No future for Palestine?

Last month, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to annex areas of the Gaza Strip if Hamas refused to release the hostages it still holds. Elsewhere, a vast military operation by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the north of the West Bank, which began in January, is still ongoing and has made swaths of the area inhabitable and displaced almost 40,000 people, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Meanwhile, groups of Jewish settlers have been establishing more outposts in the West Bank at an unprecedented speed on Palestinian land, while carrying out attacks on residents and their properties.

Palestinian communities worry that the Israeli government is preparing the ground for the full annexation of many areas under military occupation and that US President Donald Trump may endorse such plans. “People do like the idea, but we haven’t taken a position on it yet. We’ll be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks,” Trump recently said when asked whether he supported “Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria” at a joint press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s proposal to take over Gaza and turn into a riviera, which would imply emptying it of its inhabitants, at least temporarily, has alarmed human rights groups and Palestinian communities that similar plans could be envisaged for the West Bank. If Trump’s rhetoric is a major concern for Palestinians, on the other hand, his election was welcomed by far-right and religious nationalist politicians in Israel.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and a settler himself, said in November that Trump’s return to the White House meant that “the year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the West Bank. Some of Trump’s appointees, such as Mike Huckabee, the recently confirmed new US ambassador to Israel, openly said they share Smotrich’s views. However, at his confirmation hearing on 25 March he tried to distance the US administration from this position, saying “it would not be my prerogative to make [annexation] the policy of the president.”

The occupation of larger areas of Palestinian land and properties, both in the West Bank and Gaza, could result in an insurmountable obstacle to what most of the international community and the United Nations see as the only viable solution to one of the most intractable conflicts in the world: the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel.

A US brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began on 19 January and allowed for eight rounds of exchanges of hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on 7 October 2023 and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. But two months later, the ceasefire collapsed, and Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza.

Katz said last week that he instructed the IDF to seize additional parts of the Gaza Strip while issuing evacuation orders for the Palestinian in those areas. “If the Hamas terror organization continues to refuse to release the hostages, I instructed the IDF to capture additional areas, evacuate the population, and expand the security zone around Gaza for the protection of Israeli communities and IDF soldiers, through a permanent hold of the area by Israel,” he said. “As long as Hamas continues its refusal”, he added, “it will lose more and more land that will be added to Israel.” 

The minister added that Israel would use all military and civilian pressure, including the evacuation of the population to the south of Gaza and the implementation of Trump’s voluntary migration plan for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. To that effect, Jerusalem has approved the creation of an administration within the defence ministry to facilitate the movement of Gazans who wish to do so to third countries. Critics warned that such a plan for “voluntary migration” could amount to ethnic cleansing.

Since the beginning of the year, 99 Palestinians including 17 children and three women have been killed by Israeli forces across the West Bank, the majority within the ongoing operation in the northern part of the area. Over the same period, seven Israelis, including five members of the Israeli forces were killed by Palestinians, in the north of the West Bank, said OCHA in its latest humanitarian update on the area.

The offensive also led to the widespread demolishment of dozens of homes and infrastructure, in what Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), called the “longest and most destructive operation in the occupied West Bank since the second intifada.” He added that the destruction caused by the operation aimed to “permanently change the character of Palestinian cities and refugee camps at a scale unjustifiable by any purported military or law enforcement aims,” warning that displaced Palestinians face “uncertain prospects for return.”

Meanwhile, the creation of outposts by Jewish settlers in the West Bank has increased at an unprecedented pace, as well as violent attacks by settlers on Palestinian communities aimed at pressuring them to leave. Importantly, Trump, in an executive order signed on the first day in office, reversed Joe Biden’s government sanctions against many settlers accused of violence against Palestinians.

The recent episodes of violence in the West Bank didn’t even spare Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the 2024 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land which is focused on the many harsh realities for Palestinians living under occupation there.  He reportedly said he was assaulted by settlers after filming them attacking a neighbour’s house in Susiya village, near Hebron, and then returning home to make sure his own house was not attacked.

Shortly before the incident, in which he was arrested by Israeli security forces, a group of settlers attacked a gathering for Iftar, the end of the daily Ramadan fast, in Susiya. Anna Lippman, a Jewish-Canadian activist from Toronto, who belongs to a group called the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, told ‘Open Canada’ she and other activists were caught-up in the settler attack.

“When we got to Hamdan’s house, we were almost immediately ambushed by some settlers holding rocks and sticks and yelling at us. One person I was with was punched in the neck and the face. Another person was hit with a stick and then they started throwing rocks at us,” she said. “We quickly ran back to the car. They continued throwing rocks at us. They broke the front windshield, broke the back windshield and completely shattered the window next to me.”

The West Bank and East Jerusalem was conquered and taken from Jordan during the Six-Day war in 1967. While East Jerusalem was formally annexed by Israel in 1980, although most the international community considers the annexation as illegal, the West Bank is now divided in three different areas, either fully controlled by Israel or by the Palestinian Authority or jointly by the two. Since the occupation by Israel, Jewish settlements and outposts have mushroomed in the West Bank, and some 530,000 Israeli Jews live in communities punctuating the area alongside roughly 3 million Palestinians.

The creation of outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under both Israeli and international law, as well as violent attacks by settlers on the Palestinian community aren’t a new phenomenon, but activists say both have accelerated recently. “It’s a pattern that’s been happening over and over,” said Lippman. “It’s a situation that has been happening for decades, but particularly in the past few weeks and months.”

Daniel Jackobovitz, a 27-year-old settler from Revava, said in an interview he thinks that the military occupation in the West Bank is “immoral,” but that it has existed for such a long time for security reasons. However, he also said the two-state solution will only bring more war. Many settlers, largely religious people like him, just lead a very “normal” life and he disputes a view he thinks is common, that settlers are all violent. “Some people abroad imagine we are bandits, savages living in the mountains terrorizing Arab kids. I am obviously exaggerating, but I see on social media people just talk about ‘occupation’ and ‘stealing the land from Palestinians’ and describe us as evil demons.” “We are,” he added, “only normal people.”

Jackobovitz used to live in Tel Aviv, but a few years ago decided to move to a calmer and smaller place with his wife and chose Revava, which was founded in the early 1990s in the West Bank. At the same time, he said, they decided to move there for “idealistic” reasons. “Judea and Samaria are, in our view, an integral part of Israel. The thought of disconnecting that part of the land from the rest of Israel is absurd to me.”

A report published in March by ‘Peace Now’ and Kerem Navot, two Israeli activist organizations, found that over the past three years Israeli settlers used shepherding outposts to seize around 14% of the West Bank’s total area. The report says that settlers, with the backing of the Israeli government and military, seized land primarily by establishing shepherding outposts and displacing Palestinian shepherds and farmers from their lands; harassing, intimidating, and violently targeting nearby Palestinian communities to force their expulsion; taking control of large areas of land from displaced Palestinian communities and setting up new outposts. In this way, the report says, more than 60 Palestinian communities were displaced and at least 14 Israeli shepherding outposts established on or near their former lands over the period.

The report also notes that “the systematic and violent displacement of Palestinians from hundreds of thousands of dunams [a measure from the Turkish Ottoman empire whose unit equals roughly 900 square meters] of land in recent years has undoubtedly laid the groundwork to facilitate such ambitions.” But perhaps most worrying for Palestinians, and the international community that stands with them, is the re-election of Donald Trump. As the report notes, the seemingly good relations between Trump and Netanyahu “heightens the likelihood that Israel’s current far-right government will act on its plans to annex parts of the West Bank.”

As for the Canadian government, and likely due to looming elections at home, there has been a relative silence on recent IDF and settler activity in the West Bank. On the other hand, last year Ottawa did impose three rounds of sanctions against named extremist Israeli settlers and entities due to “their roles in participating in or facilitating acts of harassment and violence, including attacks on humanitarian convoys, dispossession of property and displacement of Palestinian communities.”