Rights and Accountability 13 July 2024
Israeli settlers are the foot soldiers of the state and its expansionist policy.
APA imagesAs Israel’s genocide in Gaza enters its tenth month, its settler-colonial project advances relentlessly across historic Palestine.
The UN Human Rights Office is sounding alarm bells over Israel’s accelered land theft in the occupied West Bank, exacerbated by the forcible displacement of Palestinians through settler violence, home demolitions and access restrictions.
“The situation in the occupied West Bank is a matter of grave concern as Israel allows and facilitates an environment characterized by fear forcing communities from their homes and lands,” the UN office said.
Settlers, the statement continued, “acting with the protection and support of Israeli security forces, are escalating violent attacks on herding communities in the South Hebron Hills, Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem that have been encircled by settlements and outposts.”
Israel’s so-called security cabinet approved the legalization of five settler “outposts.”
While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.
In their early stages, they often comprise a small number of the more extreme settlers gathering in a certain area with few caravans or structures, often unconnected to water and electricity.
Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-far-right Israeli finance minister, is attempting to streamline the process of legalizing and recognizing outposts under Israeli law by providing them with basic services and creating facts on the ground.
As part of Smotrich’s push to legalize over 60 outposts in the occupied West Bank, he is now instructing ministries to put them “on the same legal footing as regular settlements,” The Times of Israel reported.
At a private conference of the Religious Zionism Party which was held at a settlement outpost near Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank, Smotrich discussed creating a “legalization bypass route” for outposts, by funding and providing services to them, according to settlement watchdog group Peace Now, which obtained a recording of the conference.
Smotrich described how what he called “farm outposts” would pave the way for taking over Palestinian land.
“The farm outposts are a mega-strategic tool for the protection of lands,” he said, Peace Now reported.
“We did not invent the wheel. Always in the state of Israel, pasture has been the most effective tool for preserving lands,” he added.
“You take a farmer, a thousand head of cows, a dime and half an investment and it protects you 40,000 dunams. A tool that, like everything else in the settlements, started from the bottom up.”
Smotrich is saying “out loud what Netanyahu is trying to hide,” Peace Now said.
“While all eyes are on what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza, they are also actively pursuing annexation of the West Bank,” the group added.
“Since the war began, over two dozen new outposts have been established, and a similar number of Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced.”
Land theft
Last month, Israel quietly announced one of the largest state land grabs since the signing of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s, Peace Now reported.
This involved 12,700 dunams (12.7 square kilometers) in the Jordan Valley, which were declared “state lands” by the Custodian of State Property within the Civil Administration, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation.
Declaring Palestinian land as “state land” is a legal maneuver aimed at confiscating land belonging to Palestinians by interpreting an Ottoman law that was utilized in a completely different context nearly two centuries ago.
This tactic enables Israel to circumvent the technical legality of land ownership, as “most privately owned land in the West Bank is not officially registered,” Peace Now says.
“The declaration of state land is one of the main methods by which the state of Israel seeks to assert control over land in the occupied territories,” the group says.
This method amounts to “overt measures that could facilitate the annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law,” the UN human rights office said.
The newly declared state land borders another sizable territory that was designated as state land earlier this year, creating “territorial continuity” between settlements in the Jordan Valley region, as can be seen here.
This continuity is precisely the goal.
“I tell you that really, this is the significant revolution: if in five, six, seven years it is possible to get anywhere in Binyamin, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, within fifteen minutes on a two lane road,” Smotrich said at the conference.
“This is a revolution,” he continued, “this is how you bring a million people to [the West Bank].”
The current government has also transferred the authority over bureaucratic and legal work related to settlement declarations from the military to civilian bodies, streamlining the process of land theft.
Peace Now called this “a blatant violation of international law.”
At the June conference, Smotrich made this exact declaration.
“This thing is mega-strategic and we are investing a lot in it,” he said.
“We can produce much more capacity of work, much more [land] surveys, more [land] declarations, more plans, more of everything. This is something that will change the map dramatically.”
Smotrich said that declaration of state lands in 2024 will be “roughly ten times the average in previous years,” estimating that by the end of the year “between 10,000 and 15,000 additional dunams will be declared [as state lands].”
Israel has already declared nearly 24,000 dunams (24 square km) as state lands in the occupied West Bank, and the year is far from over.
Forcible displacement
While Israel steals land from Palestinians on one front, it drives Palestinians out of their homes and demolishes their property on another.
Israel has demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of nearly 1,120 Palestinian-owned structures since 7 October, of which 38 percent were residential buildings.
These demolitions drove over 2,500 Palestinians out of their homes, nearly half of which are children, according to UN monitoring group OCHA.
The group said over half of those displaced were driven out during military operations, particularly in Jenin and Tulkarm in the north, and surrounding refugee camps.
Over 40 percent of those demolitions happened under the pretext of Palestinians building without a permit.
Israel refuses to permit virtually any Palestinian construction in Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank under the terms of the Oslo accords. This forces residents to build without permits and live in constant fear of demolition.
And the numbers exclude Palestinians who were forcibly displaced as a result of settler violence or access restrictions, more than 230 households, or nearly 1,400 Palestinians, including over 660 children.
Israeli settlers threaten Palestinians at gunpoint, vandalize their property, hamper their access to water, ruin their trees, damage their vehicles, steal their belongings and intimidate and physically attack them.
“Alongside demolitions carried out by the Israeli Civil Administration, such attacks are forcing Palestinians to leave their lands,” the UN human rights office said.
“This, in turn, aids consolidation and expansion of Israeli settlements and outposts in the areas.”
Settlers carried out over 1,080 attacks against Palestinians since 7 October, as per OCHA, causing both injuries to Palestinians as well as property damage.
At least 46,500 trees or saplings owned by Palestinians have been destroyed by those known or believed to be settlers.
Settler-colonialism is the goal
On 11 July, the United States announced sanctions on a number of outposts in the occupied West Bank, as well as on extremist individuals, and Lehava, an extremist group.
“We are imposing sanctions on four outposts that are owned or controlled by US designated individuals who have weaponized them as bases for violent actions to displace Palestinians,” US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
Miller said that Israeli outposts “disrupt grazing lands, limit access to wells, and launch violent attacks against neighboring Palestinians.”
This follows previous declarations by the US and other allies of Israel who have constantly supported its actions in Gaza while punishing a handful of settlers and their organizations.
But this has been a mere distraction.
The notion that settler violence is caused by a few bad apples is not only false, it sidesteps the centrality of settler violence to Israel’s settler-colonial project.
Settlers are not acting as individuals but on behalf of a state whose goal is the theft and total control of all the land in the West Bank.
They are the foot soldiers of the state and its expansionist policy, and view even the Biden administration as not going far enough to support their colonial mission.
Lehava slammed US President Joe Biden as “senile and anti-Semitic” and grouped him in with other “enemies” of Israel.
News of the US sanctions came as foreign ministers of the “Group of Seven” major Western powers also denounced Israel’s expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, saying it was “counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, due to its staggering scale and magnitude, has diverted attention from the occupied West Bank, facilitating the state’s theft of Palestinian land, with Jewish settlers on the frontlines of that violence.
Ultimately, Israel’s so far futile effort to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas in the Gaza Strip aligns with its broader objective to suppress any resistance to its settler-colonial violence across historic Palestine.
Even as Israel employs the Palestinian Authority and its security forces as subcontractors in the West Bank, armed resistance has flourished in smaller cells spread across refugee camps, towns and cities.
Settlers and some Israeli ministers may publicly dream of resettling the Gaza Strip, but their primary focus remains on the larger territory, constituting one-fifth of historic Palestine: the occupied West Bank.
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