Everything you know about Israeli settlements is wrong.

Few seem to know about the Palestinian Authority's vast illegal settlement program in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and the strategy behind it.

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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If you follow media coverage of Israel’s settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), then I have some bad news: You probably have no idea what is going on.

Lies, distortions, propaganda, and false premises are endemic. It is time to marshal the facts.

Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria have been in the news lately. The U.S. and Europe imposing sanctions on some extremist settlers, Donald Trump’s re-election to the U.S. presidency and his appointment of settlement supporter Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, and Far-Right Israeli politicians calling for Israel to annex the region have all made headlines.

However, what has not made headlines — what never even makes the news — is the Palestinian Authority building swathes of settlements illegally in direct violations of the 1990s Oslo Accords¹.

In fact, there are vastly more illegal Palestinian buildings than Israeli ones. There are 81,317 illegal Palestinian structures in Area C, compared with 4,111 illegal Israeli structures (which includes bizarre things such as bathroom extensions built while there was a settlement freeze).²

The Palestinian Authority’s illegal building has multiple strategic aims, such as illegal Palestinian construction over ancient Jewish archaeological sites and how the Palestinian Authority is trying to erase Jewish history and evidence of Jewish indigeneity.

This construction is also designed to encircle and isolate Jewish settlements and stoke international anger at Israel. Understanding the Palestinian Authority’s actions and goals makes the whole issue look very different to what is commonly reported.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a complex one, so you might want to grab a coffee and a prune danish while we do a quick review of the history. This is essential to understanding what is happening and who is and who is not allowed to build where.

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Most news media treat it as a fact that Judea and Samaria is illegally occupied, as do many countries, the feckless United Nations, and its corrupt kangaroo court, the International Court of Justice (which has made meaningless advisory rulings to that effect).

These are political positions, but no amount of political consensus makes something a fact. Judea and Samaria is disputed. Here is the history.

In 1948, about 40,000 Jews lived in the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, then part of British Mandatory Palestine, where Jews have lived for millennia.

Five Arab states attacked the newly declared state of Israel (the 1948 War of Independence or the First Arab-Israeli War). During this war, Jordan illegally occupied Judea and Samaria, ethnically cleansed it of Jews, and rebranded it as the “West Bank.”

Israel then took Judea and Samaria in the 1967 Six-Day War, which was a defensive war in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria which attacked Israel in a genocidal effort to destroy the Jewish state and its people.

This is Israel’s so-called “occupation” of Judea and Samaria.

However, occupation is a legal term that comes from Articles 42 and 43 of the 1907 Hague Convention. These articles state that, for a territory to be considered occupied, it must have previously been under another state’s sovereign control. A Palestinian state has never existed, so it could not have held sovereignty.

Jordan’s occupation from 1948 to 1967 was illegal since it was gained in an offensive war. Before 1948, Judea and Samaria were part of the British Mandate for Palestine, which had a legal obligation to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

The customary international law concept of uti possidetis juris is clear that new states should have the same boundaries as their preceding dependencies. This means Israel has a legal entitlement to all of British Mandatory Palestine, including Judea and Samaria. Critics of Israel ignore this fact because it is inconvenient to their fictional narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinians should have a claim, too, based on the UN’s 1947 partitioning of Mandatory Palestine into two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state, but the Palestinians rejected it and the Arabs launched a war with genocidal intent. Hence, the territory is disputed.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was passed at the end of the Six-Day War, lays out a framework for peace talks. It links the issues of Israel withdrawing from territories captured with Israel’s right to security and recognized, defensible borders. The resolution makes no mention of where a final border should be, since that was to be negotiated.

The 1990s Oslo Accords was an attempt to resolve the dispute in accordance with this framework and the accords divided Judea and Samaria into areas A, B, and C. The Palestinian Authority administers Area A, which makes up 18 percent of the territory and is the most densely populated part.

In Area B, the Palestinian Authority administers but shares security responsibilities with Israel. Israel has overall security responsibility and authority over Jewish residents, while the Palestinian Authority has jurisdiction over Arab residents. It accounts for 21 percent of the area.

Most Palestinians, about 2.8 million, live in areas A and B, meaning most Palestinians in Judea and Samaria are self-governing under Palestinian Authority rule. The media rarely mentions this because they prefer to spread the lie that all Palestinians are living under an Israeli jackboot.

Israel administers Area C, which is 61 percent of Judea and Samaria. It is sparsely populated, mountainous, undeveloped, and home to the “controversial” settlements. About 500,000 Israelis and 300,000 Palestinians live in Area C.

This map is complicated because it was not meant to be a permanent solution. It was designed to allow the greatest number of Palestinians to live under Palestinian rule, and address Israel’s security concerns, while the two sides negotiated a final status agreement.

Pending a final status agreement, the Oslo Accords place Area C under full Israeli civil and security control, including planning, zoning, and construction — which includes approving and building settlements. So, while there might be an anti-Israel political consensus that Israel’s settlements are illegal, the Oslo Accords suggest otherwise.

Simply, to declare Jewish settlements illegal is tantamount to tearing up what remains of the Oslo Accords. Surely, the Palestinian Authority would not want to do that since it is these accords that created and gave legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority itself. Before these accords, the Palestinian Authority was just the murderous Palestine Liberation Organization terror group.

Settlements are not a free-for-all for Jews or Palestinians. Government approval is required. This is why Israel can impose settlement freezes when politics demand it, and why Jewish outposts without approval are illegal under Israeli law.

Palestinian settlements also require Israeli approval. The Oslo Accords stipulate that Israel must approve any construction in Area C. By building without approval, the Palestinian Authority is unlawfully treating Area C as sovereign Palestinian territory.

source: Israeli Policy Institute

While every new Jewish settlement gets lambasted, the Palestinian Authority has built illegal settlements and infrastructure on about 250 sites, covering more than 2,000 acres, with no objection.

The Palestinian Authority even provides tax exemptions, discounts on vehicle registrations, and even jobs, for Palestinians who settle in Area C.

Disgracefully, European countries fund much of this construction, much as they fund the Palestinian Authority’s abominable pay-for-slay policy in which it pays stipends to Palestinians and their families who aim to (and in many cases actually do) murder Jews.

When Israeli bulldozers level Palestinian settlements or houses, it is these illegal ones that are being demolished, and it is not just an Israeli land-grab like the media would suggest. Israel bulldozes illegal Jewish outposts, too, which the international media never reports, but which is well covered in local Israeli media.

The legal process for Israel to demolish illegal settlements is slow and cumbersome, and goes through Israel’s courts, so the Palestinian Authority can build them far more quickly than Israel can demolish them. Israel is constrained by its own rule of law, while the Palestinian Authority, being a terror group with a hall pass, has no such constraints.

In declaring the Israeli settlements controversial, and not writing at all about the illegal Palestinian ones, the media is legitimizing the false premise — the lie — that the Palestinian Authority has the right to build there as if it is Palestinian land, and not disputed territory.

Both sides have strategic reasons for building settlements. Each wants to create “facts on the ground” that could help predetermine where any future negotiated border might be.

Israel also builds settlements for security reasons. Judea and Samaria is high ground, which makes it strategically important to Israel’s defense, and the settlements create a buffer between Israel and its enemies. Israel’s dismantling of Jewish settlements when it unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 certainly made it easier for Hamas to attack Israel on October 7th.

The Palestinian Authority claims that Jewish settlement expansion is designed to make a Palestinian state unviable due to a lack of contiguity, and that is indeed a goal of some on the Israeli Right.

Most of the world, against all evidence and reason, thinks a two-state solution is the best way to resolve the conflict, so the Palestinian Authority knows that accusing Israel of undermining a future Palestinian state creates enormous international pressure on Israel.

The Palestinians show maps of Judea and Samaria looking like Swiss cheese to show how Israel is building settlements to destroy any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state. Yet, the Palestinians conveniently fail to mention — and the biased media fails to report — that the Palestinian Authority has created this patchwork of settlements itself to encircle and isolate Jewish settlements and exert diplomatic pressure on Israel.

The Palestinian Authority deliberately builds settlements that are far from Palestinian population centers and near Jewish towns. It does this to prevent Israel from building a contiguous area that could help determine future borders.

It is yet another example of the Palestinians accusing Israel of what the Palestinians are guilty of themselves. This trick never fails with the credulous international community and media.

It is a disgrace that the media does not report honestly that illegal Palestinian building has contributed far more to creating this patchwork in Judea and Samaria than Israeli settlements have.

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This is the picture into which violence in Judea and Samaria must be placed.

Most of the violence is Palestinian terror attacks against Jews, which averaged about 20 a month last year before the October 7th attacks. Some are revenge attacks from Jewish settlers, and a small number are extremist Jewish settlers attacking Palestinians.

Jewish settler vigilantism is wrong and should be dealt with, but it is not hard to see how anger can boil over into pushback and revenge attacks when faced with constant terror. The Jewish extremists, not all of whom live in Judea and Samaria, who attack Palestinians are problematic and should be brought under control, as should those who build illegal Jewish outposts.

These are the Jewish extremist settlers that Western governments are sanctioning, which is absurd given the Palestinian Authority is sponsoring terror with international support.

Given all this, it is sheer nonsense to think that this small number of extremist Jewish settlers are the primary problem, worthy of international attention and sanctions, and somehow define the dispute. It is also scandalous that some European governments are funding the Palestinian Authority and its institutionalized pay-for-slay policy, while sanctioning Jewish settlers. That is some serious moral confusion.

Of course, this is typical of the antisemitic double standard that passes as foreign policy in Europe today, where Jew hatred is at its worst since the 1930s.

The biggest and most pressing problem in Judea and Samaria is Islamist Palestinian terror, and the Palestinian Authority’s brazen campaign of illegal construction in support of its own creeping annexation of disputed territories.

Congratulations, you now know more about the situation in Judea and Samaria than 95 percent of foreign correspondents.

It was not that hard, was it?

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1. A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization

2. Regavim