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Settler violence and the new Nakba in the West Bank

58 0
29.07.2026

The events unfolding in the occupied West Bank can no longer be understood merely as a succession of settler attacks or isolated outbreaks of violence.

What is taking shape is a systematic pattern of territorial domination that combines settlement expansion, increasing militarisation, the forced displacement of Palestinian communities and the gradual transformation of the territory’s demography.

The central question is no longer whether violence has intensified, but whether Palestine is witnessing the continuation of a historical process that began in 1948: the Nakba.

The central question is no longer whether violence has intensified, but whether Palestine is witnessing the continuation of a historical process that began in 1948: the Nakba.

The Arabic word Nakba—”catastrophe”—is commonly associated with the forced displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the establishment of the State of Israel and the destruction of more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages.

Increasingly, however, historians and scholars view it not as a historical event confined to the past, but as an ongoing process of territorial dispossession, social fragmentation and demographic replacement.

From this perspective, the West Bank has become the principal arena in which a new territorial reality is being gradually imposed at the expense of the Palestinian presence.

This framework allows us to understand the recent escalation as something far more significant than a rise in violent incidents. Attacks on villages, the burning of homes and olive groves, the destruction of property, the killing........

© Middle East Monitor