In 1967, Israel fought a monumental six-day war against neighboring Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who attacked the small country with the declared goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. To the amazement of the international community, Israel unexpectedly emerged victorious, gaining control over multiple territories, including the West Bank. Historically known as "Judea and Samaria," and before 1948 home to a thriving Jewish population, the West Bank was illegally occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan without international recognition from 1948 to 1967. In that time, Jordan ethnically cleansed the Jewish residents and destroyed dozens of synagogues. It re-named the region the "West Bank," meaning "west of the Jordan River," to sever any Jewish connection to the land in an attempt to legitimize its occupation of territory that was never part of its internationally recognized borders.
When Israel wrested control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, it refrained from annexing the territory, immediately offering to exchange land for peace. This unprecedented overture was met with the resounding "Three No's" at the infamous 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum: "No peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel." Consequently, the West Bank came under Israeli military rule.
"For reasons I can't begin to explain, Israel thought it could make everyone happy. That's how this whole monster was created," says Naomi Kahn, International Director of Regavim, an NGO "dedicated to the protection of Israel's national lands and resources." The monster Kahn is referring to is the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and its Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria. COGAT is a unit of the Ministry of Defense, and the Civil Administration is responsible for governing the West Bank's "Area C" (the parts that are not governed by the Palestinian Authority) and managing all issues there pertaining to civilians, both Jews and Arabs.
Instead of extending Israeli law to the territory liberated in 1967, Israel's leaders chose to "temporarily" maintain the existing legal framework until a negotiated solution with the Arabs could be reached. To this day, the IDF's Commander of the Central Region, rather than elected representatives, retains the ability to legislate and administer Area C. According to Kahn:
"I am personally living under military rule. It's not only inefficient, but also ridiculous. It's a massive bureaucracy that seems to be doing very little. The army – any army – is simply incapable of replacing the government. That's not what armies are meant to do."
While COGAT technically receives orders from the minister of defense, on a day-to-day basis it operates with autonomy. Israeli laws mandate that attempts to trespass and commandeer land must be intercepted, but COGAT commanders are wary of action and weary of global condemnation. The staff have learned to expect international headlines, along with formal complaints, threats and lawsuits from the European Union, when they so much as remove a corrugated roof from an illegal structure -- which the EU will likely rebuild anyway.
For every razed structure, five new ones take its place. That Palestinians are legally permitted to bring grievances against COGAT and the Civil Administration to Israel's Supreme Court further undermines enforcement. Both foreign and Israeli NGOs receive millions of euros every year to "protect" the Palestinians in the court system, which is backed up with appeals. In the meantime, the Palestinians build and build, engaging in a strategy of setting Israel's own system against itself.
While COGAT officers hold a diverse array of personal views about the Arab-Israel conflict, the IDF tends to be conformist and technically oriented, concerned with tactical training, readiness and counterterrorism, and focused on immediate, critical threats from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran. The defense establishment views the West Bank as a political dispute, as opposed to a national security issue.
But COGAT is well aware of the scope of the hostile takeover in Area C and is choosing not to enforce its legal mandate. Due to intense pressure from the EU, COGAT officers routinely speak with Palestinian Authority officials and work out agreements to refrain from demolishing specific infrastructure built under former PA Prime Minister Salman Fayyad's master plan. While COGAT does occasionally destroy unauthorized structures deemed to be dangerous from a security or safety point of view, such as those built close to IDF training or firing zones, abutting major traffic arteries, or those that were used as launching pads for terrorist attacks, these demolitions are exceedingly rare, and almost always receive massive international media coverage and condemnation.
Through a Supreme Court case, Regavim succeeded in forcing COGAT to reveal its list of established enforcement priorities. At the top of the list was prevention of Jewish construction on privately-owned or state land, while at the very bottom of the list were PA-EU orchestrated takeovers. In other words, Israel's Ministry of Defense was forced to admit by court order that its enforcement guidelines for land-use policy were tilted against Jews and in favor of Arabs. "They let the Palestinians do things they'd never think about allowing Jewish people to do," alleges Dr. Yishai Spivak, an investigative researcher with Ad Kan, an Israeli non-profit organization.
In addition, the PA never reports deaths in, or emigration from, Area C, and pads its population statistics with people who have never set foot in the Middle East — for instance, children who were actually born and raised abroad but had parents who once lived in the region. This serves the goal of portraying the area as flooded with Arabs. A far more serious problem, however, may be that the PA actively and publicly encourages residents of Areas A and B to move into Area C, an act possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention.
The Civil Administration, meanwhile, does nothing to protect Israeli national interests in this regard. It does not keep population figures, thereby enabling itself to conveniently claim that it serves an enormous number of residents, and purportedly justifying its budget. If a conversation about squandered Israeli and international resources and the needs of the current and future population is to begin, the first step is a census of the population.
Regavim and others have called to disband COGAT entirely. They demand a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal construction, regardless of EU funding and lawsuits, and have called on the Israeli government to initiate a long-overdue diplomatic effort that will make it clear to the EU that it has established red lines that will be enforced. "Israeli leadership as a whole is failing to behave like a sovereign government with a backbone that enforces the law and protects the security and national interests of the people," argues Kahn.
During Naftali Bennett's six-month tenure as Defense Minister in 2019-2020, he began referring to Area C as a battleground and PA mass illegal land use as a strategic military threat. With an uptick in enforcement, mild progress was made. Still, it was always a matter of scale. A shed would be knocked down, while the illicit electricity and water connections would be ignored because of the humanitarian issues to which the EU would draw attention. Avigdor Lieberman who served as Defense Minister in 2016-2018, similarly spoke out, but encountered uninterested bureaucrats and pushback from many Europeans, who have a direct line to their political counterparts in the Israeli government. Although the Ministry of Intelligence published a full report in June 2021 that presented a comprehensive analysis of the Palestinian illegal land grabs and demographic saturation of Area C, little has changed since the publication's report.
Ultimately, there has thus far been little political will in Israel to counter Palestinian illegal construction in Area C. Also for lack of political will, Israeli authorities allow illegal weapons to proliferate throughout Arab-Israeli communities, and Bedouin clans to establish illegal villages in the Negev Desert.
The government does not give definitive enforceable orders to COGAT — it wants to avoid negative press or a more violent confrontation with the Palestinians in the future. Israeli officials therefore approach the problem with local, Band-Aid solutions rather than a full-frontal assault. According to Brigadier General Amir Avivi (res.), founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum:
"They are not treating this as a war, and it is a war. It's actually more dangerous than other wars. At the moment, the Palestinians are winning this war. In 20 or 30 years, this will be an existential threat. We need to wake up."
Spivak concurs, adding that there are two kinds of wars that Israel is fighting with the Palestinians. One is the terror war, in which Palestinians use physical violence to harm citizens of the State of Israel. The other is the non-violent, or civilian war, in which Palestinians attempt to delegitimize Israel via various channels, such as the UN, social media, or the global BDS movement.
Another reason Israeli leadership fails to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves is because its ministers are generally in power for a short time and may be dismissed within their party in short order. For the one to two years they generally serve, they are primarily concerned with building their reputation, desperate to be internationally accepted. Put simply, the political system bolsters the bureaucrats. They know that to tackle a problem of this nature and magnitude, they would have to take extreme actions against the EU, the PA, and COGAT. With the painful, precarious status Israel has on the geopolitical landscape, it is unlikely that any foreseeable coalition will set the precedent and shift the pattern.
Even leaders of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have failed to respond to this encroachment as an existential threat. In the town of Efrat, for instance, when Israelis complain to the mayor of about illegal Arab structures popping up around their neighborhoods, the most he will do, if anything, is to make a phone call to the Civil Administration, and then quickly forget about the matter.
Many of the elected Jewish leaders in the West Bank focus on addressing the needs of their small communities on a day-to-day basis. Their effectiveness is severely compromised because they are beholden to multiple government ministries for favors, including the transportation, defense, finance and interior ministries, who do not exercise direct jurisdiction over the "green line." These mayors have a limited number of asks and it is generally counterproductive to demand that structures be removed, especially when they will likely be rebuilt in a few weeks. For many leaders in Jewish towns and villages, as long as there is no peace process, the status quo is all they have to work with.
Nonetheless, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has taken several punitive measures against the PA and has leveled harsh words at the EU, pledging to block their aggressive activity, which he called "contrary to international law and incompatible with basic rules of diplomacy in relations between states." In a joint letter, dozens of Knesset members denounced the EU's confidential June 2022 document as a severe breach of the EU-Israel relationship whose gravity cannot be overstated, writing:
"Under the thin veneer of the EU's civility and manners and the concern for human rights, the same old blood libels can be found, along with the same flames of primitive hatred that seek this time to persecute – not the individual Jew, but the tiny Jewish state."
It may even be that right-wingers such as Smotrich and others have risen to power precisely because of growing Israeli frustration over fundamental threats such as this one having long gone ignored.
This article, slightly different, originally appeared as part if a 10-part series in Western Journal.
Karys Rhea is a producer at the Epoch Times, a writing fellow with the Middle East Forum, a delegate for Israel365 Action, and a Rising Leader at the Global Liberty Institute. You can find her on X @rheakarys.
