To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
In this world, where everything and everyone is for sale, we must sustain independent media we can trust. If you believe independent journalism is critical to protecting democracy and the common good, please support Common Dreams this Giving Tuesday! We wouldn't exist without you.
"My life's mission," said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is "to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state"—even as an overwhelming majority of the world's nations support independence for Palestine.
The Israeli government said Wednesday that it has completed plans for the first new apartheid settlement in the occupied West Bank since 2017, a move the country's far-right finance minister said was due in part to increasing international recognition of Palestinian statehood amid Israel's obliteration of Gaza and a recent World Court affirming the occupation's illegality.
The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, also known as the Civil Administration, announced what's known as a "blue line"—which defines and delimits the boundaries of a new settlement—for Nahal Heletz, one of five Jewish-only colonies
proposed for construction or expansion on stolen Palestinian land. If built, the nearly 150-acre colony would connect the Gush Etzion settlement bloc with Jerusalem.
"The connection of Gush Etzion to Jerusalem by establishing a new settlement is a historic moment," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a settler, said Wednesday. "No anti-Israel and anti-Zionist decision will stop the continued development of the settlement enterprise."
"We will continue to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state and establish facts on the ground," Smotrich continued, referring to the longtime Israeli practice of violating international law by colonizing and annexing Palestinian land to establish what one legal scholar described as "de facto possession with the aim of attaining de jure possession."
Smotrich added: "This is my life's mission and I will continue it as long as I can... Together we will continue to pursue Zionism. We will build, develop, fight, and win."
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Since Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Syria's Golan Heights in 1967, Israeli settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to more than 500,000 today.
Settlers often destroy property and attack Palestinians, sometimes en masse in deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into leaving so their land can be stolen. As the world's attention is focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October, including at least 143 children, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.
Last month, the International Court of Justice—where Israel is on trial for genocide over its conduct in the Gaza war—ruled that Israel's 57-year occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end "as rapidly as possible."
The Gaza war, in which Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 143,000 Palestinians, forcibly displaced almost all of the territory's 2.3 million people, starved hundreds of thousands of people—some of them to death—and flattened much of the coastal enclave, has also pushed numerous nations to recognize Palestinian statehood. Around 150 countries now support Palestinian independence. In April, the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian U.N. membership.
Smotrich applauded the resolution's defeat. The finance minister has come under fire recently for
defending Israeli soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman torture prison—he called the suspects "heroic warriors"—and for asserting that it would be "justified and moral" for Israel to starve 2 million Palestinians to death.
The Israeli activist group Peace Now decried the recent decision by the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) to establish a new Settlement Administration under Smotrich's authority.
"Netanyahu and Smotrich are relentlessly advancing de facto annexation," Peace Now said Wednesday. "This reckless pursuit will have dire consequences for everyone. The new settlement at Nahal Heletz will create an isolated enclave deep within Palestinian territory, inevitably escalating friction and security challenges."
"This administration is wholly dedicated to advancing the settlement enterprise while completely neglecting the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians," the group added. "This government must be held accountable and replaced—now."
The Israel-based activist group Peace Now says "2024 is by far the peak year for Israeli land seizure in the occupied West Bank."
Human rights defenders on Wednesday condemned the far-right Israeli government's announcement of the largest seizure of Palestinian land—many critics bluntly called it "land theft"—in the illegally occupied West Bank in over 30 years.
On June 25, Israeli occupation authorities unilaterally declared 12,700 dunams, or 4.9 square miles, of land in the Jordan Valley "state lands." Israel's Custodian of the State's Property in the Civil Administration published the declaration on Wednesday. The move supplements previous Israeli land grabs totaling nearly 11,000 dunams (4.2 square miles) in February and March.
Combined, these are the biggest seizures of Palestinian land since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
"Land theft is a component part of colonial genocide as a social process," noted Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto.
Muther Isaac, academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College in Jerusalem, lamented that "the land theft continues in the West Bank!"
Israel's goal, according to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is to "establish facts on the ground" in service of annexing the Palestinian lands and establishing or expanding overwhelmingly Jewish colonies there. The push comes as more and more countries—nearly 150, according to Palestinian officials—officially recognize the state of Palestine and as Israeli forces continue an assault on Gaza that has been widely condemned as genocidal.
"We will establish sovereignty... first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements," Smotrich said last month, referring to illegal outposts that are newer and smaller than established Jewish settler colonies.
"My life's mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state," he added.
Under international law, all of the settlements are illegal. Most were built on land seized from Palestinians through terrorism and ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Arabs were expelled during the establishment and consolidation of modern Israel in the late 1940s, and during the conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "are determined to fight against the entire world and against the interests of the people of Israel for the benefit of a handful of settlers who receive thousands of dunams as if there were no political conflict to resolve or war to end," the Tel Aviv-based activist group Peace Now said in a statement Wednesday.
"Today, it is clear to everyone that this conflict cannot be resolved without a political settlement that establishes a Palestinian state alongside Israel," the group added. "Still, the Israeli government chooses to actually make it difficult and distance us from the possibility of peace and stopping the bloodshed."
That bloodshed includes a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since last October. More than 500 Palestinians—around a quarter of them children—have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers there over the past nine months, according to Palestinian and international agencies.
Protected and sometimes aided by Israeli troops, Israeli settlers have launched multiple deadly pogroms targeting Palestinian people and property in the occupied territories since last year.
These and other previous attacks prompted the Biden administration to impose sanctions on a handful of the most extremist Israeli settlers. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also reverted to classifying Israeli settlements as inconsistent with international law, which was the State Department's position from 1978 until the Trump administration reversed it in 2019.
However, the U.S. remains Israel's staunchest international supporter, providing billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover for Israeli policies and actions that, in addition to occupation and colonization, critics say amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.