“They came to a land that had a people and they made it a land without a people, so they could become a people without a land. But the land remained, and the people remained, and the memory remained.” — Mahmoud Darwish, Farasat al-Ghazal

“They did not expel us from our homes because they hated us. They expelled us because they wanted our homes.” — Ghassan Kanafani, Returning from Haifa

“…this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

THE HOOK

The mid-August 2026 siege of Qusra, a Palestinian town southeast of Nablus, by violent Zionist settlers is a metaphor for the structured violence that has come to define the occupied West Bank. Over nearly two weeks, Zionist settlers encircled residential homes on the village outskirts, cut off water and electricity and established outposts directly in the front yards of Palestinian homes.

Rather than coming to the aid of the besieged Palestinians, Zionist soldiers were documented praying alongside the blockading settlers. Targeted Palestinian homes, including the property of a Palestinian-American family on the Ras al-Ain hilltop, have since been declared a “closed military zone” and their properties repurposed into military barracks. The families are homeless now.

Qusra is not an isolated act of lawlessness, nor is the violence sporadic — it is evidence of how the Zionist state and the settler movement function as an integrated, singular apparatus. It shouldn’t surprise anyone because it illustrates the foundational — I choose the word carefully — Zionist premise of territorial acquisition through native erasure. The employment of localised terror effectively serves today as the vanguard for state-sanctioned annexation, as it did when the Zionists began settling in Palestine a century ago.

Qusra is also not the first or only target. Within just the Nablus Governorate, settlers have targeted Qaryut, Tell, Jalud, Burin, Osarin. The story is generally the same: intimidation, attacks, arson, looting, killing, sparing not even the domesticated animals. The Jordan Valley, Central West Bank, Southern West Bank, villages in the Hebron Hills, settler terror is everywhere.

While the world has understandably focused on the genocide and destruction in Gaza, Zionist settler violence has deepened across the Occupied West Bank. At the same time, the global diplomatic ritual of calling for a two-state solution in Palestine increasingly bears little resemblance to the reality on the ground. In fact, it may be a smoke-screen that facilitates a continuing land-grab. The current settler activity is not an aberration, argues Ejaz Haider, but a logical outcome of the colonial-settler project of Zionism itself…

These are not hidden atrocities committed in the shadows of an unmonitored frontier. By forcing the international community to witness state-backed displacement occurring with absolute impunity, Qusra and other unfortunate Palestinian towns not only shatter the narrative of the ‘rogue settler’, they depict what lies at the dark heart of Zionism: structural violence inherent in Zionism.

The strategy of colonisation has been playing out in Palestine since Britain and France (the United States was not in play at the time) decided to find the ‘solution’ to Europe’s Jewish problem in Palestine, their terra nullius. The evil is marauding the land now.

I intend here to make four points: one, settler violence in the Occupied West Bank, long a part of the Zionist entity’s grey zone operations, is now centre stage. Zionism’s ‘little green men’ are now unmasked.

Two, this strategy of violence is not a recent phenomenon. Its ideological architecture was built on the foundations of what the father of Zionism Theodore Herzl called Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] and Revisionist Zionism’s founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky The Iron Wall. The monster was born much before the crossing into the West Bank of ultranationalist Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples after the 1967 War. Today’s settlers are not just a synecdoche of Zionism, they are Zionism.

Three, a pile of evidence about the malevolence that makes up Zionism should disabuse anyone of the idea of a two-state solution. I have written about it previously but it bears repeating, because that red-herring informs much of the pro forma international diplomacy seeking to find a solution. The Zionist entity has absolutely no intention of letting a Palestinian state come into existence.

Four, flowing from the points above, for the Middle East to achieve peace, the world must clearly and without equivocation call for an end to Zionism, uproot it branch and tree, to be replaced by a Palestinian state where all denominations can live in amity.

EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR MOTIVES (1882-1948)

The ideological and economic foundations of the Zionist state were laid during the first (1882–1903) and second (1904–1914) aliyahs [waves of immigration].

Zionist-American sociologist Gershon Shafir’s work demonstrates that early European Jewish settlers quickly realised that their survival depended on how they managed land and labour. While the First Aliyah relied briefly on a ‘planter model’, employing local Palestinian agricultural workers, the influx of highly ideologised, socialist immigrants during the Second Aliyah fundamentally altered this trajectory.

To build an independent national economy, these settlers instituted the policy of Kibush Ha’avoda [The Conquest of Labour]. This doctrine mandated that Jewish enterprises hire exclusively Jewish workers. The policy systematically shut local Palestinians out of the emerging economy. Shafir notes that these exclusive labour practices, along with the collective agricultural models of the kibbutz and moshav, were explicitly designed to build an isolated, self-sufficient economic infrastructure that marginalised the indigenous population.

Shafir is a good example of a liberal Zionist. While his academic work is intensely critical of the Zionist state’s policies and foundational historical narratives, he nonetheless operates within a framework that seeks a two-state chimeric solution rather than accepting the ugliness situated at the core of the Zionist ideology, and refuses to overturn the original sin or accept that no such solution is possible.

In his influential 1923 essay The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky rejected the notion that the indigenous Arab population would ever voluntarily accept their own displacement: “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers… Zionist colonisation, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.” He concluded that the Zionist project could only succeed under the protection of an unyielding “iron wall” of military supremacy.

Compare this with what Zionist historian Benny Morris wrote in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War: “Years later, after the establishment of Israel, [its first prime minister David] Ben-Gurion expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann, founder of the Jewish World Congress: ‘I don’t understand your [Goldmann’s] optimism… Why should the Arabs make peace? If I [were] an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural… We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?’”

This early rhetoric proves that the movement’s pioneers understood settlement not as a peaceful return to an empty land, but as an aggressive colonial campaign requiring absolute physical domination. This is why Ben-Gurion saw the Partition plan as a stepping stone to Palestinian expulsion: “With compulsory transfer, we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

PARAMILITARY POLICIES, PLAN DALET AND NAKBA (1939-48)

As the British Mandate drew to a close following World War II, the structural imperative for territorial control for the Zionists shifted from economic exclusion to direct military action.

During the 1940s, Zionist underground paramilitary organisations, primarily the Irgun and the Lehi, conducted asymmetric urban warfare campaigns. These operations targeted both British administrators — the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel is a case in point — and Palestinian civilians, and culminated in events like the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948, ahead of the war in May.

While mainstream Zionist leaders initially distanced themselves from these splinter factions, these groups were quickly absorbed into the central military command of the Zionist paramilitary organisation the Haganah under Ben-Gurion. The Haganah would later form the core of the Zionist entity’s military.

The merger of these early paramilitary groups integrated radical tactics into formal state doctrine. The operational climax of this strategy was Plan Dalet (Plan D), launched by the Haganah high command in April 1948. Historian Ilan Pappé, Israeli but anti-Zionist, characterises Plan D as a deliberate blueprint for ethnic cleansing. The plan provided a systematic military methodology for entering Arab towns, expelling residents across international borders and destroying villages, to prevent any future return.

In contrast, Morris argues that the flight of the Palestinians was a chaotic byproduct of war rather than a pre-designed master plan. The irony is that Morris’ own extensive empirical documentation of Plan D reveals specific, brutal operational mechanisms that triggered mass displacement.

Ben-Gurion had entrusted Chief of Operations Yigael Yadin with drafting Plan D. While Yadin authored the strategic plan, a young Yitzhak Rabin served as a field commander responsible for executing its tactical dimensions on the ground, most notably during Op Dani in July 1948.

During this campaign, Zionist forces captured the strategic twin cities of Lydda and Ramle. Following an outbreak of local resistance, Ben-Gurion ordered the removal of the population. Rabin formally signed and issued the operational directive, which explicitly stated: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”

Consequently, between 50,000 and 70,000 Palestinian civilians were driven from their homes. They were forced to march eastwards towards Arab Legion lines in intense summer heat, leading to hundreds of deaths from dehydration and exhaustion. Significant civilian casualties also occurred when Zionist forces fired into a local mosque to suppress resistance. In 1979, a Zionist government censorship board banned Rabin from including a first-person account of the expulsions in his memoirs.

According to Morris’ research, the execution of Plan D, diabolically simple, relied on four primary tactics: armed intimidation (surrounding Arab villages and issuing ultimatums to local leadership, demanding immediate surrender and the handover of all weapons); psychological warfare (broadcasting warnings via loudspeakers and radio to induce panic, often weaponising reports of nearby massacres to accelerate flight); sustained mortar shelling (bombarding civilian population centres to break local resistance before the Zionist ground troops entered the villages and towns); and systematic demolitions (dynamiting houses, burning crops and planting mines in the ruins of depopulated villages to ensure that the physical infrastructure of Palestinian life was completely erased, rendering return impossible).

The resulting Nakba [catastrophe] displaced over 700,000 Palestinians and depopulated more than 400 villages, transforming the land to secure a demographically homogeneous Zionist state.

THE 1967 WATERSHED AND THE MESSIANIC SHIFT

Prior to the Six-Day War of 1967, Religious Zionism had operated as a quiet, junior partner within the Zionist entity’s so-called secular-socialist political landscape. The swift military victory of 1967, which resulted in the capture of East Jerusalem, the West Bank (what Zionists refer to as Judea and Samaria) and Ghazzah [Gaza], fundamentally transformed this dynamic and ushered in a theological shift that reinterpreted the nature of Zionist settlement. It was easy because the idea was grounded in the so-called “biblical promise.”

At the heart of this shift was the theological teaching of Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook and his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, centred at the Mercaz HaRav seminary in Jerusalem. The younger Kook taught that the military conquest of the “biblical land” of “Israel” was not a geopolitical accident but a divine miracle, marking the beginning of messianic redemption. In this worldview, the physical soil of the West Bank was infused with intrinsic holiness. Settling this land was elevated to an absolute religious commandment that overrode secular political considerations.

In May 1967, weeks before the Six-Day War, the younger Kook delivered a passionate Independence Day sermon at his seminary. Weeping and lamenting the division of “biblical lands”, he cried out: “Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Nablus?” When the Zionist forces captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Ghazzah just three weeks later, his students viewed his words as prophetic, sparking a messianic awakening.

Imbued with Kook’s theology of active redemption, his disciples set about to translate his spiritual mandate into political action. Led by figures like Hanan Porat and Moshe Levinger, they spearheaded the civilian settlement movement. They crossed over into the newly occupied West Bank to build unauthorised outposts, beginning with Kfar Etzion in late 1967. By 1974, this activism was formalised through the creation of the Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful].

In July 1967, the Zionist entity’s deputy prime minister, Yigal Allon, drafted a strategic plan that sought a territorial compromise to maintain the Zionist entity’s Jewish demographic majority. It proposed annexing only strategic, sparsely populated areas (Jordan Valley and a corridor around Jerusalem) as a security buffer, while returning the heavily populated Arab heartlands of the West Bank to Jordan or Palestinian autonomy.

Kook’s disciples disrupted this plan. Guided by their mentor’s refusal to yield an inch of “biblical land”, Gush Emunim deliberately built settlements inside the very mountain enclaves the Allon Plan intended to give away. Their relentless campaign of unauthorised outposts forced consecutive Zionist governments into political compromises, permanently fracturing the boundaries of the Allon Plan and anchoring a civilian Jewish presence deep within the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Gadi Taub, a Zionist historian and conservative-nationalist social commentator, notes that this theology effectively placed the settlement movement above the laws of the state. If God commanded the settlement of “Judea and Samaria”, any government attempt to compromise or cede land for peace became an act of sin. Gush Emunim became central to codifying religious nationalism as the primary engine of Zionist settlement expansion.

STATE COMPLICITY, SPATIAL VIOLENCE, LEGAL APARTHEID

What began as an activist movement by religious zealots was quickly adopted by the Zionist state bureaucracy. Civilian infrastructure and administrative laws were weaponised into a highly organised system of spatial control.

After Menachem Begin’s rightwing Likud party came to power in 1977, it discarded the Allon Plan, in favour of the Drobles Plan (1978). Drafted by Matityahu Drobles of the World Zionist Organisation, the plan called for planting settlements directly between and around Palestinian population centres. The explicit goal was to splinter Palestinian communities, break their geographic continuity and make the creation of an independent Palestinian state impossible.

To understand how this bureaucratic complicity functions as a tool of daily subjugation, one must turn to British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman’s theory of Forensic Architecture in his landmark study, Hollow Land. Weizman demonstrates that the occupation operates as a three-dimensional matrix of spatial violence across three distinct layers:

Topographical Domination: Settlements are strategically built as panoptic fortresses on the crests of hilltops, overlooking Palestinian villages located in the valleys below. This design turns civilian housing into a mechanism of constant optical surveillance and psychological intimidation. High ground also has military utility.

Infrastructural Apartheid: The hilltop surveillance is reinforced by a network of segregated “bypass roads” with a pattern. These highways carve through Palestinian agricultural valleys to connect settlements directly to major Zionist cities, but are strictly closed or restricted to the Palestinians whose land they sever.

Vertical Sovereignty: Weizman explains that colonisation is stratified vertically. The Zionists maintain total sovereignty over the sub-surface (extracting vital water aquifers while denying Palestinians digging rights), the surface (settlements, checkpoints, and the Separation Wall), and the airspace (constant aerial attacks and surveillance).

This multi-layered architecture is legally codified through a dual legal system operating within the exact same geographic territory. While Zionist settlers living in the West Bank are governed by the entity’s domestic civil and criminal law, their Palestinian neighbours are subjected to an oppressive apparatus of military law enforced by Zionist occupation forces.

This legal bifurcation is designed to create structural inequalities:

The Judicial System: Settlers accused of offences are tried (when and if they are) in standard civil courts inside the Zionist entity and enjoy full constitutional protections, legal representation and due process. Palestinians are tried in military tribunals, which maintain a conviction rate of over 99 percent and regularly rely on “administrative detention”, a sanitised euphemism for holding individuals indefinitely without charge or trial based on secret evidence.

Property and Planning Rights: Settler regional councils receive rapid, state-backed zoning permits, infrastructure subsidies and legal recognition for expansions. Conversely, the military administration implements a restrictive permit regime for Palestinians, defining nearly all native construction as “illegal” and enforcing routine, military-backed home demolitions.

Freedom of Movement: Settlers travel seamlessly across borders and bypass roads without encountering barriers. Palestinians are confined behind the Separation Wall, forced to navigate a labyrinth of fixed military checkpoints, roadblocks, and biometric permit systems that sever families from their land and livelihoods. A journey of half an hour can become a 24-hour ordeal for Palestinians.

SETTLERS AS ZIONISM’S FRONTIERSMEN

To justify this infrastructure of control, contemporary right-wing settlers have crafted a political mythology that connects them directly to the original pioneer generation. As noted by anthropologist Michael Feige, a liberal-Zionist himself, the religio-nationalist settlers deliberately adopt the cultural symbols, aesthetics and rhetoric of early Zionists. They frame themselves as Halutzim [pioneers] who are ‘redeeming the wilderness’ and bravely holding the nation’s borders against hostile forces.

The problem with analyses like Feige’s (as with many other critical Zionist academics) is that they refuse to accept that the religious Zionism of today’s settlers is a continuation of the settler-colonialism of the original Zionists.

Even though the early halutzim considered themselves secular and progressive, their core germ was halutziut (pioneerism), the physical redemption of the land through settlement, the idea of it being grounded in theology. Today’s settlers have peeled off the veneer of secularity from the idea and rooted it overtly in its religious soil, making their specific movement the defining face (the synecdoche) of Zionism.

This is the central tension that animates modern Zionist critical sociology. The distinction between the pre-1948 establishment of a sovereign refuge and Neo-Zionism (the post-1967 fundamentalist land-grab), with the former seen as nothing more than a secular national liberation movement born out of European persecution just can’t hold.

Even if we were to accept that the original Zionist idea was somehow different, the New York built in the warehouse like in the Charlie Kaufman film, Synecdoche, New York, the simulation has completely swallowed the reality and become the reality itself.

THE HOAX OF THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION

Decades of state funding, infrastructural development and ideological mobilisation have yielded a definitive structural reality: the settlement project has become irreversible.

Today, more than 700,000 Zionist settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This population is integrated into Zionist entity’s core economy, electrical grid, water and agricultural resources and legal systems through an intricate web of infrastructure.

Politically, no coalition within the Knesset possesses the power or the will to execute a mass evacuation of nearly three-quarters of a million Zionists. Any attempt to do so would risk triggering a civil conflict within the Zionist entity itself. Moreover, the settlements have permanently fractured the territorial contiguity required to sustain an independent Palestinian state, if that unicorn were ever possible.

Consequently, the international community’s continued adherence to and mouthing of a ‘two-state solution’ is just an empty diplomatic ritual, devoid of any meaning. I have detailed this issue before in this space but it bears repeating. American political scientist Ian Lustick argues in his book Paradigm Lost that the two-state framework functions as a convenient smoke-screen. It allows the Zionists to systematically absorb the remainder of the West Bank under the guise of a temporary, ongoing “peace process”, while shielding it from international accountability.

This diplomatic inertia enables the Zionist entity to entrench a permanent, single-state reality without facing meaningful international penalties. By maintaining the fiction that a Palestinian state is just around the corner, international actors avoid confronting the actual system on the ground: a de facto, single-state apartheid system extending from the River to the Sea.

The two-state solution is not a failing peace process. It has become an unworkable formula because the physical space required to sustain it has been systematically dismantled. With the formal launch of massive infrastructure projects such as the E1 settlement corridor, expressly designed to sever the geographic continuity of any future Palestinian state, the geography of partition is dead. No amount of condemnation and letters can change that reality.

The contemporary hilltop outpost is the continuation of a structured, settler-colonial logic that began more than a century ago. No amount of sophistry by progressive Zionists can change that reality.

EPILOGUE

Before Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe’s work, academic discourse routinely conflated all forms of imperial dominance. Wolfe introduced the nuance by isolating “settler colonialism” as a distinct phenomenon governed by its own unique mechanics.

Rather than seeking to exploit indigenous labour, as for instance the British administrators did in India, the settler seeks permanent access to the land itself. Through this lens, Wolfe provided a portable framework that transformed how scholars critique the foundational histories of the US, Australia, Canada and Zionism/Palestine.

“Invasion is a structure, not an event,” is how Wolfe put it, simple and elegant, the equivalent of E=mc ². He argued that colonisation is not a historical artefact confined to the past, but an active, ongoing system that operates daily. The legal structures, property rights, infrastructure networks and military apparatus of a settler state are designed to continuously assert sovereignty over territory, while precluding the original population from reclaiming it.

Because the mere presence of an indigenous population challenges the legitimacy of the settler state (recall the words of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky et al), the system organises itself around what Wolfe termed the “logic of elimination.” This elimination is comprehensive and designed to “destroy to replace.” It manifests not only through physical displacement or violence, but also through legal erasure, forced assimilation, and cultural rewriting.

The ultimate goal is to dissolve native social and political realities so that a brand-new sovereign society can be erected on top of the expropriated land.

By weaponising topography, legal apartheid, and international diplomatic stalling tactics, the settlement movement has created a permanent, irreversible reality on the ground.

Recognising the two-state solution as an illusion is the first step towards confronting and dismantling the single-state Zionist system that has already been built.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and
foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 6th, 2026