However, UN documents show that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab world as a whole considered all of Israel to be illegally occupied by Zionists.
Issa Nakhleh, a Palestinian Arab envoy of the Arab League who was invited to speak at the 367th meeting of the UN Special Political Committee, 12 December 1962, floated the idea that Israel illegally occupied all of Palestine:
If the situation in Palestine was the result of an armed conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the occupation by the Jews of 80 per cent of the area was a belligerent occupation subject under international law to the law of war. It was clear from the Abandoned Areas Ordinance of June 1948 that the Jewish authorities based themselves on conquest and occupation. In that Ordinance an abandoned area was defined as any area or place which had been conquered by .Jewish armed forces, had surrendered to Jewish armed forces or had been deserted by its inhabitants. Thus the Jewish occupants would be entitled only to the rights attributable to a temporary belligerent occupation pending the settlement of the dispute by peaceful means and subject to the law of war regarding the belligerent occupation.
This was echoed as definite international law a year later by the Jordanian delegate to the UN at the 411th meeting of the Special Political Committee, Monday, 18 November 1963:
14. In paragraph 166 of volume II of his book International Law,.Y L. Oppenheim, the leading authority on international law, said that it had taken the whole of the nineteenth century to develop the rules regarding occupation. Those rules, which were universally recognized, were based on the principle that, although the occupant in no wise acquired sovereignty over a territory through the mere fact of having occupied it, he exercised for the time being military authority over it and he must use that authority for the ultimate benefit of the inhabitants.15. It was thus clear that Israel had no sovereignty over the area it occupied in Palestine and· that its position there was simply and purely that of a military occupant. As such it was not entitled to oppose such action as the United Nations might take to protect the properties of the refugees.16, Although some might contend that Israel at least had sovereignty within the borders allotted to it by the General Assembly under the Partition Plan that was not so under the rules of international law. Israel had acquired no sovereignty whatever over the territory it now occupied, because the legitimate owners had not ceded that territory to it and because the United Nations itself did not possess the power to cede the territory of one people to another or to transfer sovereignty over it. Now did recognition of one States by any number of Member or non-member States confer sovereignty on it under international law. Israel could acquire sovereignty only if the territory which it occupied was ceded to it by the legitimate sovereign, namely the Arabs of Palestine.
Jordan's 1962 argument is that the UN had no right to recognize Israel as a state, ever, because the entire territory belong to the fictitious Palestinian Arab nation first, and it then puts forth the argument that unless the Arabs of Palestine agree to it, Israel can never become a state.
When Palestinians say that they want to end the "occupation," they are usually very careful not to say anything about 1967. To them, "occupation" means the entire State of Israel, and most Westerners are too clueless to ask them that question directly.
