Settlement or defeat

Writer: Dr. Hassan Abu Baddeh

Bottom line: The settlement project is no longer satisfied with actively working to undermine the chances of a Palestinian state, but rather is betting on us getting used to the aggression and accepting it. Where daily aggression turns into passing news, and official silence turns into politics, defeat creeps deep into our souls. Unless the leadership moves from managing the crisis to confronting it, the equation of recent days will turn into a harsher equation: settlement or defeat.

I wrote under the title “Either Settlement or the State” in early September 2026, that what is happening on the ground is a conflict between two projects that cannot be accommodated in one geography. Today, after only a few weeks, I fear that the equation itself has changed. The confrontation is now about preventing the settlement project from imposing impotence and accepting the fait accompli. It is a confrontation that is fought every day on the outskirts of villages, springs, roads, agricultural lands, hills and mountains, and not in a limited battle. What is frightening about this path is that it does not require an announcement. It is enough for the burning of two houses in Jalud to become a line in a local bulletin, and for the displacement of an entire Bedouin community to be read like news about the weather, until the loss turns into a habit. When we, the victims, get used to the scene, the settlement project will have won half its battle without firing an additional bullet.

The system of "individual transgressions": How is the future confiscated?

The magnitude of the danger is not a literary description. From the beginning of the year until the end of September 2026, the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission documented 5,287 settler attacks, including 798 in July alone. Therefore, numbers with this regularity eliminate the pretext of “individual transgressions” and reveal a system with integrated roles, in which a right-wing racist minister from the extremist settlers has held the powers of the civil administration since 2023, an army that secures the incursions, settlers who carry out the attacks, and a judiciary that closes 94% of the files investigating their crimes without an indictment, according to the Yesh Din organization. This is a perfect recipe for organized terrorism, which the occupation calls “individual violence.”

What is more dangerous than the numbers is the function, as violence has become a tool for seizing land, and its driver is pastoralist outposts. On September 10, 2026, the Union of Settlement Farms itself published, via the Israeli Channel 7, a map showing that its farms extend over more than 1.1 million dunums, or about one-fifth of the area of ​​the West Bank, compared to only about 200 thousand dunums for built settlements, that is, about six pastoral dunums for every dunum built. Even if the number is a propaganda exaggeration, it is an admission by the project owners themselves, accompanied by an explicit announcement of the pursuit of another million dunams. The result of this is that OCHA monitored the complete or partial displacement of 130 Palestinian communities until the end of August 2026, 48 of which were completely emptied. I believe that this is the practical meaning of dismantling geography: emptying Area C, then marching towards the outskirts of the cities, where the settlers of these outposts extended their control over more than 100,000 dunums in Areas A and B, according to the Peace Now Movement, until the Palestinians are crammed into isolated islands, and talk of a connected state becomes a political illusion.

What happened on Tuesday, September 29, 2026 is a condensed example of this mechanism. Dozens of settlers gathered at the Jariut roundabout in Beitunia under the protection of the occupation forces, and threw stones at citizens’ vehicles, in preparation for performing the “Throne Day” rituals at Ain Jariut, which waters the town’s lands. Meanwhile, at dawn on the same day, settlers burned two vehicles and a tent in Al-Mughayir, the village whose surrounding outposts now control most of its lands. It is important to emphasize that praying at the spring is not an innocent ritual. Seizing the springs begins with a religious “visit,” and ends with preventing the landowners from accessing them, as happened to the Al-Auja springs in the Jordan Valley. According to OCHA, settlers destroyed or seized about 160 water and sanitation facilities in Palestinian communities from the beginning of the year until July. Water has become, after land, the next arena for piracy and the strangling of Palestinian life.

The timing of this escalation is not a coincidence. In my estimation, the war on Gaza provided the right-wing government with a cover to accelerate the decision in the West Bank, and that the Israeli elections scheduled for October 27 make every scene of expansion, takeover, orgy, or settlement aggression a message to the Israeli voter, even though the elections accelerate an existing project and do not create it.

Where are the leadership and factions in all this?

In contrast to a system that operates with such clarity, the position of non-position adopted by the Palestinian leadership raises astonishment, if not its competence, and this applies to a certain extent to the National Action factions, which seem to participate in the spoils and distance themselves from the losses. Any citizen has the right to ask: Did you mobilize when the settler gangs arrived on the outskirts of Beitunia? They suffocated Qusra, Al-Mughir and their sisters, and did Palestinian embassies around the world move to raise awareness of what was happening and mobilize solidarity and positions rejecting this ongoing aggression? Did you send a single legal team to Qusra, Al-Mughir, or Ain Griot? Or would you be content, as usual, with a statement of condemnation, which was also late? Faith has weakened, and this alone is a measure of what our situation has reached.

I do not ignore the stifling restrictions on leadership and authority, which Israel engineered in various ways, from withholding clearance funds, to cutting off work in its market, and taking dozens of aggressive decisions to stifle the economy, society, and collective and individual security, plunging it into successive crises. Dealing with these restrictions is not effective, comprehensive, or inclusive, and is explained by the weakness of tools, despite perhaps the presence of the will. Organizing protection committees does not require permission from Smotrich, arresting rioters and handing them over to their state is stipulated in the agreements, and documenting attacks does not require clearing money. Therefore, the citizen has the right to believe that silence and indifference are close to the limits of unintended complicity, because this position and behavior practically informs the occupation that the cost of settler escalation is nil. It is ironic that King Abdullah II, from the United Nations podium on September 22, described what is happening in the West Bank as forced displacement, which is a war crime, while our official discourse is still captive to expressions of denunciation and calls for peaceful popular resistance, without mobilizing to practice it, without providing the necessary components, and without involving the cadres of the factions to lead the popular movements.

Then what?

What is required is not a stronger statement, but rather steps that the leadership can be held accountable for implementing:

First, an announced national plan to protect the olive season that will begin within days, which is the peak of settler attacks; In October 2025, Yesh Din documented 264 attacks. What is required are popular protection committees, local and international legal teams accompanying farmers, and compensation for their losses to be paid within weeks, not years, despite the stifling financial crisis.

Secondly, a resilience program for Bedouin communities and villages threatened by the loss of their birthplace and springs, financed by the private sector and communities through a national fund independent of the budget, similar to the “National Dignity Fund” that was closed fourteen years ago, so that resilience does not remain hostage to clearing funds.

Third, transforming embassies into operations rooms with specific tools to follow up with countries, parties and peoples: the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (July 19, 2024), which affirmed the commitment of states not to provide assistance to perpetuate the illegal situation resulting from the occupation, and the General Assembly resolution that gave Israel a twelve-month deadline to end its occupation, which expired in September 2025 without implementation, and the British decision on September 8 to ban the import of goods. The settlements, and the announcement by twelve countries on the same day of their intention to restrict trade with them, are strong justifications for pushing other countries to join this path, and to invest in diligent daily follow-up. Not to mention that every documented attack must be turned into a legal file and an issue of international public opinion.

Fourth, he urged the Arab brothers, the Group of 77+1, and the countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to seriously review the forms of communication with a government that is openly working to undermine the two-state solution, including the countries of the Abraham Accords, and to align in a unified position that uses the existing agreements as a tool for pressure, not a cover for normalization, to save what can be saved.

Fifthly, opening a serious Palestinian discussion about the gradual dissolution of the Oslo Accords, as I detailed in my article “Towards Abandoning Oslo,” published on September 15, 2026.

Let us agree that nations are not defeated when they are exposed to aggression, but when they adapt to it, and they do not lose their rights when confronted, but rather when they become accustomed to retreat/compromise, and remain silent about the confiscation and erosion of rights. The battle today is comprehensive and decisive for all the political meanings of the issue, the land area and the borders of the prospective state, and the spread of settlement with the accompanying devouring of the land and the security and lives of citizens. Most important of all, the future of our children has been thrown into the furnace of the battle, and we have no choice but to adhere to our combined will to confront and withstand.

Therefore, before the transformation of settlement from a project that threatens the state into a reality that perpetuates defeat goes deeper, “knock on the walls of aggression.”

They raided it in capitals, parliaments, and courts.

And before all that, in the olive fields, the mountains, the plains, the alleys, the neighborhoods, and the besieged houses,

Before silence descended on what remained of the land, what remained of the dream, and what remained of the homeland.