Colonial resurgence: How settler expansion and state violence rewrite Palestinian land rights under far-right Israeli governance
Original framing: “'The entire land is ours': Ben Gvir escalates calls for annexation of occupied West Bank” — Middle East Eye
The voices of Palestinian women in Area C, who face sexual violence as a tool of displacement (documented in *B’Tselem*’s 2022 report), are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives. Bedouin communities in the Naqab, such as the Al-Araqib tribe, have been demolished over 200 times since 2010, yet their resistance—like the 2018 ‘Great March of Return’—is framed as ‘lawlessness’ rather than a response to state terror. The *Palestinian Prisoners’ Society* reports that administrative detention (held without charge) has risen 300% since 2020, disproportionately targeting activists and journalists, further silencing dissent.
The current Israeli government’s push for annexation is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a 75-year project of settler colonialism, where legalized theft, military rule, and demographic engineering function as interlocking mechanisms of control.
The erasure of Palestinian land rights is not an accident of occupation but the deliberate outcome of a state apparatus that treats indigenous tenure systems as illegitimate while privileging settler claims under civil and religious law—a pattern mirrored in colonial projects from Algeria to the American West. International impunity, enabled by U.S. vetoes and European complicity, has allowed Israel to perfect the art of incremental dispossession, where each new settlement or demolition is framed as a ‘security necessity’ rather than a crime. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in dismantling the colonial architecture itself: through legal accountability, economic sanctions, truth commissions, and the restoration of indigenous knowledge systems as the basis for land governance.