“Occupation” as Euphemism
On 10 August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gathered a press conference to explain an earlier cabinet decision “to occupy” Gaza. What he introduced, to the dismay of allied governments in Europe, was a military incursion on Gaza City and “the central camps and Mawasi.” Netanyahu promised a “non-Israeli civilian administration” and, in English, adjusted the earlier framing of the operation, which had by then been embraced and echoed in Israeli media: that plan is “not to occupy Gaza, but to free it.” Today – following initial objections – the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, confirmed the plan.
Such rhetoric invites scrutiny – not only for the legal ramifications of the acts announced, but it also calls into attention the shifting uses of the word occupation in Israeli political discourse. Once a term whose invocation signalled obligations toward a civilian population, occupation now appears to serve a different function altogether. Indeed, for anti-occupation activism and lawyering, the task had always been to insist that Israel is indeed an occupying power under international law. This served to buttress Israel’s human rights obligations toward the occupied population. In the emerging official Israeli parlance, however, the term occupation plays an entirely different role: to distract domestic and global audiences from the fact that what the new operation is really intended to do is to complete the destruction of Gaza and collectively displace its residents.
Understanding this transformation requires a return to the term’s legal origins and its troubled history in the Israeli context.
No Occupation
The 1907 Hague Regulations, perhaps the most important legal source for defining occupation, stipulate that “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” In orthodox doctrine, occupation is temporary and entails defined legal responsibilities toward the population. For decades, political actors in Israel have sought to deny the occupation of the West Bank, precisely to evade these implications and to preserve the option – explicit or implicit – of annexing the territory or exercising unrestrained control. Conversely, Palestinian discourse has continuously used the term as a form of resistance against Israel, often referring to the Israeli military simply as “the occupation” (al-iḥtilāl). The result is that occupation became a term deeply embedded in Israel’s political and legal history, often through the imperative to avoid pronouncing it.
This avoidance began at least as early as the aftermath of Israel’s 1967 capture of vast areas in the war, only some of which remain under Israeli control to this day: the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. For example, commanders of the military’s Central Command derived their authority to legislate in the West Bank from the law of occupation (Article 43 of the Hague Regulations). Yet military orders conspicuously avoided the phrase “occupied territories,” opting instead for the vague ha-ezor – “the area.” Over time, Israeli jurists sometimes favoured the term “belligerent custody” (t’fisa lohhemet), a choice that sidestepped the politically charged resonance of occupation, while simply offering a different translation to the same international legal concept.
After Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the 2005 “disengagement,” many – including Israel’s High Court of Justice – declared Gaza no longer occupied. The era of military legislation by the military’s Southern Command had ended. Yet other international lawyers, including Israelis, argued that even without troops on the ground, Israel’s control over Gaza’s borders (including its maritime boundary), electricity and water supply, population registry, and other essential functions, amounted to a “remote” or “functional” occupation. This reasoning stressed that international law recognises not only physical presence but effective control, which carries with it responsibilities for the inhabitants’ welfare and the protection of their human rights. Key international legal institutions, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, likewise appear to hold that Gaza remained occupied throughout this period.
The denial of occupation intensified in 2012, extending even to territories under direct military control. The Levy Commission’s report, On the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria, declared that the West Bank was not occupied at all, but “territory designated as the national home of the Jewish people… from which it was absent for several years due to a war imposed upon it, and to which it has now returned.” In so doing, the Commission adopted the position advanced by the Regavim movement, represented among others by Bezalel Smotrich – now Finance Minister.
The Lie of Occupation
Against this long history of denial, recent developments mark a striking turn. Within a matter of a week or so, the term occupation has enjoyed an unprecedented revival in the mouths of government spokespersons. Israeli media outlets have echoed calls for “a decisive move, a full occupation of the Strip” (emphasis added).
Netanyahu’s latest statement – “Israel’s goal is not to occupy Gaza, but to free it” – appears, on the surface, to distance itself from this rhetoric. Yet the term’s sudden popularity in official discourse is no accident, and it has persisted following the press conference. It is important to understand that currently, to adopt the occupation narrative is to enter the government’s strategic frame.
The falsehood embedded in the phrase “occupation of Gaza” operates in two temporal axes. Looking backward, it erases the broader reality that Gaza has remained under a form of occupation and, at varying intensities, under blockade since the disengagement. More importantly, looking forward, it reframes the military campaign as a project of territorial control – whether exercised directly by the IDF or through a proxy – while diverting attention from the rights of Gaza’s inhabitants.
In the West Bank, invoking occupation has been a form of resistance to annexationist narratives, keeping focus on residents and their entitlements. It is for this reason that Palestinian advocates such as Charles Shamas and Israeli advocates such as Michael Sfard, have consistently insisted on analysing Israeli operations in the West Bank within an occupation paradigm. Now, however, the term is deployed in precisely the opposite way: to centre the land and its administration, while presuming the permanent displacement of its people. As Netanyahu explained in his press conference, 70-75% of the Gaza Strip is currently under direct Israeli military control. These areas, he said, are empty – a purely artificial terra nullius which is of course the direct consequence of Israel’s campaign.
Both the cabinet’s decision and Netanyahu’s address make clear that the next stage of the campaign, in Gaza City and the “central camps,” is aimed first and foremost at removing the civilian population. The plan, as it has appeared in Israeli media, is to uproot approximately one million people from their homes and force them southward. Netanyahu’s reference to “humanitarian zones” offering “abundant” food and water omits the fact—documented by human rights organisations – that similar assurances led civilians into areas that were subsequently attacked. Nor is there mention of the principle, central to international humanitarian law, that evacuations must be coupled with a guarantee of return once the security threat abates.
As reported, the Israeli military Attorney General, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, has once again affirmed this basic rule, as well as that any occupation will require assuming responsibility for the population. Tomer-Yerushalmi has, however, become a persona non grata among government officials; and, at this stage, the mere reiteration of such a rule can hardly be considered news. Its absence from governmental policy is not incidental; it lies at the core of the present plan.
A Campaign of Destruction
In this light, the recent discussion of Gaza’s “occupation”, just like Netanyahu’s idea that Israel would “free” Gaza, is nothing more than the continuation of a process of expulsion and destruction: “more of the same”.
At the end of January, it briefly appeared that this process had halted, when hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents returned to the ruins of their homes in the north. Days later, on 5 February, Netanyahu stood alongside President Trump at the White House and announced a sweeping plan for population transfer. He repeated this before the Knesset months later, calling it his “day after” plan. While that scheme seems absent from his latest speech, the emptying of population centres in the north and central Strip may be seen as another stage in the same process—likely to bring further mass killing but not, in practice, large-scale transfer, if only because of the logistical impossibility of such deportation.
Mass expulsion of this kind is often termed ethnic cleansing. In legal terms, it constitutes a crime against humanity. When conducted with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national group, such expulsion amounts to genocide.
The campaign Netanyahu now leads in Gaza is assuredly not one of liberation. But neither, in the conventional sense, is it a campaign of occupation. Perhaps for the first time in Israel’s history, the term occupation serves the government’s purposes—precisely because it conceals a more devastating reality.
Usually, advocates who have used the term “occupation” have sought to mobilize its generally negative connotation to ensure the measure of protective obligations attached to it in international law. It’s not good to occupy land where you don’t have sovereignty. In the Hague Regulations, the occupying power is considered “hostile” to the territory. And yet – precisely because of that negative connotation – such a power’s duties cannot be disregarded. Now, however, the term is re-emerging in public discourse not as a positive term, but as one that conceals the momentous measure of lawless violence the underlying activity necessarily requires. Put simply, occupation denotes something bad, but here it serves to conceal something worse. This is not the first time or place such a discursive feat has been achieved. In our collaborative work on the Aegean, Niamh Keady Tabbal and I argued that the same pattern appeared with the word “pushbacks”, which served to conceal torture and abandonment of asylum seekers at sea.
But occupation must not be allowed to become another instrument in the state’s arsenal of euphemism and gaslighting. What Netanyahu described should be called a campaign of expulsion, or, even more accurately, a campaign of destruction.