"Fight against the Arab enemy": Israel erases the Palestinian state

JerusalemIn the small Bedouin village of Khallet al-Sidrah, in Area C of the West Bank, the Hassan family has lived for generations among olive groves and pastures. A few weeks ago, they awoke to a tremendous noise: settlers had destroyed their chicken coop and were jeering and threatening them. "We had to leave. We couldn't stay. We saw them setting fire to other neighbors' shops," the father explained to ARA. Just a few days later, they encountered the same threat and suspect it was the same group of settlers who were after them.

Fifteen more families have been forced to move to neighboring camps and dismantle their homes in the northern Jordan Valley this week alone, according to Mahdi Daraghmeh, head of the village council in Al Malih, a Palestinian community near Ramallah. Seven more families from the neighboring community of Maita were forced to leave after similar attacks, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. It is a common pattern in the West Bank: the combination of settlement pressure and recurring settler violence.

Now the Netanyahu government has ordered the reopening of the land registry in the West Bank, which This hadn't been done since 1967, the year Israel occupied the Palestinian territory. This will allow large tracts of Palestinian land, lacking legal titles, to be registered as property of the State of Israel. The new registration will take place in Area C of the West Bank, the zone that, according to the 1993 Oslo Accords, remains under Israel's exclusive administrative and military control, and which comprises 60% of the total area. Much of the Palestinian land remains unregistered due to long-standing and complex processes requiring documents that have been lost or destroyed, particularly during events such as the 1967 Six-Day War. This makes expropriation even easier.

Many Israeli human rights groups and political analysts have condemned the measure, considering it a further step toward the ethnic cleansing of the territory, with practical effects that will be difficult to reverse. "The Israeli government has formalized what it was already doing on the ground: preventing Palestinians from building, demolishing homes and infrastructure, and controlling roads and water in Area C. It's zero stability, zero peace process, zero freedom: Israel will impose itself as an apartheid state from the river to the sea," said Issa Amro, an activist and lawyer from Hebron and a member of the Youth Against Settlements (YAS). "Now Palestinians will have to prove their ownership of the land with documents that Israel will likely reject, thus losing most of their land in Area C," he added.

'De facto' annexation

According to Michal Braier, an architect and head of research at the Israeli human rights organization Bimkom, the Israeli government is moving forward with measures that many legal experts consider annexation. de factotransferring powers from the military authority to the State of Israel. Braier and his colleagues from other NGOs, such as Yesh Din, ACRI, and HaMoked, already attempted to file a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court against the measure last January, but it was rejected as premature.

Israeli authorities have provided few details about the new process, but all indications are that it will involve transferring legal ownership to the State of Israel and ordering evictions, as has been happening in East Jerusalem since 2018, where only 1% of registered land legally belongs to Palestinians. Although Palestinians will theoretically be able to file land claims, in practice they will most likely be prevented from succeeding, warns Braier: "Based on how the legislation works in the occupied territory, this is basically an apartheid system where some have rights and others don't. It's difficult to imagine any Palestinian being able to secure their rights."

This movement did not emerge in a vacuum, but rather in the context of constant harassment by Israeli settlers with the state's approval. "For years, two phenomena have been occurring: one is turning a blind eye to the violence, not intervening, which is very obvious; the other is that, in many cases, soldiers on the ground actually support and help the settlers. At an institutional level, they have facilitated land allocations, budgets, infrastructure construction, and weapons for them."

Violence by settlers has surged since October 7, 2023. The Israeli NGO B'Tselem estimates that settler attacks have forcibly displaced 44 communities to the West Bank in recent years and resulted in numerous deaths. According to the United Nations, at least 1,054 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by soldiers and settlers between October 7, 2023, and February 5, 2026.

The settlers describe their violence as a "fight against the Arab enemy." Some post lists on Telegram of incidents they claim responsibility for: burned vehicles, houses set on fire, wounded Palestinians, and trees cut down in dozens of villages.