A Message from the Foreign Relations Department of the D.F.L.P to Political Parties and Popular Movements Worldwide
The West Bank in the Face of an Annexation Plan: The Occupation and Settlers Serving a Single Agenda
Ladies and Gentlemen,
To Political Parties, Institutions, and Popular Movements and Organizations Worldwide,
We are sending you this letter in light of the ongoing practices of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, which are no longer limited to isolated violations here and there, but have become part of a clear agenda serving one political objective: annexation.
For months, the West Bank has been witnessing a rapid and dangerous escalation in both the scale and nature of the violations inflicted upon the Palestinian people. These violations have expanded in scope and have involved an increasingly coordinated interplay between the Israeli occupation army, security agencies, and state institutions on the one hand, and settler groups on the other. These attacks can no longer be regarded as isolated incidents or individual excesses; rather, they are taking place within an integrated political, security, and settlement-driven context aimed at imposing new facts on the ground and reshaping the geographical and demographic reality of the West Bank.
These practices include killings, arrests, military incursions and raids, the demolition of homes and facilities, the seizure of land and property, road closures and checkpoints, attacks against farmers, the uprooting of trees and the burning of fields, in addition to assaults carried out by settler groups under the protection of the army or in its presence. In some cases, these attacks extend to the burning of homes and property, physical assaults, threats against residents, and forcing them to leave their areas and villages.
What makes this situation even more dangerous is that these attacks are accompanied by measures, decisions, and legislation issued by Israeli political, legislative, military, and security institutions, indicating a shift from merely administering and controlling the Palestinian territories towards an attempt to permanently re-engineer their reality. Settlers do not act alone, nor can their attacks be separated from the broader network of military protection, administrative measures, laws, and decisions that create the necessary environment for expanding settlements, seizing land, and displacing its Palestinian inhabitants.
A reading of developments in the West Bank over recent years leads to one fundamental conclusion: settlement expansion is no longer merely a policy of colonial urban expansion. Rather, it has become one of the principal tools for implementing a political project aimed at consolidating annexation on the ground, even before it is formally declared.
In this sense, annexation does not require, in the logic of the occupation, a single formal legal declaration. It can be achieved gradually through control over land, the expansion of settlements and settlement outposts, the conversion of vast areas into what are referred to as “state lands,” the imposition of a network of roads, checkpoints, and military zones, restrictions on Palestinian construction, the demolition of structures, the denial of Palestinians’ access to their land, and the gradual pressure on residents to leave targeted areas. In this way, the occupation becomes an integrated system for redistributing land and population, expanding Israeli control over Palestinian territory while shrinking the geographical and social space available to Palestinians.
In this context, settlement expansion cannot be separated from the policy of displacement. When a Palestinian village is surrounded by checkpoints and settlement outposts, when its residents are prevented from accessing their land, when attacks on their property and fields are repeatedly carried out, and when their homes are subjected to demolition, the practical outcome is to push residents towards leaving, even in the absence of an official and direct deportation order. This is where the danger lies: displacement can become not an openly declared decision, but the intended outcome of an accumulated series of measures and policies.
On the other side of this reality, the escalation of crimes committed by settlers constitutes one of the most significant components of this process. Settlers do not operate independently of the institutions of the occupation. In many cases, their attacks take place within an environment that provides political, security, and military protection, while high levels of impunity continue to prevail.
The danger of this phenomenon lies in the fact that it serves a political and geographical function that goes beyond attacks against individuals or property. When Palestinian communities are repeatedly subjected to attacks, violence becomes a means of emptying the land of its inhabitants, forcing them to abandon their sources of livelihood and their land, and creating space for settlers to take control.
Thus, the settler becomes a field-level instrument for carrying out what official institutions may find difficult to implement directly, while state institutions provide the legal, security, and political cover for this process. Consequently, separating “settler crimes” from “state policy” becomes misleading when protection, armament, facilitation, or official decisions enable such attacks to continue without serious accountability.
In the face of this grave reality, it is no longer acceptable for the international response to remain limited to expressions of concern and condemnation. It has become necessary to move towards practical and effective measures that ensure accountability for those responsible for violations, impose deterrent measures against settlers and parties involved in settlement expansion, violence, and displacement, and end the treatment of settlements as an accepted fait accompli. This must be accompanied by continued support for international mechanisms of investigation and accountability, in order to put an end to the policy of impunity and protect the rights of the Palestinian people in accordance with international law.
Accordingly, and in the name of the Foreign Relations Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), we call upon political parties, institutions, and popular movements and organizations around the world to give this issue the attention it deserves, as an integral part of the Zionist project aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause through the imposition of facts by force and the practice of displacement and silent ethnic cleansing.
This reality further heightens the responsibility of progressive forces and all free people around the world to defend international law, confront the policies of occupation and settlement expansion, and strengthen solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just national cause in all its dimensions.