“They came to a land that had a people and they made it a land without a people, so they could become a people without a land. But the land remained, and the people remained, and the memory remained.” — Mahmoud Darwish, Farasat al-Ghazal

“They did not expel us from our homes because they hated us. They expelled us because they wanted our homes.” — Ghassan Kanafani, Returning from Haifa

“…this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The mid-August 2026 siege of Qusra, a Palestinian town southeast of Nablus, by violent Zionist settlers is a metaphor for the structured violence that has come to define the occupied West Bank. Over nearly two weeks, Zionist settlers encircled residential homes on the village outskirts, cut off water and electricity and established outposts directly in the front yards of Palestinian homes.

Rather than coming to the aid of the besieged Palestinians, Zionist soldiers were documented praying alongside the blockading settlers. Targeted Palestinian homes, including the property of a Palestinian-American family on the Ras al-Ain hilltop, have since been declared a “closed military zone” and their properties repurposed into military barracks. The families are homeless now.

Qusra is not an isolated act of lawlessness, nor is the violence sporadic — it is evidence of how the Zionist state and the settler movement function as an integrated, singular apparatus. It shouldn’t surprise anyone because it illustrates the foundational — I choose the word carefully — Zionist premise of territorial acquisition through native erasure. The employment of localised terror effectively serves today as the vanguard for state-sanctioned annexation, as it did when the Zionists began settling in Palestine a century ago.

Qusra is also not the first or only target. Within just the Nablus Governorate, settlers have targeted Qaryut, Tell, Jalud, Burin, Osarin. The story is generally the same: intimidation, attacks, arson, looting, killing, sparing not even the domesticated animals. The Jordan Valley, Central West Bank, Southern West Bank, villages in the Hebron Hills, settler terror is everywhere.

While the world has understandably focused on the genocide and destruction in Gaza, Zionist settler violence has deepened across the Occupied West Bank. At the same time, the global diplomatic ritual of calling for a two-state solution in Palestine increasingly bears little resemblance to the reality on the ground. In fact, it may be a smoke-screen that facilitates a continuing land-grab. The current settler activity is not an aberration, argues Ejaz Haider, but a logical outcome of the colonial-settler project of Zionism itself…

While the world has understandably focused on the genocide and destruction in Gaza, Zionist settler violence has deepened across the Occupied West Bank. At the same time, the global diplomatic ritual of calling for a two-state solution in Palestine increasingly bears little resemblance to the reality on the ground. In fact, it may be a smoke-screen that facilitates a continuing land-grab. The current settler activity is not an aberration, argues Ejaz Haider, but a logical outcome of the colonial-settler project of Zionism itself…

These are not hidden atrocities committed in the shadows of an unmonitored frontier. By forcing the international community to witness state-backed displacement occurring with absolute impunity, Qusra and other unfortunate Palestinian towns not only shatter the narrative of the ‘rogue settler’, they depict what lies at the dark heart of Zionism: structural violence inherent in Zionism.

The strategy of colonisation has been playing out in Palestine since Britain and France (the United States was not in play at the time) decided to find the ‘solution’ to Europe’s Jewish problem in Palestine, their terra nullius. The evil is marauding the land now.

I intend here to make four points: one, settler violence in the Occupied West Bank, long a part of the Zionist entity’s grey zone operations, is now centre stage. Zionism’s ‘little green men’ are now unmasked.

Two, this strategy of violence is not a recent phenomenon. Its ideological architecture was built on the foundations of what the father of Zionism Theodore Herzl called Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] and Revisionist Zionism’s founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky The Iron Wall. The monster was born much before the crossing into the West Bank of ultranationalist Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples after the 1967 War. Today’s settlers are not just a synecdoche of Zionism, they are Zionism.

Three, a pile of evidence about the malevolence that makes up Zionism should disabuse anyone of the idea of a two-state solution. I have written about it previously but it bears repeating, because that red-herring informs much of the pro forma international diplomacy seeking to find a solution. The Zionist entity has absolutely no intention of letting a Palestinian state come into existence.

Four, flowing from the points above, for the Middle East to achieve peace, the world must clearly and without equivocation call for an end to Zionism, uproot it branch and tree, to be replaced by a Palestinian state where all denominations can live in amity.

EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR MOTIVES (1882-1948)

The ideological and economic foundations of the Zionist state were laid during the first (1882–1903) and second (1904–1914) aliyahs [waves of immigration].

Zionist-American sociologist Gershon Shafir’s work demonstrates that early European Jewish settlers quickly realised that their survival depended on how they managed land and labour. While the First Aliyah relied briefly on a ‘planter model’, employing local Palestinian agricultural workers, the influx of highly ideologised, socialist immigrants during the Second Aliyah fundamentally altered this trajectory.

To build an independent national economy, these settlers instituted the policy of Kibush Ha’avoda [The Conquest of Labour]. This doctrine mandated that Jewish enterprises hire exclusively Jewish workers. The policy systematically shut local Palestinians out of the emerging economy. Shafir notes that these exclusive labour practices, along with the collective agricultural models of the kibbutz and moshav, were explicitly designed to build an........

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