Many people fail to recognise that a widespread belief among Israeli settlers is rooted in a religious conviction that God granted them the land, thereby denying Palestinians any legitimate right to remain on it. This form of religious extremism drives much of the settler violence, land seizures and expansionist practices. While global attention has been focused on Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the Israeli regime has approved the largest seizure of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank in decades.
This illegal expansion reflects the growing political influence of the settler movement within the Israeli regime. The settler violence, home occupation and demolitions, and land confiscations occurring in the West Bank today mirror the dispossession Palestinians endured during the 1948 Nakba or catastrophe. The exclusionary religious rhetoric underpinning the settler movement is systematically eroding the foundations of a just and lasting peace in the Holy Land, raising serious concerns that the possibility of fair reconciliation may already have been irreversibly lost.
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