Earlier this month, Netanyahu and his defence minister Israel Katz visited the Israeli military position atop Syria’s Mount Hermon in a trip roundly condemned by regional states and dozens of other countries. With an Israeli election looming at the end of October, neither Netanyahu nor Katz may be in their positions come November. And yet, it is hard to see any incoming Israeli government having the political capital to relinquish control over such a strategic site. Syria’s government is focused on establishing a strong central government and territorial control. It is too weak now to contest Israeli control over these recent encroachments, let alone the Golan Heights. But that time will come.
Peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and the so-called Abraham Accords are means by which Israel has established normalised bilateral relationships with some of its neighbours. There is little doubt these have improved Israel’s security. Criticism of the Abraham Accords, and the main reason why Saudi Arabia has yet to sign, is because Israel has never been expected to give up anything substantive in return for normalisation. Israel’s simultaneous occupation of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese territory may be providing it with short-term security, but wise leaders understand that long-term security comes through a willingness and ability to cede land for peace.
Unfortunately wisdom, just like peace, appears to be in short supply in the current Israeli leadership.
Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and expert associate at ANU’s National Security College.
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