This report addresses the financial, legal and planning mechanisms that Israeli authorities have been employing for more than half a century to enable the establishment and expansion of settlements and sustain them.
It centers on two key aspects:
First, the effort invested by various state authorities to encourage Jews to move to settlements and develop financial ventures in and around them. The state offers a slew of benefits and incentives to settlers and settlements, through both official and unofficial channels - extensively reviewed here. Housing benefits are the most significant, allowing families that lack capital or substantial sources of income to buy homes in settlements. These benefits partly explain the rapid population growth in the large ultra-orthodox settlements in the West Bank - Modi'in Illit and Beitar Illit. In addition, significant tax benefits of up to NIS 200,000 (~USD 60,500) per taxpayer are offered to residents of about 30 settlements, some of which are affluent.
Further benefits and incentives are offered to industrial zones in the West Bank, including discounted land fees and employment subsidies. These drive consistent growth in the number of factories there. Israel also encourages Jews to set up new outposts, which operate as agricultural farms and enable extensive takeover of Palestinian farmland and pastureland. Forty such farms have been established in the past decade, effectively taking over tens of thousands of dunams.
Second, the report analyzes the spatial impact of two settlement blocs that cut across the West Bank. One bloc, built south of Bethlehem, stretches from the urban settlements of Beitar Illit and Efrat to the west and the settlements belonging to the Gush Etzion Regional Council, which encircle Bethlehem and the villages around it, to the settlement of Nokdim and its environs on edge of the Judean Desert, to the east. The other bloc is located in the center of the West Bank and consists of the settlements of Ariel, Rehelim, Eli, Ma'ale Levona, Shilo and the outposts built around them. This bloc also cuts across the West Bank, reaching the hillsides overlooking the Jordan Valley.
Israel devotes relentless efforts to increasing the population in these two blocs and to extending their geographical footprint. This is pursued by planning new neighborhoods, developing infrastructure, and preparing plans and land reserves for future building and development. These steps have already resulted in an accelerated population growth rate in both blocs over the past decade. The population of Efrat is expected to double, if not triple, in the coming decades. Beitar Illit's population is expected to grow by 20,000 settlers, and Ariel's by about 8,000.
The impact of the two blocs extends far beyond their built-up areas (which cover about 20,000 dunams) and the size of their population (a combined total of about 121,000 settlers). Their existence stifles any possibility of sustainable development for Palestinians in the area, and directly impacts the livelihood and future of tens of thousands of Palestinians in dozens of communities.
- The bloc south of Bethlehem stretches from the Green Line in the west to the edge of the Judean desert in the east, edging the southern municipal boundaries of Jerusalem - including parts of the West Bank Israel annexed weeks after the occupation - and spreading south all the way to al-'Arrub Refugee Camp. The settlements and outposts in this bloc divide Palestinian space by cutting the Bethlehem area off from the area of Jerusalem in the north and from Hebron and its environs in the south. They also fragment the Bethlehem area itself, turning villages into isolated islands, preventing the city's future development and controlling Route 60 - the major traffic artery traversing the West Bank from north to south and connecting between Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the southern West Bank.
- The central bloc bisects the West Bank from west to east, disrupting the contiguity of a string of Palestinian communities. The settlements of Eli and Shilo and the outposts around them were built in one of the most populous and fertile areas in the West Bank, which served for generations as a Palestinian rural hub, with residents relying on intensive cultivation of the land for their livelihoods. Settlers in this area have gradually and doggedly dispossessed Palestinians of thousands of dunams of farmland, robbing them of their livelihoods.
While de-jure annexation of the West Bank may have been shelved, this is immaterial in practice - as the report demonstrates yet again. Construction and infrastructure work has recently been carried out in the West Bank on a scale not seen in decades. This large-scale development is designed to facilitate another significant spike in the number of settlers living in the West Bank, which settlement leaders predict will reach one million in the near future.
This massive investment further entrenches Israel's hold on the West Bank, clearly demonstrating the regime's long-term plans. These include cementing the position of millions of Palestinians as subjects denied rights and protection, who are deprived of any ability to influence their own future and forced to live in disconnected, dwindling, economically suppressed enclaves. They are forced to look on as they are dispossessed of more and more land, while communities and infrastructure are built for Jewish citizens. Two decades into the 21st century, Israel appears more determined than ever to continue upholding and perpetuating an apartheid regime throughout the area under its control, well into the coming decades.
Read the full report: Go here.
The most obvious example of how this "rules based order" functions is exemplified by the operations, techniques, inhumane punishments and cruelties, suppression's, denial of "Rights", land theft and usurpation's, and the "Ethnic cleansing" of Palestine. All paid for and supported by the United States and their allies tax payer monies.
I am now eighty seven, have witnessed all of this for most of my adult life, this is my conclusion: Such "rules based" inventions, so well established and supported by others, who should know better, can and will end, in only one way; There will be war and conflagration UN-imagined, it is now inevitable, too much has been invested into causing it, all the lies and deceits are in place, it is fait accompli; The grand prize, subjugation and may be the totalitarian rules based order of whole World.
Democratic National Governments World wide are criminally responsible because they have insanely succumbed to the twisted visions and lies "erupting" out of the United States, and they have not troubled to ask the Peoples they Govern, either for their opinion or instructions, so that the Peoples "Will" shall prevail; such Governments are necessarily complicit and corrupt.
Such Governments do not need the "Peoples" armies any more; They need only a handful of brainwashed psychopaths willing to press buttons when ordered. Mark my words, be ready and prepared, this War must happen; my personal hope is, that it strikes down the original rehearsals of the New Rules Based Order first; The illegal occupiers operating in the Middle East and professing "their" God to be an original real estate vendor.
Some aspects are inevitable; so before wagging your fingers at me, warning of all the innocent Arab civilians likely in harms way, let me remind you of one stand alone fact; all Arabs and neighboring Nations are complicit because they almost literally have stood by and just let it happen; they tried and failed, falling at the first fence, does that mean all is lost? No, If the cause is of paramount importance, and surely the Palestine cause is one such,you re-group get stronger and resist; you do not swallow the occupiers Shekels, obfuscations and deceptions, and you do not get into bed with them. Read their instruction manual, it clearly instructs, "By deception thou shall succeed", and nothing else can account for the Inhumane, wretched and dire circumstances, the Palestinians are now mired in; and where pray, is the Arab and Muslim support? It is busy sucking on the occupiers teats, and calling that "normalisation". The shame and disgrace of this will sit with the Arabs and Muslims for all Eternity. Amen It Is Written.