Israel does justify the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.

This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice.

• See: The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948, the Transfer Committee, and the JNF which led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate before the Nakba

The mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948:

• Plan Dalet
• Declassified Massacres of 1948
• Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948) .

Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:

• Haaretz, Forward

While the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements

• (Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ).

The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.

State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The regime treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones. At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.

The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.

• https://m.btselem.org/settler_violence

The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.

• Avi Shlaim

How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution

‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe

One State Solution, Foreign Affairs

Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution

During the current war, Hamas officials have said that the group does not want to return to ruling Gaza and that it advocates for forming a government of technocrats to be agreed upon by the various Palestinian factions. That government would then prepare for elections in Gaza and the West Bank, with the intention of forming a unified government.

• https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-07-23/rivals-hamas-and-fatah-sign-a-declaration-to-form-a-future-government-as-war-rages-in-gaza

In early October 2022, the FBI released its long-awaited compilation of 2021 crime data. But this data differed sharply in content and quality from previous years due to a transition in the way the government collects crime data. Specifically, 2021 was the first year to rely exclusively on a recently updated system for tracking crime data, the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Many agencies were not able to transition to the new format in time. As a result, the bureau received full-year reports from agencies covering just half of the country’s population. By comparison, earlier reports included a full year of data from agencies covering roughly 95 percent of the population.

To fill these gaps, the FBI’s report on national crime trends relied heavily on estimates. The agency estimated crime trends for 2021 based on the data it had available. Then it went back to 2020 and applied that same estimating methodology as if that year’s data had been similarly incomplete. In doing so, the bureau aimed to create an appropriate “apples to apples” comparison, despite the differences in data quality. The FBI also used upper- and lower-bound estimates given the uncertainty about the agency’s conclusions, estimates we represent as a rough margin of error.

Palestinian politics was driven not only by poverty but also by religion, particularly in Jerusalem. The religious nature of al-Husayni’s own leadership as the highest religious dignitary in the land, whose authority stemmed from a Jerusalemite genealogy, turned the attention of many Palestinians to Zionist activity in that city. In 1929, when sporadic acts of violence surrounding the issue of holy places in Jerusalem turned into days of rioting, al-Husayni was unprepared. He had sensed rising tension in Jerusalem in 1928, in the face of a suspected Jewish drive to expand the Wailing Wall area, which would have undermined the holiest place for Islam in Jerusalem, Haram al-Sharif, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque. He hoped to exert control by establishing a committee for the defence of Jerusalem in 1928, to counteract any Zionist attempts to build a third Temple there.

Ironically, al-Husayni lost control because he was now trusted by a wider range of Palestinians than anyone in his family before him. The a’ayan traditionally valued ambiguity and caution as the best means of navigating their communities through times of trouble. In 1928, this meant simultaneously calling for the defence of Jerusalem and discouraging direct action on the ground. But the Palestinian masses found this kind of co-opted nationalism impossible. They lived near the holy places and saw Jews praying there in unprecedented numbers, which they saw as part of a larger scheme to ‘de-Islamize’ Palestine. A minor incident concerning prayer arrangements near the Wailing Wall, the western wall of the Haram, sparked violence that soon swept through Palestine as a whole in 1929. In all, 300 Jews and a similar number of Palestinians were killed.

The spillover of anger from Jerusalem into the countryside and other towns was not a co-ordinated plan by the leadership. Rather, it started with uprooted Palestinians who had lost their agricultural base for various reasons, including the capitalization of crops and the Jewish purchase of land. These former peasants lived on the urban margins, from where they participated in what to them was their first ever political, and violent, action. Their dismal conditions were not the fault of Zionism, but it was easy to connect Zionist activity in Jerusalem with the purchase of land or with an aggressive segregationist policy in the labour market.

• pg 138

The Palestinian leadership went through very different experiences during the Second World War. Amin al-Husayni was wandering as an exile from one Arab capital to the other, but made his way to Berlin, where he served the Nazi propaganda war machine and alienated the cause of his national movement in the eyes of the victors. He was accompanied by other members of the Arab Higher Committee, some having served terms in British prisons, where, ironically, they met extremist Jewish terrorists who had fought the British. In their absence, others had replaced them. The political scene had already been affected by politicians from neighbouring Arab countries and their local protégés. The result was the establishment of two conflicting official leaderships of the community: the old Arab Higher Committee, sanctioned by the Arab League and still dominated by the Husaynis (headed by Jamal al-Husayni), and the National Authority, headed by Raghib al-Nashashibi and supported by the Hashemites. This disunity affected the political structure from top to bottom, and was evident in every sphere of life. It crippled the financial organization which had recently been erected to counter Zionist economic power; it weakened the paramilitary outfits, which were in any case poorly armed and totally outnumbered by the Zionists; and it prevented solidarity within the national committees established to run local communities. These committees were particularly active in urban areas, and tried to prepare their communities for autonomous life during the transition at the end of the Mandate. The committees were, however, less loyal to their communities, and much more in debt to their clans or political groups, rendering the communities defenceless before a Zionist determination to take over Palestine, should the diplomatic solution offered by the British, or later by the UN, allow it, or an ensuing war enable it to do so. Had it not been for the military intervention of the Arab armies on 15 May 1948, not one fragment of Palestine would have remained outside Jewish control.

• pg 172

The doctrine is named after the Dahiya suburb of Beirut, where the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah has its headquarters, which the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 that killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about a third of them children, and caused enormous damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and port facilities.

It was formulated by then-General Gadi Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command. As he explained in 2008 referring to a future war on Lebanon: "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” Eisenkot went on to become chief of the general staff of the Israeli military before retiring in 2019.

While it became official Israeli military doctrine after Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, Israel’s military has used disproportionate force and targeted Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians since Israel was established in 1948 based on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, including dozens of massacres to force them to flee for their lives.

The 1982 Lebanon war began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded again for the purpose of attacking the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. During the conflict, according to Lebanese sources, between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed, mostly civilians.

On 16 February 1985, Shia Sheik Ibrahim al-Amin declared a manifesto in Lebanon, announcing a resistance movement called Hezbollah, whose goals included combating the Israeli occupation. During the South Lebanon conflict (1985–2000) the Hezbollah militia waged a guerrilla campaign against Israeli forces occupying Southern Lebanon and their South Lebanon Army proxies.

The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.”

The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”