West Bank

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Since 1994 the West Bank has been under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the governing body of the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As of 2005 Palestine was not yet an independent sovereign state, although the Palestinian people hoped to achieve independence from Israel.

The West Bank lies to the west of Jordan. Occupying 5,860 square kilometers (2,263 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Delaware), it is surrounded to the north, west, and south by Israel. Mountains reaching elevations of 3,000 feet run north to south. Their western slopes receive moderate winter rains, whereas their eastern slopes, leading to the Jordan Valley, are arid.

The current population of the West Bank was estimated at 2.4 million in 2004. Most are Palestinian Arabs and Muslims; a small minority (approximately 10%) are Palestinian Christians. Almost 700,000 West Bank Palestinians are refugees from the areas of former Palestine that became Israel in 1948. About one-third of this group lives in nineteen refugee camps administered by the United Nations (UN). Since 1967 a Jewish settler population has grown steadily; in 2004 it numbered some 400,000 people.

The West Bank economy is primarily agricultural, with minimal industry. Remittances from migrant laborers—the vast majority working in adjacent Israel—and from the Palestinian diaspora provide a vital source of income. Since the 1990s employment within the emergent Palestinian bureaucracy has also sustained many Palestinian families.

The West Bank was formerly part of the Palestine Mandate, administered by Great Britain from 1923 to 1948. During the war following Israel's declaration of independence, the West Bank fell under Jordanian rule. Jordan annexed the West Bank and gradually enacted a program of legal unification with the East Bank. The courts and administrative departments were absorbed into their Jordanian counterparts.

Israel conquered the West Bank during the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It did not annex the West Bank, but through a military government has issued orders regulating virtually every aspect of life. Israel also has sponsored settlement of Palestinian lands by Israeli settlers. East Jerusalem was annexed and made subject to Israeli domestic law and administration. The UN has officially characterized both the annexation of East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements on the West Bank as illegal.

Parts of the West Bank fell under a so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) that was created in the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements concluded between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993. In 1996 PLO leader Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) was elected president of the PA, and eighty-eight members of a Palestine Legislative Council were also elected.

The PA was not formed as a sovereign state under the Oslo Accords; it lacks full functional and territorial control over the region. In 2002 Israel reinvaded the West Bank, ostensibly to destroy the terrorist movement responsible for numerous deadly attacks on Israelis, but also crippling much of the PA infrastructure. Arafat's authoritarian tendencies and charges of corruption and incompetence within the PA led to reforms in 2002 and 2003. After Arafat's death in November 2004, West Bank and Gazan Palestinians elected Mahmoud Abbas (b. 1935) as president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas, a principal architect of the Oslo Accords, declared an end to the armed intifada (uprising) against Israel, and promoted negotiations toward a final peace. It remains to be seen whether the democratic sovereign state that Palestinians have long sought will emerge.

Gaza Strip; Israel; Palestine.

Brown, Nathan. Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Robinson, Glenn. Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997.

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