These are:

• The centennial (100-year anniversary, no less!) of the Balfour
  Declaration, the diktat from the British Foreign Secretary that imperial
  London would support the creation of a “Jewish national home” in
  Palestine– whatever that meant… but would do so only provided that the
  “civil and political rights” of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine
  would not be adversely affected. (Fat chance!)
• The 70th anniversary of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine– which
  gave Israel (along with its conjoined twin, the never-born Palestinian
  Arab state) the only “birth certificate” it has ever had in
  international law; and
• The 30th anniversary of the launching of the First Intifada, which
  started in Gaza on December 9, 1987, spreading rapidly through the whole
  of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Make no mistake about it: 50 years of rule by a foreign military is
already a terrible travesty, and a crime against the whole Lockean
concept that government can only legitimately be exercised “through the
consent of the governed.” When the international community most recently
codified and regulated the whole concept of rule by “military
occupation”, in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (especially the 4th one),
it was only ever envisaged that military occupation by a foreign
military power would be a temporary, or short-term situation, pending
the conclusion of a conflict-resolving final peace treaty.
But for Palestinians and the legitimate indigenous residents of
occupied Golan? No. For them, occupation has hardened into a 50-year-old
force that because of Israel’s massive (and completely illegal)  policy
of moving of large numbers of its own civilians into the West Bank and
Syria’s Golan region now looks harder than ever to reverse or displace.
I remember back in early 1987, when pro-peace (or pro-peace-ish)
Israelis first started facing up to idea that their occupation of the
West Bank, Gaza, and Golan was about to hit the 20-year mark. They were
nonplussed! “How did this happen!” some of them exclaimed. That was back
then, when there was still a fairly large “Peace Now” movement in
Israel…
Six months after June 1987, the first intifada broke out. What heady
(and painful) days those were for Palestinians. It may be hard to
remember now, but traveling among all the cities of the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, and between those cities and Gaza was still
relatively easy to do. Jerusalem was the organizing hub for the whole
intifada. Throughout the six years that followed, the occupied
territories were abuzz with numerous, very creative forms of nonviolent
resistance…
Oslo, and the “return” soon thereafter to the OPT’s of the PLO
leadership apparatus, put an end to all of that. Oslo ushered in, in
quick order, the severing of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank by
an Israeli ring of steel; and then the progressive quadrillement of the whole of the West Bank– its dividing-up into tiny, mutually impenetrable cantons– by the new Israeli road system that had been specifically allowed by the PLO leadership
as part of the Oslo arrangements; and the cutting-off of Gaza which
later allowed Israel’s imposition on it of a debilitating, total siege…
At this point, nearly 30 years after 1987, I think the most
constructive and realistic way to view “the occupation” is not as a
singular step that started in 1967 that was somehow a “deviation” from
what “should” have been Israel’s rightful path, but rather as a
continuation of the settler-colonial process that started to gain
international political traction with Lord Balfour’s declaration of
1917… and then won a serious (and troublingly “colonial”) international
imprimatur from the infant United Nations in 1947…and has certainly
continued since 1967 with Israel’s increasingly blatant colonization of
the West Bank (and Golan.)
So let’s not just look at 1967. Let’s look at 1947, too– the year
just 20 years earlier than 1967 when (a) the United Nations voted to
give half of Palestine, lock-stock-and-barrel, to its overwhelmingly
recently arrived population of Jewish settlers– this, in an era when
everywhere else in the world de-colonization was already underway; and
(b) the leaders of the Zionist yishuv in Palestine took the Partition Plan as their carte blanche
(as Ilan Pappe has so rightly documented) to start launching their
program of anti-Palestinian ethnic cleansing in–and soon enough also
beyond– the areas the Partition Plan had allotted them. Yes, as Pappe
has shown in his work, the Nakba started in November 1947.
And yes, the period of time that Israel has controlled the West Bank,
Gaza, and Golan is far, far longer than the earlier period during which
it controlled “only” the area within its pre-1967 boundaries (which
were already, as we know, considerably broader than what the UN gave to
the “Jewish state” in the Partition Plan.)
… And let’s look, too, at 1917, the year that Chaim Weizmann, Lord
Rothschild, and other Zionist leaders managed to persuade British
Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour to issue his infamous declaration, which
was later incorporated into all the post-WWI peace agreements– as part
of which, by amazing happenstance, Britain emerged with a neo-imperial
“Mandate” from the League of Nations to rule over Palestine (and Jordan
and Iraq)… just until these countries’ own inhabitants should be “ready”
to exercise self-rule, you understand.
1917 came 32 years after the infamous Conference of Berlin,  in which
the European powers sat round and solemnly carved up the whole of the
African continent amongst themselves, to let each participating power
engage in settler colonialism, looting, and rapine within its designated
zone, exactly as it wished. But still, by 1917, the tide of global
opinion was already starting to turn against settler colonialism and the
“rights” of all the world’s peoples were much on the lips of diplomats.
Zionists have often tried to portray their movement as one of
“national liberation” from foreign (including British) rule. In truth,
though, they have always relied on the patronage of other, much larger,
globally powerful states in order to realize their settler-colonial
objectives in historic Palestine. That was the case in 1917. It was the
case in 1947. It was the case in 1967. And it remains the case, today.
Without the support that Washington has lavished on Israel– within its
current, expansionist borders– for several decades now, there is no way
that Israel could have defied all the norms by which the whole of the
rest of the world community has to abide… and could have done so,
continuously, for the whole of the past 50 years.
The publishing company that I founded in 2010, Just World Books, has
published numerous great books on the Palestine Question. You can see
the whole list of our publications here.
Now, we are  working on our plans for the books we’ll be publishing
later this year, and in 2017. (Stay tuned!) And we’re also, along with
our friends, allies, and partners, planning to organize a great series
of events around the whole United States in 2017, so that communities
everywhere around the country can better understand what is happening in
Palestine/Israel. More people in the United States than ever before are
now hungry for good information about what’s happening in Palestine,
and eager to understand both how the situation got to be where it is
today, and what our own country’s role in that has been.
There’s no doubt that 2017 will be a crucial year for broadening the
discussion of what’s happening in Palestine/Israel. But we shouldn’t
just be looking at 50 years of occupation. We need to look, too, at 100
years of Western-supported Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the
70-year anniversary of the Partition Plan and the Nakba that it
sparked, and the 30-year anniversary of the First Intifada. When we look
at all these
anniversaries and put them into perspective alongside each other, then
we can much better understand the state of the Palestine Question today.