Europe's Illegal Land-Grab: The Unlawful Palestinian Settlements You've Never Heard Of
by Karys Rhea • April 2, 2025 at 5:00 am
Israel's complete jurisdiction over Area C, which legally includes building permits, zoning, construction, law enforcement and planning, was recognized and agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the world at large for almost three decades. As stipulated in the agreement, only when direct negotiations determine the permanent fate of the territories that had illegally been occupied by Jordan until 1967, can the Oslo Accords be replaced. Until then, it is the law.
First, they fabricated a name for this illegal encampment to make it appear "historic": "Khan al Ahmar." From there, they complained to the media that this destitute group of Arabs were being threatened with supposed "crimes against humanity": forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing. They accompanied their manufactured narrative with images of barefoot Bedouin children, and began pumping money into the settlement, and building these "dispossessed" children a school.
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the PA regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel. First, it identifies a strategic point located far from an existing population center. Second, it illegally seizes the land, invents a name for this "historic" village that never existed, and insists the squatters have been there since the dawn of time, despite historic aerial photographs showing otherwise. Third, it broadcasts any pushback from Israel as "cruel" and "oppressive," and "ethnic cleansing".... Then, it finds another location to invade.
As of today, the PA has built over 90,000 illegal structures and aggressively seized more than 23,000 acres of land.
[T]he UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been known to partner with the PA, and it actually plowed over the royal city of Shomron (Sebastia), the seat of the ancient Israelite Kingdom and one of the largest, most important archaeological sites in the area. UNESCO has also literally "reinvented" the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried -- as the purported tomb of a Muslim sheikh.
Attempted legal action against the EU, on the basis of its undermining the Oslo Accords, is met with the claim that its funding for the PA merely amounts to "humanitarian aid" and that the EU has full "diplomatic immunity." Carver, however, argues that this defense is invalid because the Vienna Convention stipulates that diplomats may only be granted immunity if they do not interfere in the internal affairs of a state, which the EU is actively doing by seizing land that is recognized legally as being under Israel's jurisdiction. In claiming immunity by falsely declaring that it is not interfering in Israel's internal affairs, the EU is also disregarding a foundational element of the UN charter: the principle of non-intervention.
The Europeans appear to want it both ways, on the one hand paying lip service to the Oslo Accords in order to criticize Israel, while on the other hand actively helping the PA to ignore the terms of the Accords. The chasm between proclaimed intention and actual behavior renders any commitment to peace laughable. The irony of the Europeans condemning Israel for expropriating questionable Palestinian land when the Europeans themselves are helping Palestinians to expropriate Israeli land is lost on the public at large.
Yesterday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced their commitment to "foil what they said was the Palestinian Authority's scheme to seize land across Judea and Samaria." Most of this vast, lawless land-grab, it turns out, has been energized and financed by the European Union (EU).
For decades, members of the media, activist groups, academics, international organizations, NGOs, and countless politicians have insisted that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the primary obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. These settlements, the assumption goes, represent an illegal and inhumane "occupation," and until they are dismantled and the territory handed over to a Palestinian state, there can be no resolution to the conflict.
