So, Not So "Occupied"?

Ashley Perry, an editor at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs for the Middle East Strategic Information Project, deals with the war of words and specifically the term "occupation":

...ISRAEL DOES not fit the literal definition of an occupying force. The Hague Conventions and the later Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not appear to apply definitively to the West Bank. The West Bank has never been sovereign territory, and was won from a nation which held no legal claim to the area. After Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar wrote in the 1970s that there is no de jure applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding occupied territories to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, since the convention "is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign which was ousted, and that it had been a legitimate sovereign."

To take it a step further, former US State Department legal adviser Stephen Schwebel, who later headed the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote in 1970 regarding Israel's case: "Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

...[the] UN Security Council Resolution 242 which, according to its drafters, allows Israel to hold onto territories it won in the 1967 war. This stands in contradistinction to other theaters of conflict and occupation.

...THE TERM occupation has been long used as an accusation by the Palestinians...Perhaps even more worryingly, the Israeli government has bought into this terminology, which flies in the face of its own legal opinions.

The Road Map which was agreed to by the government referred to an "occupation that began in 1967," and soon after prime minister Ariel Sharon criticized what he called the "occupation" in the territories. By referring to the West Bank as occupied, Sharon broke one of the greatest taboos in Israeli governmental policy.

Today, it has almost become commonplace for high-ranking officials like Tzipi Livni to use the term "occupation" in their speeches. Consequently, the government has adopted the language of its accusers in the media, and has thus handed itself a major defeat in its own PR war.