Settlers or Squatters? Palestinian Land Under Siege

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2022, pp. 10-11, 38

Special Report

By Dr. M. Reza Behnam 

ISRAEL TELLS ITSELF and the world that it is a democracy. Professed democratic values, however, are merely a cover for the country’s continued predatory policies. 

The Israeli regime has no intention of giving up one inch of stolen Palestinian land. 

After more than seven decades, Israel is the only modern state that refuses to define its territorial limits.  Since its founding as a settler-colonial state in 1948, Israel has been expanding into Palestinian and Syrian territories, altering its borders by brute force and treating occupied areas as its own sovereign territory. 

To secure control over its ill-gotten gains, Israel has made sure to populate the land with and give support to Zionist colonists. “Settlerism” is a tool of domination, and violence is its defining characteristic. 

Terminology has always been problematic in how Israel is presented to the world. Colonizing, occupying, exploiting and brutalizing the Indigenous people, for example, cannot be described as the acts of a democratic state. 

It was an affront to democracy that Israel, a country that has shown such contempt for human rights and international law, was invited to attend President Joe Biden’s December 2021 virtual “Summit for Democracy.”

Zionists, who have illegally seized Palestinian land, cannot be characterized as “settlers.” The terms squatter or colonist more accurately describe their intrusive actions. And “settlements” should be cast as colonies; what they truly are. 

Israel’s political culture of settlerism, militarism and ethos of supremacy were further solidified with the June 2021 accession of Naftali Bennett as prime minister—an ex-army commando who proudly boasted, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.”

Just two days after Bennett took office, hundreds of Israeli supremacists marched through the streets of occupied East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs” and “a second Nakba is coming.” 

Israeli colonists have forged a powerful movement, with the political muscle to collapse a government. In Bennett they have a staunch ally. Described as Israel’s “settler-in-chief,” he has called for the annexation of most of the West Bank.

Colonization is the sine qua non of the Israeli state. According to a recent report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel now controls 85 percent of historic Palestine.

More than 680,000 Zionists (46 percent in East Jerusalem) now live on occupied land outside the internationally recognized borders of Israel. The population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues to grow at a faster rate than that of Israel proper. All of this colonization in an area approximately the size of the state of Delaware. 

The illegality of Israel’s colonies is clearly outlined in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which forbids an occupying power from transferring its population into the territory it occupies. In a meager attempt to describe the colonists who have stolen Palestinian land, the United Nations has used the term “illegal intruders.” And while the international community has focused on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, it has yet to fully address the question of the very legitimacy of Israel itself. 

Since the Zionist War of 1947-48, some 3.3 million Jews have immigrated to Israel. Although Israel likes to portray itself as a haven for Jewish immigrants, its actions have been consistent with colonial aggression. The regime uses immigrants as pawns to establish the numerical superiority it feels it needs to realize a Jewish state. 

The Second World War provided Zionist leaders with their hoped-for demographic superiority. They worked diligently to ensure that Holocaust survivors immigrated to Palestine, often preventing relocation to places the refugees may have preferred. By 1948, European refugees made up more than half of the Jewish population in Palestine. 

Israel’s 1950 Law of Return expedited immigration, especially of Jews from Muslim countries, known as Mizrahim, who comprise the majority (65 percent) of the Jewish population of Israel. 

Conservative, religious and often marginalized within Israeli society, they have filled the ranks of the Likud party. Many of the working class Mizrahim live in West Bank colonies in government subsidized housing. 

After the 1967 War, Israel claimed that its colonies in the West Bank were only temporary. But from the outset, the regime set in motion its plan to establish “facts on the ground,” to erase the Green Line, which delineates the West Bank from Israel. Ever more Palestinian land was seized to build squatter-only highways, connecting the Jewish colonists to cities on the Israeli side of the Green Line. 

In June 1991, the U.N. Economic and Social Council reported that from 1967 to 1990, Israel had confiscated a total of 715,529 acres in the West Bank; a first step in its ongoing plan to establish permanent Jewish colonies in the occupied territories. 

In contravention of international law, Israel finances, builds and provides material incentives to encourage Jewish colonization. There are currently more than 475,000 Israeli squatters in the West Bank and over 250,000 in East Jerusalem. An estimated 60,000 squatters are American-born, with some among the most aggressive in the colonization movement. 

Israel is currently attempting to annex three large Jewish colonies in the West Bank to the Israeli-defined boundaries of Jerusalem; thereby, consolidating control over the city and weakening the Palestinian presence. 

As recently as December 2021, Israel announced that it intended to double the number of Jewish colonists in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, adding to the roughly 25,000 already squatting there. Some 7,300 housing units, plus infrastructure, are to be constructed on land that is home to thousands of Syrians. (See p. 8)

In addition to using the Golan to dump its waste, the regime’s plan to turn the area into a renewable energy center for Israel by constructing a large wind turbine farm will further damage the environment by altering the unique landscape. 

Throughout, President Biden has remained silent as Israel expands its exploitative and colonizing activities in Syria and Palestine. 

The Israeli squatters, who reside in the West Bank, cite religion, history and Israel’s security as reasons for living there. They use the ideology of biblical “chosenness” and divinely sanctioned ownership of the land to violently dispossess the Palestinians. To legitimize and whitewash their colonizing ambitions, Zionists claim to be “redeeming” their native home. Armed with a sense of entitlement and AK-47s, they see Palestinians as obstacles to a Greater Israel. 

The colonist movement has grown ever more violent, with vigilantism on the rise.

During the first ten months of 2021, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were 410 attacks by squatters against Palestinians. Many of the assaults occurred in “Area C,” which is under complete Israeli civil and security control. The number and severity of squatter attacks increased in 2021, especially in Nablus and Hebron.

Israeli authorities have failed to enforce Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires that people under the control of an occupying power “shall be protected…against all acts of violence or tthreats thereof.” Terrorist acts by squatters go unpunished and are, without fail, unreported in the U.S. media. In many cases, Israeli occupying forces take no action and actively support and protect the squatters. 

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, in December 2021, referring to the number and severity of attacks and attention they were receiving, called the violence a “stain on Israel”—not a crime against Palestinians. However, Prime Minister Bennett countered, “They are a protective wall for all of us, and we must strengthen and support them in words and deeds.” Right-wing Minister of Religious Affairs Matan Kahana shamelessly referred to those committing the violence as “pioneers.” 

Palestinians have no legal protections, no redress in Israeli courts, and have little if any access to weapons, having to use rocks and kitchen knives to defend themselves. All forms of resistance to military occupation are violently suppressed by the foreign occupier. 

Israel has established in Palestine a violent colonial state disguised as a democracy, with Zionist colonists portrayed as “settlers” and colonization cast as a “conflict.” 

The country’s leaders would do well, therefore, to reflect upon the words of Nelson Mandela in 1962, during his trial before the apartheid court of South Africa: “…no power on earth can stop an oppressed people determined to win their freedom. History punishes those who resort to force and fraud to suppress the claims and legitimate aspirations of the majority of the country’s citizens…. Government violence can do only one thing and that is breed counter-violence.”

Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.