Israeli Military Conducts West Bank Raids Amid Rising Violence
Occupation Without Consent Is Not Government but Usurpation
Settler violence and military crackdowns in the occupied West Bank show a power that no equal people could reasonably consent to, and that therefore cannot claim their obedience as a duty of conscience.
I begin with what is not disputed. Israel occupies the West Bank and East Jerusalem, land which Palestinians desire, with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state. On this occupied land it has built hundreds of settlements, housing some 700,000 of its own people. We now read that settlers have set fire to mosques, cars, and agricultural land in Palestinian villages, and that six persons were killed in an attack by settlers; that four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed in a West Bank shooting; and that, in answer, the Israeli military has searched more than 300 locations and arrested scores of Palestinians in intensified operations described by Palestinians as collective punishment.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that men are naturally in “a state of perfect freedom” and equality, I meant it not as an ornament of speech but as a measure by which to judge all political arrangements. No man is born with a saddle on his back, nor another booted and spurred to ride him, whether he be called king, soldier, or settler. Political power is, by definition, the right to make laws with penalties only for the public good. Whatever goes beyond that, especially over those who never consented, must either produce its title or be counted usurpation. Occupation without the consent of the occupied bears a heavy burden of proof.
Here that burden grows still heavier. The law of nature, which is but reason, teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions. To fire a mosque, to burn the fields which feed a village, to destroy cars and homes, is plainly to wound property in the largest sense, and, where terror is spread, liberty too. If such acts are done by private settlers and go unpunished, the power that tolerates them fails in its first trust: to protect every person under its sway, not only its own. If they are done with connivance, the failure is deeper; the magistrate then ceases to be an impartial judge and becomes a party in the quarrel.
The military operations described do not mend this defect. We are told of more than 300 places searched, more than 70 or 80 persons arrested, a hospital stormed by armed soldiers, patients and staff detained, women and children terrified. The army names those seized as affiliates of militant groups and traffickers in arms. Suppose, for argument’s sake, that some are such. Still the question remains whether raiding a place of healing, or sweeping up whole communities in what Palestinians call “collective punitive measures,” is punishment according to standing law by an impartial judge, or the rough hand of power judging in its own case. The form is familiar to me; the name “security” is new.
In every commonwealth there is need of discretion, which I have called prerogative: an ability in the executive to act sometimes beyond the letter of the law for the public good. Yet such power is held on trust, revocable when it ceases manifestly to serve that good. When emergency becomes a settled condition, when the occupation of another people’s land stretches across decades, when demolitions in their neighborhoods provoke the cry that “they destroyed the future,” and when each new outrage by one side is met not with measured justice but with widening reprisals on the other, then we no longer speak of temporary prerogative. We speak of an entrenched superiority, which expects obedience while offering no path to equal citizenship or independent statehood.
Some will object that there are attacks on Israelis, that many on each side have been killed, and that the search for militants is therefore a necessary defense. I do not deny that those who kill innocents break the same law of nature I invoke here; violence by Palestinians against Israeli civilians is no more to be excused by grievance than violence by settlers against Palestinians. But because some among a people are criminals, it does not follow that the whole people may be ruled as conquered slaves. If measures taken in the name of security habitually disregard the lives, liberties, and estates of the many who are not assailants, they become not defense but domination.
In the Second Treatise I argued that when those who wield power “endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” they put themselves into a state of war with the people, and so dissolve the government in conscience before it falls in fact. I see in this occupation, in the unchecked settler violences and the broad, indiscriminate military reprisals, not the steady rule of known laws for a common good, but a long train of abuses tending one way: to keep one people permanently subject to another. Where rule is thus usurped, Palestinians do not owe it obedience; they retain, before God and man, the right to seek its fundamental alteration, and, failing all peaceful means, to appeal to heaven.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.