cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6188824

How ‘Judea and Samaria’ became state doctrine

Such remarks are part of a wider strategy adopted by Israel and its western allies to impose new facts on the ground, legitimized through religious and historical narratives to justify the gradual annexation of the occupied West Bank. For years, Tel Aviv has pursued an aggressive expansionist policy built on illegal settlement construction, creeping annexation, and the erasure of the Palestinian land’s geographic and political identity. Most recently, Israeli authorities approved a new settlement project in the heart of Hebron (Al-Khalil), consisting of hundreds of housing units next to the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is now mostly a synagogue under Israeli control.

Israel’s strategy in the occupied West Bank is a complex, multi-layered one that far exceeds the parameters of temporary military administration. It is a long-term blueprint for de facto annexation – what could be termed “creeping annexation.” Through legal warfare, archaeology, settlement expansion, and political engineering, Tel Aviv is redrawing the region’s geography and demography to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. The aim is to impose irreversible facts on the ground and absorb the territory into the so-called “Biblical Land of Israel” – a supremacist strategy that works toward dismembering the Palestinian national project and the consolidation of permanent Jewish-Israeli control.

At the heart of Israel’s colonization strategy lies the foundational myth that “Judea and Samaria” are the ancient birthright of the Jewish people. This religious-nationalist narrative, central to the Zionist project and championed by settler and far-right factions, is the ideological engine driving Israel’s land theft. In this warped worldview, the seizure of Palestinian territory is seen as a righteous reclamation rather than an occupation, justified as a divinely sanctioned ‘return’ that cloaks a settler-colonial enterprise in biblical language and fabricated heritage.

However, even within Israeli academic circles, this ideological claim faces serious scrutiny. Renowned Israeli archaeologist Professor Rafi Greenberg of Tel Aviv University harshly criticizes what he calls “the weaponization of archaeology.” He notes that the archaeological record in Palestine offers no exclusive evidence of a single group’s historical claim.

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