TRANSCRIPT
In 1967, Israel wins the Six Day War, and begins its occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In the decades since, it’s built almost 150 settlements for Jewish civilians to live in.
Another 150 outposts have also been built without government approval.
Those figures come from the Israeli non-government organisation Peace Now.
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says Israel has also built hundreds of physical barriers; including checkpoints, roadblocks, and a 700-kilometre long barrier wall that runs mostly through the West Bank.
Deakin University Middle East Studies lecturer Andrew Thomas says all of that has significantly fragmented Palestinian land.
“The biggest trouble is that, when you look at a map, the West Bank seems like a contiguous piece of land. However, it's actually much more like small pieces of land, like little mini Gazas, with little military checkpoints in between each one. It's not a contiguous piece of land, which obviously makes creating a state in that area extremely difficult.”
Analysts monitoring Israel's settlement activity say all signs are pointing to further expansion.
So far this year, the government has designated more than 2,700 acres of the West Bank as state land.
That's already more than any other year to date in just three months.
Dror Etkes, the founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli group that monitors settlement activity, say a single land appropriation last month was the biggest since the Oslo Accords of 1993.
“There are things happening in the West Bank which we haven’t seen in decades. Massive expropriations of land, in order to allocate them in the future to Israeli settlements. And this is obviously happening for two reasons. First of all, because there is the most extreme right wing, nationalist, racist government in Israel ever. The second is, of course, the context. The war in Gaza. Politically speaking, these were the periods the Israeli settlement enterprise always knew to take advantage of.”
The UN says there are now more than 700,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Over the years, Israeli governments have offered them incentives to move there.
There's been subsidised housing, discounts on development, and greater government investment in infrastructure.
Andrew Thomas says there are also ideological reasons.
“The settlers come from a broad range of societies, in fact, all over the world. A lot of Jews from the diaspora come and conduct aliyah to Israel, and some of them, in their migration to Israel - in their holy migration - they come and they attempt settlement in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. A lot of these people are quite religious, and they inherently believe that the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria, is their birthright, is holy, and part of Greater Israel. And as a result, they’ll do almost anything to bring it back into Jewish ownership, including conducting violence in some cases.”
The UN considers these settlements illegal under international law.
The Geneva Convention says an occupying power can’t move its civilians to the territory it occupies.
And Israel’s staunchest ally agrees.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this in February.
“It's been long standing US policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace. They're also inconsistent with international law. Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion.”
But Israel doesn't see it that way.
It considers the West Bank to be disputed territory, not occupied territory.
And in 2018, it passed the Nation State law, which established settlement as a national value that must be promoted by the state.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a settler himself, says it's a matter of security.
“We are settling our land from width to length, controlling it and fighting terror always and bringing with God’s help security to all of Israel. Without settlement there is no security.”
Amy Maguire is a lecturer in international law at the University of Newcastle.
She says, despite broad consensus in the United Nations on the status of settlements, international law in this area is difficult to enforce.
“International law is entirely reliant on the political will and practice of the state parties involved. Despite international condemnation, Israel has continued to expand its settlement activity in the West Bank. The settlements are supported, obviously, by increasing infrastructure, more housing, more economic development, and all of those factors further entrench the presence of the settlements. So it creates a reality on the ground that becomes more and more difficult to reverse.”
The idea of a two-state solution has long been predicated along Israel's pre-1967 borders.
That means the Palestinians want East Jerusalem and the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip, to make up their future state.
In the West Bank, they still outnumber Jewish settlers, who make up 15 per cent of the population.
But analysts say the placement of the Jewish settlements and outposts, which are often on hilltops overlooking critical water supplies and grazing land, is one of the biggest barriers to peace.
Dror Etkes believes that has been done intentionally.
“The problem is that they’re located all over the West Bank - and deliberately so. They have been deliberately established between Palestinian communities in a way that they will create axes between Palestinian communities in order to prevent the possibility that a Palestinian state will be created in the future.”
That possibility of Palestinian sovereignty has been all but ruled out by the current Israeli government.
In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying:
“In any arrangement in the foreseeable future, with an accord or without an accord, the State of Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River. That's a necessary condition. It clashes with the principle of sovereignty, what can you do.”
