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Dr. Shlomo Swirski is the director of the Adva Center in Tel Aviv. The following is the executive summary of a study on the costs of occupation, which was recently published as a book in Hebrew.
It is clear that Israel is paying a heavy price for the 37 years of occupation of the Palestinian territories, one that is sorely felt in most households. The Palestinians are paying a much heavier one, but this does not make the Israeli price any less significant.
The Israelis are paying the price of arrogance that spread throughout the ranks of the Israeli leadership and population in the aftermath of the military victory in 1967. That victory awarded Israel unchallenged rule over the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine as well as the bulk of the Palestinian people. Israel neither found the wisdom nor the bigness of heart needed at the fateful hour to take advantage of the new circumstances to realize the political solution that the Zionist leadership itself had embraced only twenty years earlier: partition of the land between the two nations. Israel proceeded to sever the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, but instead of holding them as a safe deposit until a fair agreement was reached with the Palestinians, an agreement based on the recognition of the national rights of the two communities, Israel opted to attain long-term control and to annex large chunks of Palestinian territory.
For the first twenty years, the price of occupation was relatively low. But since the outbreak of the first intifada, in 1987, Israel has been paying the price of arrogance. The Palestinians cannot defeat the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the battlefield, but their very readiness to return to the battlefield, again and again, to express their desire for independent national life has, since 1987, become a constant threat to Israel's political and economic stability.
Part I: 1967-1987
The Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 are not rich in resources. For Israel's leadership and for many rank and file Israelis, the main attraction of those territories was not economic but rather political and ideological: the possibility of establishing a "greater Israel" that would encompass most of the territories of the biblical Jewish kingdom, marginalizing...