Human Rights Research Center
- Sep 5
- 13 min read

The Writing is on the Wall: Genocide Approaches the West Bank

September 5, 2024

For the safety of the author, this article is being published anonymously.

A Palestinian woman in Jenin on July 5, 2024. [Image credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP via Getty Images] [1]

After the 1948 war, the Zionist settler colonial movement resulted in the occupation of 78% of the territory of Palestine, with the mountainous area of central Palestine becoming known as the West Bank. The country had been an undivided entity completely integrated into the Middle East region. But after the 1948 war, the country was divided into three different entities: 1. The 1948 Occupied Palestine Territories from which about 80%[2] of its native Palestinian population was expelled by Zionist forces; 2. the West Bank; and 3. the Gaza Strip. In 1967, the Israeli state that was created on the ruins of Palestine invaded and conquered the rest of the country and parts of Syria. Since then, these areas have remained under direct Israeli control. Today, as the Gaza Strip endures a genocidal war, the humanitarian situation in the West Bank remains dire, with record numbers of killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces, house demolitions, land expropriations, and an intensifying blockade of Palestinian population centers. This comes on the background of a spike in armed Palestinian resistance, which mostly involves confronting the Israeli army during its raids.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation, it is essential to recognize that the dire humanitarian crisis in the West Bank is not an isolated issue but a direct consequence of the ongoing colonization of Palestine. The crisis is a glaring symptom of a much deeper, systemic problem. Moreover, we can see clearly today that this process tends to culminate in a war of genocide aimed at ethnically cleansing the land from Palestinians to prepare it for Israeli settlers. It appears increasingly likely that the West Bank is headed in this direction.

Ethnic Cleansing and Colonization Process

The intensity of the hostile Israeli policies towards the Palestinians had been building up within the last two years in the West Bank, but, since the war in Gaza erupted in October 2023, it has gotten even worse. 18 villages have been completely wiped out in the West Bank since the war began. Residents have been forced to leave due to settler violence, an economic and movement blockade of the communities, or because the Israeli army literally razed towns to the ground. At the same time, 44 new Israeli settler outposts have been established since the beginning of 2023 in addition to 293 existing settlements. In 2024, there have been record numbers of land expropriations with the Israeli government approving the appropriation of 24,000 dunams of land, more than in the last 20 years combined. An Israeli member of parliament declared recently that "we are living in miraculous times" referencing the exponential expansion of Zionist colonization.

According to United Nations (UN) data, since October 7, 2023, Israel has demolished more than 1,300 structures, displacing some 3,000 people in the West Bank. The increase in demolitions carried out in the shadow of war is devastating families and communities[3] especially in East Jerusalem, where opulent Israeli settlements enjoy massive public investments as Palestinian neighborhoods are deprived of water by the municipality. Further, for the last two years, the Israeli army has been carrying out deadly raids in cities across the West Bank with army bulldozers and bombs destroying crucial civilian infrastructure and homes without any military necessity[4]. Entire neighborhoods are left looking like a war zone, and, on top of all the direct actions of killing and destruction, the army has escalated its blockade of Palestinian population centers. While Israeli settlers in the same territory enjoy total freedom of movement, Palestinians are confined by hundreds of checkpoints and curfews, which, in some cases, have prevented transfers to hospitals. Thousands of Palestinian workers have been banned from entering 1948 Occupied Palestine, where tens of thousands used to work for a living. The Israeli government has brought thousands of foreign workers from East Asian countries to replace Palestinian workers, while desperate young Palestinians are being shot trying to cross the wall in attempts to get an informal job to feed their families in the West Bank, where unemployment is now at 32%. These barriers are part of a range of direct and indirect policies aimed at displacing Palestinians.

Policy of Conquest

Numerous Israeli leaders constantly and openly make clear their intentions[5] to conquer whatever is left of Palestinian land and settle it with Israelis. This is a case in which official statements are directly reflected in policies on the ground. In 2017, Betzalel Smotrich, now Israeli Minister of Finance, published what he calls the “Decisive Plan”. In the plan, he argued that the West Bank should be officially annexed to Israeli territory immediately. Then, to deal with the “demographic challenge” of the roughly three million Palestinians living there, they would be given three options: 1. To keep living under Israeli rule, but without being granted citizenship and renouncing any national aspirations; 2. to emigrate; or 3. to be branded as terrorists and killed by the Israeli army should they choose to resist. When asked if this included the killing of families, women, and children, he replied: “In war as in war”, meaning that, in his opinion, the killing of civilians is admissible at war. Smotrich is one of the most senior ministers in the government, and, through the government coalition agreement, he received special powers to manage all civil matters in the West Bank. He has been described as the "overlord of the West Bank".

Smotrich’s vision is not just a fantasy; the level of entrenchment of the Israeli government and society in the West Bank through colonization policies is such that arguing that the occupation of the West Bank is temporary would be preposterous. Unsurprisingly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July 2024 that Israel has already in fact annexed the West Bank and that its policies in this territory constitute apartheid. It would be wrong to assume that these policies are carried out only by the current “extreme” government, which is how the situation is often portrayed by Western media and leaders. Settlements in the West Bank have been built during right-wing as well as left-wing Zionist governments throughout the decades. This past July, the Israeli parliament passed a bill officially stating its opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state, with support not only from the government, but also from the opposition headed by Benny Ganz, the former chief of staff who is the most likely replacement for Netanyahu in the future, and who is regarded as a moderate.

It is also important to remember that it was a Labor government, led by the left-wing Zionist leader David Ben Gurion, who carried out the ethnic cleansing of half of the Palestinian population during the 1948 war. The establishment of a state with a Jewish demographic majority has always been part of the Zionist consensus, and maintaining this objective requires not only the continuous expulsion of Palestinians but also the prohibition of Palestinian refugees to return to their country, which violates international law.

The West Bank and the Demographic Question

The existence of a “Jewish State” within the frontiers of 1948 Occupied Palestine—where Israeli Jews now make up roughly 73% of the population [6]—enjoys widespread support from the international community, especially in the West. But the conquering of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967 has positioned the Zionist project at an existential crossroads. Nowadays, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there are about 7.4 million Israeli Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians (about two million of whom hold Israeli citizenship). Besides this, there are roughly five million Palestinian refugees living in neighboring countries, generally in poor conditions. A large number of them will likely return to Palestine when this becomes possible. So, the only viable scenario for establishing a state with a Jewish demographic majority, without a massive and violent population transfer, would be if Israel arrives at a compromise with Palestinians for partitioning the country, likely according to the 1948 boundaries.

This dilemma, which is based on the racist premise of the necessity of ensuring, by force, the demographic majority[7] of a certain ethnic group, is something that the Israeli leadership is aware of. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that if the ‘Arab’ population of the state of Israel surpasses 20%, the Jewish character of the state would be endangered. This is a principle shared throughout the Zionist political spectrum from left to right. Former Israeli army general Yair Golan, now leader of the most left-wing Zionist party, Meretz, has long argued for the ‘separation’ of the Palestinian and Israeli populations through the establishment of a Palestinian state in order to maintain a ‘Jewish state’[8] Based on past behavior of leftist Zionist governments when they were in power, these declarations most likely mean they intend to segregate the Palestinian population into ‘ghettos’ or ‘reservations’ and give them limited administrative power. This can be seen through the Oslo Accords, in which Israel refused to recognize a Palestinian State despite the Palestinian side recognizing the State of Israel. These accords also have helped Israel to cement the Occupation of the West Bank instead of ending it[9], by further fragmenting the territory. The idea of officially annexing the West Bank, let alone Gaza, and giving the entire population citizenship in what is called the One Democratic State solution, is a non-starter for any Zionist.

The Israeli right is nonetheless more sincere about their intentions. In January 2020, then-U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled alongside Netanyahu his ‘peace plan’, with no Palestinian representation at the event. This plan would have allowed for the official annexation of 30% of the West Bank and established a supposedly independent Palestinian state that would consist of several demilitarized enclaves with limited administrative authorities. Rather than being a peace plan for the future, this blueprint resembles the description of the first alternative for Palestinians in Smotrich’s ‘Decisive Plan’. But Israeli leadership doesn’t fool itself into believing they won't encounter Palestinian resistance.

The last two years have been the deadliest on record for Palestinians in the West Bank, with 779 deaths since 2023, according to UN data. At the same time, Palestinian armed groups have increased their operations confronting the Israeli army during its almost daily invasions of Palestinian cities, targeting armed settlers and Israeli civilians in some cases. 46 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank since 2023. These attacks are used by Israeli political and military leadership to justify an increase in the use of force in this territory. The Israeli military has begun using airstrikes in the West Bank, a particularly indiscriminate military tactic not seen there since the days of the second Intifada. Almost half of the victims of airstrikes in the West Bank are children. The Israeli minister of national security Itamar Ben Gvir has called for a large-scale military operation on Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to uproot ‘terrorism’, evoking Operation Defensive Shield which included tanks plunging through cities such as Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Jenin in the early 2000’s. He has also used his authority to relax weapons restrictions for Israeli individuals, handing out thousands of assault rifles to settlers organized as paramilitary armed forces[10].

[Source: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties]

Following a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Hawara where settlers torched hundreds of houses and vehicles, injuring dozens of civilians and killing two, Betzalel Smotrich published on social media a post calling for the State to ‘erase’ the Palestinian town. Recently, during a visit to an Israeli town located near the ‘separation barrier’ (a wall that runs through the West Bank and Jerusalem segregating Israeli and Palestinian populations often built on expropriated Palestinian land), he threatened to “turn into ruins” several Palestinian cities in the West Bank as “we are doing now in Gaza”. This violent and often genocidal rhetoric has been used for years regarding the Gaza Strip and the idea of using the armed resistance of the native population to justify a large-scale armed conflict designed to displace it or even to commit genocide is not alien to the Israeli playbook, or to other settler-colonial enterprises[11] Just six days after the war in Gaza began, an official leaked document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence revealed its recommendations to the government on how to proceed in the war on Gaza. Its preferred way of action was to ‘transfer’ the total 2.3 million Gaza Palestinians to a tent city in Egypt across the border which would become permanent, and the creation of a buffer zone to prevent their return. Further, a convention in January attended by hundreds of people and 12 government ministers called for the expulsion of the Gazan population from the Strip and the establishment of Israeli settlements. These plans have not been carried out, most likely due to international pressure, despite reports that the Israeli government had been lobbying members of the international community to get on board.

Should a large-scale, armed conflict erupt in the West Bank, it is safe to assume that the Israeli State would behave in a similar way as in Gaza, by trying to push Palestinians into neighboring Jordan. However, the West Bank has its own singular and dangerous conditions. Presently, there are about 700,000[12] Israeli settlers in the West Bank. This population is heavily armed and completely ingrained within the Israeli military. So, the Palestinians in the West Bank would not only face attacks by the Israeli military, but also assaults by settler militias comprised of even more extremist individuals acting with total operational freedom. This is a strategy that was used before in the 1948 war when far-right militias such as Etzel and the Stern Gang perpetrated massacres [13] on civilians that hastened the displacement of Palestinians, while the mainstream Zionist leadership shielded itself behind plausible deniability by blaming ‘extremist’ irregular groups. However, it is known that these militias operated in coordination with and support from the main Zionist military forces, the Hahagana.

In the words of Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “Genocide is a process, not an act”. And, as she points out, this process is inherent to settler colonialism. Zionism is the official ideology of the State of Israel, and the pillar of this ideology is creating and maintaining the existence of a state with a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, a country in which Jews were less than 4% of the population only 100 years ago. Therefore, the existence of the State of Israel has historically been tied to, and continues to be today, the forced displacement, fragmentation, and exploitation of the native Palestinian population. As a consequence, the human rights abuses and violence we see in the West Bank, as well as in Gaza and 1948 Occupied Palestine, cannot be solved without addressing the power structures that produce them. Violence won’t disappear from Palestine as long as the Israeli Settler Colonial Apartheid regime exists.

Glossary

1948 Palestine: 78% of the territory of Palestine (excluding the West Bank and Gaza) which was seized by the Zionist movement in 1948 for the establishment of a Jewish state through armed conflict and is regarded by part of the international community as the legitimate boundaries of the State of Israel.
Annexation: the formal act by which a state proclaims its sovereignty over territory that was previously outside its domain. This typically involves the forcible acquisition and assertion of legal title over another state's territory.
Apartheid: A crime against humanity defined as racial domination enforced by a system of segregation and oppression.
Appropriation of lands: in the context of settler colonialism, appropriation of lands is the systematic and often violent process by which colonizing powers seize land from Indigenous peoples. This involves the removal and displacement of Indigenous populations to establish and expand settler colonies.
Armed resistance: The use of physical force typically involving weapons to oppose or challenge an authority, government, or occupying force. It is a form of resistance that employs military tactics and strategies to achieve political or social goals.
Buffer zone: a physical barrier created to restrict or impede the passage of refugees across the border between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.
Colonialism: the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
Crimes Against Humanity: a legal term that refers to a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, involving acts like murder, extermination, enslavement, and torture.
Dunam: a unit of land area commonly used in the Middle East. It is equivalent to 1,000 square meters or approximately 0.247 acres.
Emigration: The act of leaving one's own country, whether voluntarily or involuntarily (forced migration), often due to economic, political, or social reasons.
Ethnic cleansing: The systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous.
Ethnic homogeneity: refers to a population where the majority of people share a common cultural heritage, language, and often ancestry. In simpler terms, it means that the people in a particular area are largely similar in their ethnic background.
Expropriation: in the context of a settler colonial conflict refers to the forced or coerced removal of land and other property from the Indigenous or original inhabitants by the colonizing power or its settlers. This often involves legal, economic, or violent means to dispossess the original owners of their resources and assets.
Fragmentation: The division of a population into smaller, isolated groups based on race. This can be geographical (separate living areas) or social (limited interaction between groups), reducing the potential for resistance of oppressed groups.
Genocide: The intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, committed through specific acts like killings or preventing births.
Jerusalem Municipality: the governing body responsible for administering the city of Jerusalem. It is a local government entity with authority over municipal services, urban planning, infrastructure, and public welfare within the city's boundaries.
Nakba: The Arabic word for “catastrophe” refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This displacement involved the expulsion, flight, and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes and land.
Paramilitary: an armed force organized similarly to a military but is not part of a country's official armed forces. They often have a specific purpose or political affiliation.
Pogrom: a violent riot or massacre directed at a specific ethnic or religious group. The term originated in Russia to describe attacks on Jewish communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Preposterous: completely unreasonable, absurd, or ridiculous; something so illogical or outlandish that it's difficult to believe.
Renunciation of national aspirations: can be broadly defined as the cessation or abandonment of a group's collective desire to achieve or maintain a nation-state. This can occur voluntarily or involuntarily
Segregation: The separation of racial groups in housing, public spaces, education, and other aspects of life, reinforcing power imbalance and hindering communication between racial groups.
Settler Colonialism: A form of colonialism where colonizers and settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers.
Sovereignty: the supreme authority within a territory, granting a state or nation the power to govern itself without external interference. It encompasses the full range of governmental functions, including legislative, executive, and judicial powers.
Zionism: A nationalist movement that advocates for the development and continued existence of Israel as a state with a Jewish demographic majority and preferential rights for people of the Jewish ethnic group.