Zionist settlement extends over the land of historic Palestine from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the British Mandate period to the present day.
The organizers of this project stressed the relationship between the people and the land, because the affirmation of this relationship among Jewish immigrants was of great importance to the success of the Zionist project.
When wealthy Jews such as Moshe Montefiore and Baron Rothschild bought the most fertile lands in Palestine, such as Marj Ibn Amer from the Lebanese family of Sursock, they called the purchase the clearance of the land, meaning that this land was theirs and today they have recovered it, so they gave it the religious meaning contained in their students and Torah. In addition to giving this process a national dimension.
In order to strengthen the relationship of this people imported from the diaspora of the land with the land of Palestine, it followed a policy of changing the identity of the land, starting to erase the names of Arab villages and replace them with names mentioned in their aforementioned books. But the Zionist movement’s efforts to Judaize Palestine have been hit by the presence of the Palestinian people, who have been rooted in their land for thousands of years.
The organizers of the movement began to falsify the facts in order to exclude the owners of the land from the circle of their land and to cut off any connection with it, saying that the Palestinian people came from the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and elsewhere and that they had nothing to do with this land.
But what are the goals behind the settlement process?
Settlement on the land of Palestine has several objectives, including security objectives aimed at providing a belt around the occupied city from Palestinian attacks. Demographic targets as settlement construction aims to accommodate the largest Jewish population and in return a smaller Arab population.
And religious goals by obliterating Islamic monuments, including the demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and then the establishment of the Third Temple. In addition to political and economic goals.
The construction of settlements, as stated in international law, is a violation of international law, international conventions and international humanitarian law in war and peace, and a violation of human rights recognized under international law.
For example, take the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank built on large parts of the Palestinian towns of Bethany and Abu Dis and located 7 km east of Jerusalem.
In 1999, B’Tselem published the report “The Slope of Annexation”, which focused on the human rights violations resulting from Ma’ale Adumim and its expansion, and focused on the expulsion of Bedouin Arabs from the Jahalin tribe, despite this report, the occupying power has increased in bravado and decided to erect a continuous separation wall in order to defend the Palestinian settler population after the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. It should be noted that the separation wall mostly passes inside the West Bank and not the Green Line.
The planned route in the Ma’ale Adumim area is supposed to keep it and the small settlements adjacent to it (Kfar Adumim, Akidar, Novi Pratt, and Alon) on the Jewish side by dismembering the West Bank and creating a separation between its southern and northern parts, thus isolating and weakening them.
Today, coinciding with the war on Gaza 2023-2024, we find the occupation state intensifying construction operations insanely to increase the number of informal settlements and roads leading to them in an unprecedented manner in the West Bank, based on a new report published by the Hebrew organization Peace Now, where the organization said that the 3-month-old war is exploited by settlers to establish a fait accompli on the ground and thus control larger areas of the area. It is as if this country is suffering from settlement syndrome while feeling that the end is near.