Don't Forget Israel's Colonization of the West Bank

As Israeli-U.S. tensions over settlement-building in East Jerusalem were made public, a new report released by the Macro Centre for Political Economics overviews Israel's heavy investment in West Bank settlement:

• Spending on Jewish settlements in the West Bank over the past four decades totaled nearly 17.4 billion dollars

• Of the money spent on constructing the 128 settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory -- excluding annexed Arab east Jerusalem -- 78 percent, or 13.7 billion dollars, was for settler homes: 32,711 apartments, 22,997 houses and 5,534 caravans.

• More than 1.1 billion dollars went towards building public institutions: 321 sports facilities, 271 synagogues and 96 ritual baths.

• Between 2004 and 2008, 6,657 new settlement buildings came up, according to the Tel Aviv-based researchers, who used satellite imagery to map settlement structures in the West Bank.

• Of those, 4,379 were apartments, representing an increase of 15.46 percent, and 1,526 were single family houses, a 7.11 percent increase.

These figures are testament to how intense Israel's colonization of Palestinian territory was this past decade. With all eyes are on East Jerusalem, and it is assumed there will be an easy fix for the West Bank settlements. Observers have consistently understated the role of ideologically-motivated settlers who have become a political force in Israeli society. They have the most vested in the settlement regime, as their more recent agitation and use of violence has shown. The Israeli government has subsidized this movement and inflamed its passions by including West Bank holy places on a government list of heritage sites.

So supportive of West Bank settlement has been this Israeli government, a leader of the Israeli settlers' council says publicly that the settler population could triple to one million people despite Western pressure to curb the growth of enclaves in occupied land.

This calls into question the ease of pulling back Israeli colonialism in the Palestinian West Bank. Israeli domestic politics will likely come to a head with the world powers' view of settlements as illegal under international law, including the Geneva Conventions. Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and surrounding areas is illegal, as well, of course. And Israel still shows no sign of budging on this issue.

The United States tried to halt settlement building by pushing for a settlement freeze last year. It gained only a temporary moratorium, which has not really been enacted. When the Netanyahu government granted the moratorium it exempted East Jerusalem, and since then, has accelerated settlement activity and Palestinian dispossession there. Now this there is a fight with the United States over East Jerusalem, it cannot be assumed that the West Bank settlements will be easy to deal with down the road.

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