Dispelling the Settlement Myth
Those who deny the Jewish people’s right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland often insist that their objection to Israel is not directed against the Jewish state itself, but only against the presence of Israeli communities—commonly referred to as “settlements”—in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. According to this argument, if Israel were to dismantle these communities, peace would naturally follow.
History tells a quite different story.
If settlements are truly the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, what explains the decades of violence against Jews before a single Israeli settlement existed in Judea and Samaria or Gaza? Why were Jews attacked long before Israel captured those territories in the 1967 Six-Day War?
The answer is unmistakable. The conflict did not begin with settlements; it began with the refusal to accept the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Land of Israel.
In November 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate for Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. The proposed Jewish state was small, fragmented, and strategically vulnerable. Nevertheless, the Jewish leadership accepted the partition plan because it recognized the historic opportunity to restore Jewish independence after two thousand years of exile. The Arab Higher Committee and the surrounding Arab states rejected the proposal outright. Rather than establish their own state alongside Israel, they chose war.
Even before Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, Arab militias launched attacks against Jewish communities. Within hours of Israel’s birth, five Arab armies—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—invaded the fledgling state with the openly declared objective of preventing its survival. Their goal was not to dismantle settlements; there were none. Their goal was to destroy the Jewish state before it could take root.
For the next nineteen years, from 1948 until 1967, Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria—including eastern Jerusalem—while Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. During that entire period there were no Israeli settlements in either territory. Yet there was no movement to establish an independent Palestinian state in the Judea and Samaria or Gaza. Instead, the region remained in a state of hostility toward Israel, punctuated by cross-border infiltrations, terrorist attacks, and repeated declarations that Israel itself was illegitimate and had to be eliminated.
The Six-Day War in June 1967 fundamentally altered the map, but it did not create the conflict. Israel gained control of Judea and Samaria, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights only after neighboring Arab states massed their armies, expelled UN peacekeepers, blockaded the Straits of Tiran, and threatened Israel with annihilation. Israel’s territorial gains were the consequence of a defensive war, not its cause.
Only after 1967 did Israeli communities begin to emerge in Judea and Samaria. Consequently, settlements could not have been the reason for the wars of 1948, the fedayeen terrorism of the 1950s, the Suez Crisis of 1956, or the existential threats that culminated in the Six-Day War. Cause and effect cannot be reversed.
This historical reality exposes the weakness of the settlement argument. If settlements were truly the obstacle to peace, then the absence of settlements before 1967 should have produced peace. It did not. If settlements were the principal grievance, Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005—dismantling every Israeli settlement and removing every Israeli soldier—should have ushered in coexistence. Instead, Hamas transformed Gaza into a launching pad for thousands of rockets directed at Israeli civilians and conducted the barbaric atrocities of October 7, 2023.
None of this means that settlements are beyond legitimate debate. Israelis themselves hold differing views regarding their strategic, legal, and political implications. But to portray settlements as the origin—or even the primary driver—of the conflict is to disregard the historical record.
The central issue has never been the location of Israel’s borders. It has been whether a Jewish state should exist at all.
The settlement issue has become a convenient political rationale for those unwilling to acknowledge this fundamental reality. Yet the chronology is undeniable: the rejection of Jewish sovereignty came first; the settlements came later. History therefore demonstrates that opposition to Israel did not begin in 1967. It began decades earlier, when the very idea of a sovereign Jewish homeland was rejected, and that rejection remains the conflict’s most enduring obstacle to peace.
