The British-American-steered Israeli leadership, coalesced around Benjamin Netanyahu, has since the 1930s used two strategies against the Palestinian population. First, wars and genocidal military assaults; second, the use of invasionary fanatical settlers.
Sometimes strategies one and two are deployed simultaneously, sometimes successively. The 1947-49 “Palestine” War resulting in the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) is exemplary of both methods. In what was the British Mandate, approximately 400 Arab towns and villages, with existing populations, from Jaffa and Haifa, to Rabla and Al Majdal, were depopulated, many with living quarters completely destroyed. Atrocities were carried out on both sides, but some of the atrocities of the soldiers of what would become Israel were duplicates of what the Nazis did during World War II.
The displaced Arab towns were given new Hebrew names; Jewish immigrants surged in. About half of the Palestinian population of about 1.5 million were expelled, and would not be allowed to return.
Particularly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the policy of settlers invading and taking over Palestinian land grew. The ‘settlements’ are often established near Israel Defense Forces outposts, which threaten those Palestinians whose land is stolen by a variety of methods involving fraud, intimidation, and destruction. The settlers, after establishing themselves, move Palestinians out. The settlers, many of them Orthodox and/or Hasidic Jews, are sometimes led on by the story that they are occupying the New Canaan (the West Bank and Gaza).
The settlement movement growth can be seen below. In the table below, the year is indicated first, and then the sum of the total settler population of the West Bank, which comprises two parts, the East Jerusalem portion of the West Bank, and the other portion of the West Bank combined, is presented.
1972 10,531;
1983 99,795;
1993 269,200;
