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Israeli annexation of the West Bank will bury the two-state solution

March 1, 2017 at 11:29 am

Image of Israeli forces patrolling the demolition site of a Palestinian home on 11 January, 2017 [Wisam Hashlamoun/Apaimages]

To the extent that there is any serious discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the mainstream media, it is mostly focused on the issue of settlements across the West Bank and Jerusalem. “Settlements” may sound like a relatively benign, even neutral term. A “human settlement” in the historical context is simply a phrase referencing the places where people have made their homes over many years. The reality of Israeli settlements, though, is very different.

Perhaps a more accurate description would be “colonies”, because that’s what Israel’s settlements are. Its colonies in the West Bank are established and maintained through violent expropriation of Palestinian land.

The indigenous Palestinians are thrown off their lands and out of their homes so that exclusively (or in some cases near-exclusively) Jewish settlements can be built. This is done with extreme violence.

Read: Commitment to the two-state solution is a formality

Furthermore, the practice is not limited to the West Bank or relegated to history. The Palestinian Bedouin village of Um Al-Hiran is in present-day Israel; in the southern Naqab (Negev) Desert, and yet it is being demolished against the will of its residents, who are supposed to be Israeli citizens. Israel is carrying out this act of ethnic cleansing so that it can replace the Palestinian village with a town for Jews, to be called “Hiran”.

In the process of trying to destroy the bravely organised, unarmed resistance of the native Palestinian population of Hiran, Israeli forces have not only wounded a Palestinian member of parliament, but also killed one villager during a pre-dawn raid. That was bad enough, but after murdering him physically, Israeli spokespeople and ministers tried to murder Yaqoub Abu Al-Qiyan’s reputation by slandering him as a terrorist and supporter of the so-called Islamic State. This is the reality of Israeli settlements; they are violent by their very nature.

In truth, should the demolition succeed and the town of “Hiran” be built, it will be no less an Israeli settlement than those built using extremely similar violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Despite this, since Donald Trump’s election victory in America, Israel has declared a massive increase in settlement construction in the West Bank; more than 6,000 new housing units have been approved.

“The flurry of recent announcements signals that the Israeli government, emboldened by the Trump administration, feels no need to hide its brazen violations of the rights of the occupied Palestinian population,” said Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, Magdalena Mughrabi, in January.

That’s not all. In early February, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed a bill to recognise retroactively around 4,000 settlement homes in “unauthorised outposts” in the West Bank. This is a major step towards the formal annexation of a large tract of the West Bank, something which could see a fundamental paradigm shift in the way that “the conflict” is viewed in international terms. It could, in fact, mean the formal and official abandonment of the so-called “two-state solution” by the international powers; it is already pretty much dead in the water in any case, as those of its supporters who are honest enough will admit.

The outposts are wildcat settlements, founded by religious zealots such as the “Hilltop Youth”. These are often the most fanatical Zionist extremists, some of whom are hostile towards the state of Israel for supposedly not killing enough Palestinians. It is these most extreme of the Israeli colonists who almost certainly burned Palestinian baby Ali Dawabsha to death in July 2015.

The outposts were considered illegal even under Israeli law, but only because they did not conform to government-sanctioned master plans for Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank. It had nothing to do with their founders’ violent racism towards the native Palestinian population; it was more an issue of having one central government maintaining control over the direction of the colonisation project.

Read: UN officials: Threat of demolition of Palestinian Bedouin village ‘unacceptable’

While the official Israeli settlements are considered “legal” by the state, international law disagrees; all settlements are illegal under international law. For an occupying power such as Israel to move its civilian population into an occupied territory (the West Bank, for example, or East Jerusalem) is considered a violation of the fourth Geneva Convention. In other words, settlements are, quite literally, a war crime, far removed from that benign, neutral view beloved of so many.

Now that even the illegal settlement “outposts” are being legalised, it is obvious that, in Israel, crime really does pay.

According to the Jerusalem Post, this is the first time that the Knesset has formally attempted to legislate in Area C (a zone designated by the Oslo Accords, covering some 60 per cent of the West Bank). The most extreme, hard-right ministers in the Israeli government have been advocating a formal annexation of Area C for several years now.

Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Jewish Home party, is one such extremist. He is the current education minister in the coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and has long touted a plan to formally annex Area C to “Israel” and give the Palestinians living there “residency” rights. This would almost certainly be less than full citizenship but, in any case, Israeli law already discriminates explicitly against its Palestinian citizens who make up 20 per cent of the population.

This the direction in which the colony-settlements are heading. With the two-state solution simply awaiting the official coup de grâce, the only real option left is a unitary democratic state, which gives equal rights to all people living in historic Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.