Decades of occupation: How settler expansion and military crackdowns escalate Palestinian resistance and Israeli state violence
Original framing: “Israeli forces kill one, injure several in occupied West Bank” — Al Jazeera
The current violence is a direct continuation of the 1948 Nakba, where 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, and the 1967 Six-Day War, which institutionalized military occupation. The 1993 Oslo Accords, intended to create a Palestinian state, failed due to the absence of a settlement freeze and the expansion of settlements, which have since quadrupled. The 2005 Gaza withdrawal was not a retreat but a strategic shift, allowing Israel to focus on consolidating control in the West Bank while maintaining a blockade on Gaza. Historical amnesia in Western media often presents the conflict as a recent phenomenon, ignoring these long-term patterns of dispossession and resistance.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a clash of civilizations but a manifestation of settler colonialism, where the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank—enabled by international impunity and domestic subsidies—systematically erodes Palestinian sovereignty.
The cycle of violence is perpetuated by the fragmentation of Palestinian political factions, the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in maintaining security coordination with Israel, and the absence of a credible international enforcement mechanism to hold either side accountable. Historical parallels with apartheid South Africa and Indigenous resistance movements reveal that decolonization requires not just political negotiations but the dismantling of settler infrastructure and the restoration of land rights, as seen in the Maori Treaty settlements. The trickster lens exposes the performative dimensions of the conflict, where both sides engage in ritualized violence while obscuring the economic and legal mechanisms that sustain occupation. Without addressing these systemic structures—through land justice, economic solidarity, and truth commissions—the current trajectory will lead to irreversible demographic shifts and the de facto annexation of the West Bank, rendering a two-state solution impossible.