Creeping Displacement in Jerusalem and the West Bank!

On June 11, 2026, the Israeli government, according to Axios reporter Barak Ravid, approved the allocation of $350 million to establish 61 new settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The goals of this move include accelerating construction in dozens of sensitive Palestinian areas, especially in Hebron and all of Area C, which constitutes 61% of the West Bank, and also in the Jordan Valley. This approval came based on a recommendation by Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and was granted in exchange for Smotrich's party agreeing to dissolve the government! Amnesty International commented on the Israeli government's decision, with Agnes Callamard, Amnesty's coordinator, stating: "The purpose of allocating this budget is to annex the West Bank to Israel. These violations are not isolated; they fall within the ethnic cleansing adopted by the Israeli government. One hundred villages in the West Bank have been completely or partially evacuated between January 2023 and April 2026, and 7,280 cases of Palestinian displacement from their homes have been recorded!" The Peace Now movement newspaper published the following on June 10, 2026: "The Israeli government is in a frantic race before the elections to plunder public funds. This race aims to create a catastrophic reality on the ground for the next government, even though the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army warned against establishing such a large number of settlements, and emphasized that it would harm security and push the army into a state of collapse. The government should seek a political solution, but the government is trying to drown us in a quagmire of blood. The goal is complete control over the West Bank, while reducing the area for Palestinians!" This government is rushing to issue special laws to make the task of any new government almost impossible. On May 31, 2026, it approved a law transferring responsibility for Palestinian archaeological sites from the Civil Administration, i.e., from temporary military decisions, to the Israeli Ministry of Heritage. The decision will also apply to antiquities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This decision is one of the most unfair decisions after the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967! Examples of Israel's plan to implement creeping displacement in Jerusalem and the West Bank include the story of the displacement of Palestinian Bedouins in Abu Dis, Jerusalem, under the pretext of expanding the Jabal neighborhood. The Israeli Jerusalem municipality forced those Israel called (Bedouins) to move next to the Abu Dis village landfill, where millions of tons of waste accumulate! As for the displacement of the Palestinians of Khan al-Ahmar, they are now awaiting Smotrich's and Ben Gvir's army to be expelled from Khan al-Ahmar, after they were at the forefront of the peaceful Palestinian struggle. Smotrich issued an order to evacuate all residents of Khan al-Ahmar, even though its residents were displaced from their homes in 1948 and settled in East Jerusalem in the 1960s under Jordanian rule. Since 1967, the Israelis occupied the West Bank and demanded their evacuation from Khan al-Ahmar because Khan al-Ahmar is located on Road No. 1 near the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. However, international public opinion and solidarity from all over the world forced previous Israeli governments not to implement the deportation and demolition orders! The emptying of Khan al-Ahmar of its Palestinian residents is part of Smotrich's plan to control the central West Bank and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian government, even though there is an Israeli plan to build a settlement in Area E1, which is the area connecting the northern and southern West Bank. It is known that the area is 12 kilometers, and it is a sensitive area in the West Bank because it is an obstacle to connecting the Ma'ale Adumim settlement to Jerusalem! Eid al-Jahalin, head of the Khan al-Ahmar residents' assembly, said: "Palestinian solidarity activists supported us in 2018. They stayed with us. I hosted thousands of solidarity activists from all over the world. Our cause was in the news, but after the October 7 disaster in Gaza, Khan al-Ahmar turned into a settler state. They are waging war against us. The whole world today is far from our cause!" There is a plan submitted by Smotrich's association specializing in the usurpation of Palestinian lands, called (Regavim), to build a settlement in Area E1 comprising 3401 housing units, and the tender for the plan will be announced next July! There is a plan that was frozen (temporarily) but is proceeding very slowly by the same Regavim settlement association. This plan was approved by the Knesset on June 24, 2013, presented by the former Deputy Head of the Israeli National Security Council, Ehud Braver. This plan stipulated: "Evacuating unlicensed Palestinian Bedouin dwellings and gathering the Bedouins in other cities. Israel, under the plan, will seize eight hundred thousand dunams of the property of the displaced Bedouins, whose number reaches more than forty thousand residents of the Negev." The Israeli government publicly stopped the implementation of this plan after six months, but individual creeping deportation operations are ongoing! To implement the displacement plan, Israel sprayed internationally banned (Roundup) powder by planes to destroy Palestinian crops in the Negev, an international environmental crime that did not provoke environmental organizations worldwide! We must also remember the phoenix of Palestinian villages, the village of al-Araqib in the Negev. Digital sites have stopped publishing most of its news. The number of times it has been demolished reached two hundred and fifty times by May 2026, and its residents are still rebuilding it! I will always remember what David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said about the Negev: "The Negev will become a home for Jewish immigrants, and it is a settlement reserved to house millions of Jews worldwide." For this reason, Ben-Gurion decided to build the first settlement in the Negev on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Abdah, to live there, to call it Sde Boker, and to be buried there in 1973. Settlers celebrate the Midburn festival in the Negev every year, where thousands of settlers gather and light fires around Ben-Gurion's grave. The veneration of Ben-Gurion is not only due to the strength of his personality but also to his plan for settling the Negev! There are major settlement systems in Israel that control most governments because they carry central religious genes, which are the genes of religious settlement. Among the most prominent of these major systems, feared by all party leaders in Israel, is the Gush Emunim bloc, religious Zionism led by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the chief rabbi of the religious Zionist movement. The bloc was founded in 1971 within the National Religious Party (Mafdal), which supported the Zionist movement in the 1970s. However, the Mafdal party, which was the nucleus of Gush Emunim, joined the Likud party in 1977 and left the left-wing government. Therefore, the Likud party carries the main settlement gene, the gene of Gush Emunim and Mafdal! The Gush Emunim movement gave birth to another settlement movement, (Amana), and also gave birth to the effective and oppressive settlement arm, the Yesha Council, a greenhouse for right-wing voters. Yesha today is the head of the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip! The truth is that Israeli settlement is not a political principle, but a religious doctrine among the Haredim. This religious doctrine is deeply rooted in the core belief of the religious Zionist movement and the Haredi movement, who do not recognize Zionism. Most Haredim even arrange the doctrine of repentance for Jews according to three repentances: the first repentance is the repentance of fear of enemies in exile, the second repentance is the repentance of the land when they return to the Promised Land, and the third repentance is the repentance of love, which is waiting for the return of the awaited Messiah! Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman established settlement in Jewish religious doctrine. This rabbi died in 1270 at the end of the thirteenth century AD. He is the first theorist of the Zionist settlement movement before the entire Herzl lineage appeared. He said: "Settlement is a mandatory Jewish religious commandment, and it is a commandment equal to all religious commandments, and Jewish religious rituals may only be practiced in the Promised Land, and every religious commandment outside the Promised Land is not accepted by God, and a Jew may divorce his wife if she refuses to immigrate to Palestine!" This Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman is also one of the contributors to attracting the Christian Zionist movement to Israel. This Christian Zionist movement today constitutes about 13% of the world's Christians, and this rabbi also pushed the Christian Zionist movement to believe that the establishment of Israel in Palestine is the way for the return of the awaited Messiah, and this meeting between the two poles was and still is the largest source of funding for Israel worldwide! The Christian Zionist preacher, Jerry Falwell, said in 1980: "God blessed America because America supported Israel." Remember: Israel's turning a blind eye to the killings in the steadfast Palestinian villages and cities since 1948 is part of the creeping displacement project intended to be implemented sooner or later! ========================== The truth is that Israeli settlement is not a political principle, but a religious doctrine among the Haredim. This religious doctrine is deeply rooted in the core belief of the religious Zionist movement.