“There’s two sides to the story but the media only shows one side.”

“It’s a small number of at-risk youth.”

“The military is failing to enforce the law and needs to try harder.”

“The military is complicit.”

“The vast majority of settlers are morally upstanding individuals.”

There are a lot of different opinions about this. According to human rights organizations it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and a successful one at that considering that 62 communities containing over four thousand individuals left their homes as a result of settler violence since October 7. The numbers don’t do justice to the extent of this success as these communities are/were composed largely of shepherds and agriculturalists whose lifestyle makes/ made use of large amounts of land.

What is this really about?

In case you weren’t aware, there has been a dilemma in Israeli political discourse for the past 60 years. Israelis want to annex the West Bank, but it is not possible due to demographic reasons. It’s not just about a religious/ nationalistic expansionist ideology; it is also based on very understandable security concerns.

The solution to this quandary is to annex part of the West Bank in a way that provides the country with strategic depth without the need to absorb the Palestinian population.  The original proposal  was the Alon plan, which sought to immediately annex small sections of the West Bank and allow the rest to return to Jordan, thus avoiding the long term occupation of a civilian population.

A more recent plan outlined by Bennett in 2012 is to annex area C and leave the Palestinians with autonomy over areas A and B.  This plan has been stealthily pursued long before area C came into existence, as area C amounts to........

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