The Occupation and the Occupying Society
A basic assumption of Israel’s political, cultural, and legal discourse, one that is taken almost for granted, is that the occupation takes place “there”, beyond an invisible border, while within sovereign Israel a stable liberal democracy exists. Even the most determined opponents of the occupation tend to reduce it to the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as though it were a reality existing separately from Israeli society. This imagined separation may be a kind of psychological defense mechanism that allows Israeli society to imagine that prolonged domination over another people does not distort its own moral, cultural, and political character. Yet a prolonged occupation does not exist in a vacuum; it requires the creation of laws, orders, institutions, enforcement mechanisms, legal precedents, and political language. And when the same institutions and the same officials operate in the West Bank and in Israel, it is difficult to assume that the norms created to sustain the occupation will not spill over into the occupying society.
The norms of occupation are sustained through people, institutions, and language. A soldier in the West Bank, exposed to a reality of violence and discrimination, returns to his family in sovereign Israel; legal experts who formulate the rules in the West Bank also operate in sovereign Israel; government officials, police officers, politicians, and judges move between the two arenas; precedents created by the rule of occupation, which allow for the denial of basic freedoms, become part of the repertoire of governmental power; and a security language that developed to justify restrictions imposed on an occupied population can also be used to justify restrictions within Israel itself. This is not merely a matter of the psychological effect of occupation on those who serve in the West Bank, but an institutional, cultural, and political process. When a state becomes accustomed, over decades, to exercising extensive and unequal powers without democratic mechanisms of oversight, it is difficult to assume that these norms will not also leave their mark on the occupying society itself. In other words, the question is not only what injustices the Israeli occupation inflicts upon Palestinian society, but how the occupation distorts the character of Israeli society.
When a society presents its domination over another people as an existential necessity, and when any challenge to this premise is regarded, in effect, as an act of betrayal, it expresses a willingness to bend its moral values and subordinate all its resources to the task. Some of the most prominent and direct manifestations of the occupation’s impact on Israeli society can be seen in the social legitimization of continued violations of equality, the rise in violence and selective law enforcement, and the weakening of Israeli democracy.
The prolonged violation of the principle of equality, which takes place with the acquiescence of Israeli society, perhaps expresses more than anything else the effects of the occupation. For decades, Jews and Palestinians living in the same geographic space in the West Bank have not enjoyed the same rights: settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, while Palestinians are subject to military law. Freedom of movement, freedom of association, access to land, protection against arbitrary government action, and other rights are not enjoyed equally by the two populations. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice described the legal separation between the two populations as a violation of Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
The very existence of a norm of inequality – in which basic human rights are not understood as universal rights but rather as privileges that can be granted to one group and denied to another, and in which limitations on the principle of equality can be imposed in the name of security, national, or even religious considerations – does not necessarily stop at the boundary between Israel and the West Bank. A clear manifestation of this can be found in the Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People, which explicitly refrains from establishing the principle of equality as a constitutional right. Indeed, within Israel itself there are significant disparities between the Jewish and Arab populations in various areas, including personal security, employment, social infrastructure, and representation in government institutions. Official studies and reports by Israel’s State Comptroller point to the depth of the disparities between the two societies and to the government’s failure to reduce them.
This inequality is also given explicit legitimacy in political discourse. One characteristic of Israeli politics is the widespread opposition to the inclusion of Arab parties in government. According to the 2025 Israeli Democracy Index, 77 percent of Arab respondents supported the inclusion of their representatives in the government, while 71.5 percent of Jewish respondents opposed it. The very fact that a majority of the Jewish public perceives the participation in government of a party representing Israel’s Arab citizens as illegitimate points to the connection between civil and political equality and national identity. Once the principle of equality becomes tied to identity – national, religious, or group identity – it becomes difficult to ensure that it will stop at the national boundary. Indeed, inequality also characterizes relations between secular and religious Jews, and even the government’s attitude toward protest actions by its supporters as compared with its treatment of its opponents on the left.
The second dimension is reflected in the erosion of the rule of law. In this respect, the manner in which governmental authority is exercised in the West Bank can help illuminate one of the manifestations of unequal law enforcement that has become almost a norm in Israel. In the West Bank, the state does not exercise the same enforcement power toward Jews and Arabs; settler violence and the violence of the so-called “hilltop youth” do not receive the same law-enforcement response as Palestinian violence defined as terrorism, and the gap between the number of investigations and the number of indictments and convictions is telling: according to data from Yesh Din, 93.6 percent of investigation files opened since 2005 concerning offenses committed by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank ended without an indictment, while only 3 percent ended in a full or partial conviction. These figures point not only to persistent failures of law enforcement but to the transformation of unequal law enforcement into a governing norm.
This norm has long since seeped into sovereign Israel, manifesting itself in the state’s failure to ensure the personal security of Israel’s Arab citizens. In 2024, the homicide rate in Arab society in Israel was fourteen times higher than that in the Jewish population. Selective law enforcement is also reflected in homicide clearance rates; according to police data, the clearance rate for homicides in the Jewish population fell from 78 percent in 2021 to 50 percent in 2024. In the Arab population, it fell during the same period from 30 percent to 18 percent. In this sense, the deterioration of personal security in Arab society is evidence of the absence of equal protection. A democratic state is not measured only by whether it enacts equal laws, but above all by whether it protects its citizens equally. When a society normalizes a situation in which a particular group experiences persistent violence without receiving effective protection, the resulting harm is not limited to personal security but reflects an injury to that group’s status as equal citizens.
The third dimension is reflected in the weakening of the foundations of Israeli democracy. For decades, the West Bank has been governed through a system in which the military authorities exercise extensive governmental powers, including executive, judicial, and legislative powers, while the political and legal means available to the Palestinian population to constrain that power are almost nonexistent. The “judicial reform” that the current Israeli government sought to enact set a similar objective – this time with regard to Israeli citizens themselves: the purpose of the “reform” was to strengthen the executive at the expense of the judiciary, weaken mechanisms for oversight of governmental decisions, and dismantle the system of checks and balances. The determined civic struggle for judicial independence was crucial. But it cannot be separated from the question of the continuation of the occupation.
The West Bank is not a distant reality. It is integrated into Israeli society. And the longer the occupation continues, the more deeply the three principles it normalizes – inequality, selective law enforcement, and the erosion of the foundations of the democratic system – become embedded in Israeli society. These are only a few examples of the distortions it produces in the character of Israeli society. Therefore, the struggle for Israeli democracy cannot be limited to defending the independence of the judiciary. It must begin with a determined struggle to end the occupation, because the occupation does not exist outside Israeli democracy: it exists within it, through its institutions, its people, its laws, and its political language – and over time, it also shapes them.
