Conquest, Expulsion, Settlement
The American Conservative · R · trust 22/100
It is not difficult to project what comes next in Gaza.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... This article is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of C reating Facts: Israel, Palestinians and the West Bank, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies.
The maximalist agenda of Israel’s settlement movement has been energized by the calamity of the Second War for Palestine.
The “Conquest” of Gaza, the “Expulsion” of its 2.1 million residents, followed by the “Settlement” of the Gaza Strip are the unabashed objectives of the ideological vanguard of Israel’s twenty-first century settlement movement. This movement traces its roots, and indeed even its current leaders, to the Park Hotel that marked the inauguration of Jewish (re)settlement in Hebron more than half a century ago and Gush Emunim’s “pioneering” outposts in Samaria, where Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich was raised in the aftermath of the shocking setbacks that marked the October 1973 war.
The massive death and destruction visited upon Gaza in response to the unprecedented October 2023 Palestinian assault—unique even in the bloody history of Palestine—is far removed from what was once widely praised as Israel’s “liberal occupation.”
Although unacceptable as a description of Israel’s post-1967 policies, when compared to the catastrophe now visited upon Gazans, and increasingly throughout the West Bank itself, the first two decades of Israeli rule were indeed—as Ramonda Tawil once wistfully remarked to me in an eerily silent Gaza restaurant in the darkest days of the Second Intifada—the “golden years of occupation.”
Israel’s objectives in the occupied territories have always been marked by tactical flexibility in pursuit of the strategic objective of assuring Israel’s ability to rule and settle.
Under the direction of Moshe Dayan, Israel in the early postwar years adopted the hallmarks of “liberal occupation,” characterized by unfettered Palestinian access to Israel, even for those crossing to the West Bank from Jordan every summer. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were open cities, and a battered membership card to Jerusalem’s newly constructed Cinematheque in what was formerly no-man’s land could serve young Palestinians as an adequate hawiyya . As a young student, I often travelled by service to Birzeit or Nablus from Damascus Gate, seamlessly and without obstruction—trips that have long been impossible. Even as Israel waged war in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon removed the two sleepy soldiers overseeing passage on the main road from Israel to the Gaza Strip. On Saturdays, Gaza was chock-a-block with Israelis eating at seaside fish restaurants or having their cars repaired along the road to Gaza City.
The infrastructure for massive settlement was then in its infancy, and Israel’s High Court found solace in the assertion that settlements were “temporary.” Settlers were then only a noisy but miserable minority.
Yet even when Israel’s settler population was 50,000, including fewer than 10,000 in the West Bank and Gaza, did Menachem Begin offer a bald hint of Israel’s strategic intentions when he promised “autonomy for the people but not the land” during short-circuited “autonomy talks”.
Land was the currency in which Israel and the settlers traded: “Another goat, another dunam , and the Land [of Israel] will be ours.”
By 1980, the settler population, building upon the infrastructure pioneered by the Labor governments ousted by Begin in 1977, had doubled to almost 100,000.
The first intifada, which exploded in Gaza’s now-obliterated Jabaliya camp in December 1987, forever ripped the mask off the pretense of a benevolent occupation. Rabin’s admonition to “break their bones” betrayed the true, essential spirit of occupation and settlement. The fiction that massive settlement throughout the West Bank could proceed at no cost to Palestinian personal and national existence—a fact of which Palestinians and Israelis alike were only too aware—had become untenable.
The inexorable increase in settlers and settlements transformed the settlement movement from its original role as an aggressive supplicant to the army and the politicians into what we see today: a dynamic engine of settlement and dispossession that the army and the politicians defy at their peril.
The Oslo process supercharged this development. What was not prohibited was condoned and encouraged. The settler population in 1993—120,000 in the West Bank and an equal number in East Jerusalem—is now a half-million and 230,000 respectively.
As always, the never-ending expansion of settlement and the accompanying administrative, legal, and security framework proved, then as now, to be the best and most accurate barometer of Israel’s intentions. Settlement was, and remains, Israel’s instrument for “creating facts” that diplomacy will have no choice but to accommodate.
The “peace process” led by the United States has proved unequal to the task of constraining, let alone reversing, the expansion of settlements throughout the West Bank. In its stead Sharon, as prime minister, and notwithstanding promises to Washington, exhorted a new generation of settlers to “grab and settle”—claiming strategic hilltops throughout the central spine of the West Bank that continues to this day.
During the bleakest days of the Second Intifada, sitting around a pale kerosene fire in the depths of the Balatta refugee camp outside Nablus, a young member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade confided his rationale for the organization’s existence. The Palestinian police, he said, were unable to confront the settlers or the army. Someone had to protect villagers from the depredations of settlers, who acted with impunity.
The Oslo process added a new and dynamic diplomatic superstructure to the settlement engine, one that enjoyed the effective endorsement of superpower patrons and indeed the PLO itself, which discovered to its unending chagrin…
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