Living under foreign military occupation

24 thoughts on “Living under foreign military occupation”

1. Insightful article. My country, Indonesia, occupied East Timor for 24 years, a brutal affair that took the life of an estimated 200,000 people (out of a total current population of around 800,000). After a plebiscite that went heavily against continued Indonesian rule, the whole ‘province’ was looted and razed to the ground.
   And yet there was a huge outrage when Australia sent peacekeepers to pacify East Timor from Indonesian-sponsored militia groups.. what Iraqis must be feeling now, since it’s their country that is invaded and not merely an ex-colony, I can’t even begin to fathom.

2. Excellent article Helena! I noticed you concentrated on the monetary costs of an occupation, and not the social cost, which in my opinion is the far greater danger. My beloved country is now a place where empahy is dead. Your last sentence is the key;
   “And then (especially if you’re American) ask how you yourself would feel if this situation were imposed on your country…”
   This is asking Americans to show empahy. The majority, quite frankly, don’t care one bit about Iraqi’s. In my opinion it is a VAST majority. Yes, polls show many don’t support the way the war is going, but that is a reflection of AMERICAN casualties, not Iraqi casualties. I walk amongst these hard people, and my inability to get through to them the cost to US breaks my heart. I have heard people who I have known and respected for twenty years say “One less person to grow up to be a terrorist” when I asked them about dead Iraqi children, and the moral costs of occupation.
   For the first time in my life I fear for my country, because if you cannot have empathy for a child in a far off land, you can be manipulated to not have it for someone down the street. And I wonder if it is the opposite. Do we not care about that far off child because we NEVER cared about that person down the street?
   Even when it all falls apart, American’s will only talk about the costs to THEMSELVES, and won’t mention what we have done to ‘them’.
   Warren

3. That was an excellent article by Helena, Warren. It was also a great post from you. I think that Americans would care more about Iraqis if the media didn’t have such an overwhelming concentration on American rather than Iraqi suffering.

4. How interested were Americans in the suffering of Vietnamese 30+ years ago?
   Not very much, as I recall.

5. Good point, sm. The same question occurred to me.

6. Many Americans were very interested in the suffering of Vietnamese, which featured prominently in the concerns of the antiwar movement.
   I’m afraid that American sensibilities may be blunted in Iraq. In Vietnam there was a fair amount of free-floating racism, but there was never the concerted demonization of the Vietnamese as there is now of Arabs and Muslims. And of course there was no Vietnamese Sept 11.

7. No Preference: quite right, there was no Vietnamese Sept 11 – quite the reverse, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident though, which turns out to be fabricated (note similarity with the Niger yellow cake story and the similar alleged attack on a US ship that triggered the Spanish-American war in 1898)

8. Thank you for your article on living under a foreign military occupation. It clearly is difficult for those of us not in that circumstance to truly understand what it means to live this way day by day.
   But haven’t Palestinians been living under a foreign military occupation for more than 37 years now? Haven’t they been living under foreign military occupation, like, for ever? When were they not living under foreign military occupation, since there has never been an independent Palestine?

9. Mike, my understanding of the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank is that Jordan treated the Palestinians much as they treated the Jordanians living on the East Bank. The Israeli occupation could not be more different.

10. Hi, all! Thanks for great and thoughtful comments. Warren, your point about not forgetting the non-monetary costs of maintaining an occupation is a very important one. These exist in so many different dimensions! Not just the gross coarsening of sensibilities inside the society of the occupying power but also the huge mental and physical damage done to the occupation’s own foot soldiers… (The deaths/ bereavements, too.)
    In the post on interrogations I’d cited the report from the Naval investigators in Whidbey Island, Washington state, that noted that of nine medical corpsmen deployed with a Marines unit in the early days of the war, “all of the corpsmen have experienced some form of problem from what they observed in Iraq.” Indeed, the prospect of literally hundreds of thousands of service members coming back into American communities with major mental-health sequelae is starting attract quite a lot of attention now and is somethng I should write about…
    Mike, you raise a good point about the Palestinians never having had sovereign self-government at all. What happened in 1948-49 was that the well-armed and well-organized Israeli forces took what they took of Mandate Palestine, which was significantly more than what the UN Partition Plan had allotted them. That left two chunks of land: the butterfly-wing-shaped “West Bank”, including east Jerusalem, and the tiny Gaza Strip.
    The Jordanian army was in control in the West Bank, and in 1949 or 1951 Jordan’s King Abdullah simply annexed that to his “original” Jordan east of the river. Not a lawful or a democratic thing to do– indeed, only Britain and Pakistan ever recognized the legitimacy of the annexation. But all West Bank residents were given Jordanian passports and equal civil rights within Jordan to those enjoyed by “East Bankers” (i.e., rights significantly curtailed by the monarchy.) West Bankers probably occupied a disproportionate number of jobs in government service, because of their generally higher degree of edication, and served as government ministers including a number of PMs. Jordan didn’t relinquish its claims on the West Bank and its residents until 1988.
    In Gaza, the Egyptians ran an interesting form of quasi-military administration between 1948 and 1967. Gazans were NOT offered Egyptian citizenship but they did have many social and economic rights in the Egyptian system. Including for many years there the Egyptians ran Gaza as a “free port” area which stimulated a lot of economic activity there and gave Gazans a lot more economic freedoms than were enjoyed for most of the Nasser years inside Egypt itself. Of course, along the way there, too, for a few months in 1956, Gaza was also subject to a short-lived and extremely punitive Israeli occupation. Gazans remember the Israelis systematically trying to destroy their workshops and other centers of economic activity before they finally– under intense pressure from Pres. Eisenhower– returned back within their own borders…
    So yes, you’re right in general that in all those circumstances the Palestinians in their homeland were living under some form of “foreign military occupation”. But as I’ve noted, there are several different flavors of such occupations…

11. So, some of the troops who went to Iraq to destroy, kill, maim and torture are paying the price for what they have done to Iraq and its people by experiencing a few mental problems. That is nothing – absolutely nothing – compared to what their victims have suffered, are suffering, and will suffer for generations to come.

12. Helena,
    Thanks. I have a question. Do you know if Jordan kicked Jews out of the parts of Palestine that it occupied? I’ve heard that happened, but I don’t know if it is true.

13. Mike,
    When the Jordanians captured East Jerusalem they evacuated the old Jewish quarter, and escorted its inhabitants to the line between the part they controlled and the part captured by the Israelis where they turned the Jews over to the Israelis. I have in my library a number of contemporary accounts of the evacuation from a variety of sources, including statements by evacuees. I can write in more detail about it later if you are interested, but right now I am very tired.
    There were a few Zionist settlements in the territory that fell into Jordanian hands, and the Jews were forced to abandon them.
    It is important not to overlook the fact that the territory that the Jordanians took over did not include areas that had been allocated to the Jews in UNGA 181, whereas about 1/3 or so of the territory the Israelis ethnically cleansed was allocated to the Palestinians.

14. Mike, in May 1949 the Jordanians did evict about 2000 Jews from the Old Quarter of Jerusalem. Prior to that, 30,000 Arabs had fled or been evicted from their homes in West Jerusalem. The Israelis did not allow them to return.

15. I agree with sm. September 11 and Al Qaeda is what triggered ultimately the Iraqi invasion and desensitized Americans to the Iraqi’s suffering.
    It is clear that by attacking the US Bin Laden was risking Afghanistan, and he must have calculated that possibility. I wonder if he and his circle anticipated that a much more important Arab country could be lost as well, or was this an truly unintended consequence of 911.
    E. Bilpe

16. No Preference, it is never a positive thing when people are forced out of their homes. However, without whitewashing the evacuation of the old Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, it was, according to information I have from multiple sources, done by mutual consent between Israel and Jordan. There was considerable and justifiable concern for the safety of the residents of the Jewish quarter, given the rage over what Israel was doing to the Palestinians in the territory it controlled.
    The threat was not from the Jordanian military which was the only professional and disciplined Arab military that took part in that war. According to multiple sources, including Jewish evacuees, it was done with considerable respect for the welfare of the evacuees. The Jordanian soldiers killed a number of Arabs who attempted to attack the Jewish evacuees. There are also accounts from evacuees and others of kind and thoughtful treatment from the Jordanian soldiers who escorted them to safety.
    Many if not all of the evacuees were immediately ensconced in the confiscated West Jerusalem homes of Palestinians (most of them Christians) who had been expelled or terrorized into fleeing by the Israelis.

17. Bilpe, the destruction of Iraq is not a consequence of 9/11, it is a consequence of an agenda that was articulated by many in power in the Bush administration nearly a decade and a half ago, and of Bush’s own personal agenda long before September, 2001. September 11 was merely one of the devices used to market the invasion that has led to the current constantly worsening disaster.

18. No Preference, the evacuation of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem took place in 1948, not 1949. 🙂

19. No Preference, the evacuation of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem took place in 1948, not 1949. 🙂

20. I wonder if he and his circle anticipated that a much more important Arab country could be lost as well, or was this an truly unintended consequence of 911.
    Neither Osama bin Laden nor George W. Bush have a clue where their reliance on violence will ultimately lead.
    Shirin, you’re right. The flight of the Arabs from West Jerusalem also happened in 1948, part of the fallout from Deir Yassin.

21. No Preference,
    Actually, the ethnic cleansing of West Jerusalem was less fallout from the Deir Yassin massacre than it was the result of a systematic and unrelenting Zionist/Israeli campaign of terrorism and propaganda which was undertaken for just that purpose. The propaganda included loudspeaker “warnings” from trucks that drove up and down residential streets, papering of neighborhoods with leaflets containing dire and bloody threats, and whispering campaigns.
    One of my friends, a Christian, recalls that the bombing of the civilian-owned Semiramis hotel was the turning point for her family. She still vividly remembers being awakened by the explosion. (That was, by the way, one of many acts of terrorism committed against civilians not by the “rogue” Irgun and LEHI, but by Ben Gurion’s Haganah, which became the Israeli military.) Her family fled to Ramallah where they had property, and like most of the families that were forced from their homes, they naively intended to return once things had calmed down. Little did they know that their home and all its contents – furniture, clothing, jewelry, toys, bedding, china, cooking utensils, musical instruments, family photographs and heirlooms – were immediately confiscated and given out to Jews, most of them newly arrived from Europe.

22. Boy that stinks. Oh well, at least everyone left on the “wrong” side wasn’t “evacuated” or “escorted out.”

23. Shirin, the Journal of Palestinian Studies published an article a few years ago by (IIRC) an Israeli who lived in West Jerusalem at the time, describing the departure of the Arabs and the looting and occupation of their houses by Jews. It was very vivid; unfortunately it’s no longer available online.

24. From pp.93-94 of the Quaker book I worked on on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, that came out in mid-2004… (It’s titled “When the Rain Returns”. You can get more info about it here.)
    …During and immediately after the fighting of 1947-48, both sides engaged in near-total ethnic cleansing, leaving West Jerusalem nearly empty of its Palestinians and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, empty of Jews. Approximately sixty thousand Palestinian residents fled or were expelled from West Jerusalem and the villages surrounding it that came under Jewish/Israeli control, while around two thousand Jewish residents fled or were expelled from the Old City.(fn-1) In addition, during and after the fighting, both sides made significant changes to the physical structures of the areas that they controlled. As Israeli researcher Raphael Israeli has noted, “the destruction by the Jordanians of the Jewish Quarter [of the Old City] … went a long way to de-Judaize much of the millennia-old Jewish holdings in West Jerusalem, just as the [Israeli] takeover of abandoned Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem … led to their de-Arabization.”(fn-2)
    fn-1: Michael Dumper, The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 65.
    fn-2: Raphael Israeli, Jerusalem Divided; The Armistice Regime 1947-1967 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 24.
    Therefore, what we have in this regard (as in so many other aspects of the P-I conflict) is a historical narrative in which both peoples have suffered considerable harms. The number of those affected on the Palestinian side was far greater than the number on the Israeli side. But instead of scoring “points” for “my side’s suffering” as opposed to “your side’s suffering”, I wish everyone could first of all join together to mourn EVERYONE’s suffering, and then realize that war, violence, and colonial coercion/exprorptiation are all policy choices that simply cause and perpetuate suffering…

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