A Just Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Jeff Halper's Integrated Strategy
The founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions argued that occupation is a system, and that only a strategy aimed at the whole system could end it. His thinking has travelled a long way since.
Jeff Halper has spent most of his adult life arguing that Israelis and outsiders misunderstand the occupation of the Palestinian territories. They treat it as a set of separate problems (settlements, checkpoints, the wall, home demolitions) to be negotiated one at a time. In his view it is a single structure, and it has to be confronted as one.
Halper was born in the United States, moved to Israel in the 1970s and trained as an anthropologist. In 1997 he co-founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). The group became known for physically rebuilding Palestinian homes that Israeli authorities had demolished. In 2006 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with the Palestinian activist Ghassan Andoni.
The matrix of control
Halper's best-known idea is the "matrix of control". On this reading, the occupation works less through overt military force than through an interlocking set of mechanisms:
- Physical: settlements, bypass roads, the separation barrier and zoning that fragments Palestinian land.
- Administrative: permits, planning laws, residency rules and house demolitions that constrain everyday life.
- Military and legal: closures, military courts and the legal architecture that sustains them.
Each element can be defended on its own terms, often as a security measure. Together, he argued, they make a viable Palestinian state steadily harder to achieve while keeping the arrangement looking temporary.
An integrated strategy
From that diagnosis came his call for an integrated strategy for a just peace. Rather than relying on diplomacy between leaders, or on protest alone, Halper argued for coordinated pressure on several fronts at once:
- Grassroots resistance on the ground, including nonviolent Palestinian action and joint Israeli-Palestinian activism such as rebuilding demolished homes.
- International advocacy aimed at governments, churches, unions and civil society, framing the conflict in terms of human rights and international law.
- A clear political endgame, so that activism builds toward a defined solution rather than open-ended protest.
Critics on the Israeli right saw his work as one-sided and questioned the funding of NGOs like ICAHD. Some on the left thought his emphasis on international pressure underplayed Israeli domestic politics. Few disputed that he had given activists a vocabulary for seeing the occupation as a system.
From two states to one
The endgame is where Halper's thinking has changed most. In the mid-2000s he still engaged with the two-state framework while warning that facts on the ground were closing it off. In later books, notably War Against the People (2015) and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine (2021), he concluded that the two-state solution was no longer achievable. He became a leading voice in the One Democratic State Campaign, which calls for a single state with equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea.
That shift tracks a wider debate among activists and scholars. For the mainstream diplomatic world, two states remain the official goal. For a growing number of critics, the matrix Halper described has made that goal a slogan rather than a plan.
Whatever one makes of his conclusions, his core methodological point has aged well. Anyone assessing the prospects for peace, whether in one state or two, has to look at how the whole system works on the ground and not just at what leaders say at the negotiating table.