“The establishment of Israeli settlements, one must recall, was supposed to be a security measure in the occupied territory, and it was with this rationale that Israel defended the legality of its settlement enterprise. One looks on with an almost stultified gaze at the teenage settlers’ abduction, and the hysterical West Bank crackdown, and asks security for whom? It is difficult to imagine what security needs are sated by the civilian settlement of a hostile region, and even harder when it is precisely those settlers who seem so predisposed to catalyze insecurity. The perverse logic of the occupation, with its inseparable settler enterprise, creates the very conditions that allow it to continue.”

Read more: Jordan Calazan Manalastas, Occupation and Its Discontents: The Pretext and Pretense of Security in Occupied Palestine, 2 Cornell Int’l L.J. Online 105 (2014).