Aren’t they just buildings and infra?
In the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:
Settlements - refers to illegal makeshift "towns" (usually no more than a few trailers) built on lands that belong to Palestinians by right wing Israeli extremists who believe that the entire land belongs to them. As of 2006, these are strictly in the west bank.
Everything else (city, town, kibutz etc) - traditional meaning but also indicates that they are within the official internationally recognised Israeli border.
Here's some wiki reading I found interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement
Because international agencies and governments recognize those settlements as violations of international laws https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm . To create those settlements, most often, people previously living there were forced to move somewhere else, often by using army.
That's the reason. Whatever is someone's side on the conflicts, those settlements are simply widely recognized as illegal
I always assumed it was because of their ambiguous legal status—“town” implies it’s a recognized political jurisdiction, while “settlement” only implies that people live there.
That were my thoughts too.
Because the people settle there. The land was "empty", like it was "empty" for the settlers in the Americas. See first synonym below.
settler: noun a person who moves with a group of others to live in a new country or area. "the early European settlers in America were often fleeing from religious persecution"
synonyms: colonist, colonizer, frontiersman, frontierswoman, pioneer, immigrant, newcomer, incomer, homesteader, habitant, redemptioner, squatter
I love how the first two synonyms are colonist and colonizer.
"is back"
No stupid questions, right, but where do you think it went?
Is back in the global news. They were forgotten for the last several years, to suffer in silence… The reward for peace is being ignored…
Well, whilst I abhor the violent terrorism that Hamas have committed and abhor the overwhelming overreaction and horrific vengence that the state of Israel have, as usual, immediately begun, it's just not accurate to call what preceded recent events "peace".
The people I know who have separately and recently visited Israel and Palestine variously called it "viscious apartheid", "appalling", "military occupation" and phrases like that. No one called it peace.
I think you erroneously assumed that because it wasn't in the news, violence was not occurring, whereas I think it's more accurate to say that it wasn't in the news because the violence was so everyday and constant that there was nothing new to say about it. A child getting run over by a car won't make the national news either, for almost exactly the same reason.
What news do you read? It has been on the news constantly over the past decades. Now we have a dramatic escalation of an ongoing conflict
I read the news where KSA and Israel were going to normalize relations in exchange for US military aid in Yemen which would threaten Iran's power broker status and it became urgent to derail such a detant.
The fact KSA was even willing to entertain such an agreement is because the Palestine apartheid hadn't been getting global coverage for a few news cycles.
It's not that the situation disappeared, but the conversation was not talking about the situation, making it politically palatable to put it on the back burner to ignore it. At the global level
I mean, sure, I've been hearing about war in the middle East my whole life, but you can't tell me you haven't noticed an influx of Israeli/Palestinian posts in the past week. It's been all Ukraine for two years now.
Yeah, the point I'm making is that for some of us it hasn't gone away. That saying "it's back" is such a weirdly privillidged and ignorant position to take.
Like it's this year's hot conflict.
Also, they haven't been forgotten. Certainly not in Europe. I can't speak for the US though.
The US forgets about everything on pretty much a weekly basis. Blame the 24 hour news cycle, I guess.
Out of the headlines.
@delitomatoes As I understand it there is was a legal process in Israel for settlements on "unused land" to become recognized by the Israeli government and eventually become part of Israeli state recognized territory, which is how the original Israeli territory was gradually expanded from the time of the handovery by the British. There are/were rules that these settlements are not supposed to displace existing Palistinian residences or farms, but if course these rules/laws are often ignored by ultraconservative Israeli settlers who view displacement of all non-Jews from Israel as their holy mission, leading to direct conflict and displacement with existing Plestinian occupants. It is this fact, and the fact that the Israeli state agreed to prevent futher settlement in the 1994 peace accords but subsequently has supported them, that has led much of the international community to condemn all Israeli settlements established after that date as illegal.
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