Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington this week coincides with record levels of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a clash between two national movements but as a prolonged settler-colonial campaign to displace one people and replace it with another. Beginning with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Khalidi traces a succession of political, military, and diplomatic assaults on Palestinian society, each supported or tolerated by a major external power. 

What is now occurring in the occupied West Bank may represent the culmination of that century-long process as described by Khalidi. The Israeli objective increasingly appears to be not merely the indefinite occupation of Palestinian territory, but the destruction of the Palestinians’ ability to remain on their land as a coherent national community. 

Israel has not formally annexed most of the West Bank. It scarcely needs to. Annexation is taking place incrementally through settlement construction, land registration, roads, checkpoints, military zones, demolition orders, and the legalization of previously unauthorized outposts. In February 2026, the Israeli cabinet adopted measures tightening Israeli control over the territory and making it easier for settlers to acquire land—steps Palestinians described as de facto annexation. In July, the security cabinet allocated approximately $434 million for 34 new settlements, bringing the number initiated during Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s tenure to more than 100. Smotrich presented the expansion explicitly as a means of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Settlement is only one component of Israel’s Palestinian strategy; its indispensable companion is the gradual removal of Palestinians from the areas Israel intends to incorporate. 

The principal agents of this removal are often settlers, especially those operating from agricultural outposts overlooking Palestinian villages and Bedouin communities. They seize grazing land, obstruct roads, destroy crops, intimidate shepherds, burn homes and vehicles, and attack residents. The Israeli military frequently fails to intervene effectively and, according to numerous Palestinian and Israeli human-rights accounts, quite often protects the attackers, restricts Palestinian movement after an assault, or treats Palestinian attempts at self-defense as terrorism. 

The scale of the violence has risen dramatically. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in June that the number of settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage had already exceeded 1,000 in 2026, affecting more than 230 Palestinian communities. Earlier in the year, settler violence and accompanying access restrictions had displaced nearly 1,700 Palestinians—more than during the entirety of 2025. Since 2023, dozens of Palestinian communities have been emptied of their inhabitants. 

These acts of lawlessness serve a discernible territorial purpose. Palestinian herding communities are particularly vulnerable because removing a few dozen families can open thousands of acres to settlement expansion. Violence becomes an instrument of land policy, conducted with sufficient informality to preserve governmental deniability but with enough official assistance to produce permanent demographic change. 

The events around the village of Tal, near Nablus, in late July illustrate how the system operates. After armed settlers reportedly entered the village, a confrontation left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead. Israel responded not by concentrating on the settlers’ initial incursion, but by imposing roadblocks, carrying out arrests, surrounding Nablus, and preparing a major military operation. Settler reprisals then spread to surrounding villages, and mosques were set on fire. By July 27, Reuters reported that settlers had killed at least 20 Palestinians since the beginning of the year.

Smotrich called for Palestinian villages associated with the confrontation to be evacuated to eliminate what he termed “terrorist infrastructure.” Such language collapses the distinction between armed militants and the civilian population. A village becomes a legitimate target not because all its inhabitants have committed violence, but because its very presence obstructs the territorial project of the settlers. 

The official rhetoric is therefore increasingly difficult to separate from the violence on the ground. Smotrich has spoken of building the “Land of Israel in practice” and has prepared maps for the annexation of much of the West Bank, excluding several densely populated Palestinian cities that would presumably remain isolated enclaves. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated for Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and the transfer of Palestinians. Their positions are no longer those of marginal extremists. They are cabinet ministers with authority over policing, settlement administration, budgets, and land policy.

This is what makes the present moment different from earlier phases of settlement expansion. The settler movement has penetrated the state. Its representatives no longer merely pressure the government from outside; they exercise governmental power to dismantle the remaining restraints on annexation.

The West Bank cannot, however, be understood separately from Gaza. The methods differ, but the strategic logic is increasingly similar: concentrate Palestinians into progressively smaller areas, destroy the physical and economic foundations of normal life, and create conditions under which departure can be described as voluntary.

In Gaza, repeated evacuation orders and advancing Israeli military boundaries have displaced civilians again and again. By April 2026, Israel reportedly exercised de facto control over approximately 64 percent of the territory and sought to expand this to 70 percent. The shifting military demarcation known as the “yellow line” has pushed residents out of neighborhoods in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah, sometimes after they had already been displaced several times. 

Israeli officials have long promoted the “voluntary emigration,” a euphemism for expulsion, of Gazans. Smotrich stated that Gaza’s future would look entirely different if only 100,000 or 200,000 Palestinians remained rather than more than 2 million. Smotrich has likewise called for Palestinians to leave and for Jewish settlements to be reestablished in Gaza. In July 2026, Israeli ministers joined a march demanding the return of Israeli settlements to the territory.

The parallel is unmistakable. Gaza demonstrates how mass destruction and repeated displacement can make a territory increasingly uninhabitable. The West Bank demonstrates how bureaucratic annexation, settler terror, and military coercion can achieve a comparable demographic objective more gradually. One is war conducted largely from the air and through military occupation; the other is territorial attrition village by village, hilltop by hilltop, and road by road. The link between the two strategies becomes absolutely clear when viewed in the context of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicitly stated stand that under no circumstances would Israel allow the establishment of a Palestinian state next to it.  

Khalidi’s framework helps explain why Palestinians regard these developments not as temporary excesses of a particularly right-wing Israeli government but as part of a continuous historical process. From the Nakba of 1948 to the occupation of 1967, the settlement enterprise, the fragmentation produced by the Oslo process, and the devastation of Gaza, each stage has reduced the territory available to Palestinians while weakening their political capacity to resist.

The question is how Palestinians will respond if they conclude that neither diplomacy nor restraint can prevent their dispossession. The Palestinian Authority is profoundly weakened. It lacks popular legitimacy, depends financially and administratively on arrangements with Israel, and is widely perceived as incapable of defending Palestinian communities. Hamas has been devastated militarily and politically in Gaza, yet no credible national leadership has emerged to replace either organization. This creates conditions not necessarily for an organized uprising directed by a unified command, but for decentralized and increasingly desperate resistance. 

A third intifada, therefore, may not resemble either of its predecessors. The first intifada was characterized principally by mass demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience. The second became heavily militarized and produced devastating Israeli retaliation. A new uprising could combine elements of both while remaining more fragmented: village self-defense groups, individual armed attacks, urban unrest, attacks on settlers, and sporadic confrontations with Israeli forces. 

Settler violence itself may become the immediate catalyst. Palestinians who see armed settlers entering their communities while soldiers stand nearby will increasingly feel compelled to organize their own defense. Israel will almost certainly classify such organization as terrorism and respond with raids, arrests, home demolitions, closures, and overwhelming force. Each punitive operation could then generate further resistance. 

An explosion centered on Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa Mosque is also possible. Ben-Gvir’s repeated incursions into the compound housing the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock and the erosion of the long-standing religious status quo add an emotionally and symbolically explosive dimension to an already combustible situation. His heavily protected visit on July 23, accompanied by thousands of Israeli nationalists, was condemned by Palestinians and Jordan as a dangerous provocation. 

Such an uprising would be unlikely to defeat Israel militarily. The imbalance of power is far too great. It could result in enormous Palestinian casualties, tighter Israeli control, and further destruction of refugee camps and urban centers. Israel might use the violence to justify accelerated annexation or even large-scale expulsions in the name of security. 

But repression would not resolve the underlying conflict. It would demonstrate once again that millions of Palestinians cannot be permanently subjected to dispossession without recurring resistance. Even a defeated uprising could further erode Israel’s international legitimacy, destabilize Jordan, inflame Arab public opinion, and force Israel’s allies—especially the United States—to confront the consequences of their support. This is why President Donald Trump must warn Netanyahu, who is visiting Washington this week, to reverse a course that could otherwise have a major negative impact on Israel’s relations with the United States.  

The central issue is no longer whether the conventional two-state peace process can be revived. Israeli policies have deliberately dismantled the territorial basis for that process. The more urgent question is whether Palestinians can continue to exist as a people in the West Bank, rather than as a collection of confined populations surrounded by Israeli settlements and military infrastructure. 

If Khalidi is correct that the past century has constituted a sustained war against Palestinian national existence, the current transformation of the West Bank may indeed be its culmination point. Yet culmination does not necessarily mean conclusion. A policy intended to extinguish Palestinian resistance may instead produce its most desperate—and unpredictable—form.

About the Author: Mohammed Ayoob

​Mohammed Ayoob is a university distinguished professor emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University. His books include The Many Faces of Political Islam (Second Edition, 2020), Will the Middle East Implode? (2014), and, most recently, From Regional Security to Global IR: An Intellectual Journey (2024). He was also the editor of Assessing the War on Terror (2013).

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