Do you support the settlements? They are illegal under international law and that ends the argument

The fuller answer

This entry does not tell you what to think about the settlements. Readers of this site disagree, and a handbook does not allocate a political position to its own audience. It makes sure that whichever position you hold, you can hold it under pressure. Two halves: read the one that is yours, then the third part, which both of you need.

One thing before either. Do not answer the question you were asked. It covers roughly 150 places, from a city of 92,000 people minutes from the Green Line to a caravan on a hilltop soldiers may remove next month. Ask which ones. That is not evasion, it is the first accurate thing anybody in the room will have said.

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Part one: if you support them

The connection is a site list, not a sentiment

Judea and Samaria are not words invented in 1967. They are the names of the places, and the places have been excavated.

At Sebastia, north of Nablus, archaeologists recovered around a hundred inscribed sherds recording deliveries of wine and oil to the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, Hebrew, written in ink, from the first half of the eighth century BCE. Tel Shiloh, twenty miles north of Jerusalem, carries settlement layers from the Middle Bronze Age and has been dug since 1926. Qumran, Wadi Murabba’at and Wadi Daliyeh are all in the West Bank, and between them produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, the letters of the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE, and Samaritan papyri of the fourth century BCE. At Hebron, the enclosure over the Cave of the Patriarchs is Herodian and survives from foundations to cornices.

Use the specifics rather than the feeling. “We have a connection to that land” invites an argument about emotions, which you cannot win. “The administrative records of the kingdom of Israel were dug out of Sebastia, which is in the West Bank” invites somebody to go and check.

Two limits, and answer both yourself. Excavation cannot locate a tent, so the position of the Tabernacle at Shiloh is faith rather than archaeology.

The second is where this argument usually gets surrendered. Somebody will say connection is not title. True, and not the point. Nobody derives sovereignty from potsherds, and title is argued from the law in the next section. What the sites establish is that Jews in Hebron and Shiloh are not foreigners in another people’s country, which is precisely what is asserted when the presence is called colonial. A colonist arrives from a metropole, and there is no metropole here.

So make it a move rather than a concession.

A dig doesn’t transfer sovereignty and I’m not claiming it does. I’m answering the claim that we’re foreign to that land, and that one doesn’t survive contact with the ground.

The legal argument on this side, and its named advocates

There is a real one. The law of belligerent occupation was written for territory taken from a sovereign state. In 1967 the West Bank had no lawful sovereign, the Jordanian annexation of 1950 having been recognised by almost nobody. With no prior sovereign there is no reversioner, the classic model does not fit, and the accurate word is disputed rather than occupied.

Four jurists set this out within three years of the war: Yehuda Blum, Elihu Lauterpacht, Julius Stone and Stephen Schwebel, who later became President of the International Court of Justice. It also has an official Israeli expression. A committee chaired by a former Supreme Court justice, Edmund Levy, reported on 9 July 2012 that Israel does not meet the criteria of military occupation in the West Bank, and that no rule of international law prohibits Jewish settlement there.

Now the part that has to travel with the argument, in the same breath.

This is a minority legal position. The International Court of Justice held on 19 July 2024 that transferring settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem is contrary to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, dividing fourteen to one on the operative paragraph. Security Council resolution 2334 passed fourteen to nil in December 2016. Israel’s own Supreme Court has worked on the basis of belligerent occupation for decades, and the Levy report was never adopted by the government that commissioned it.

Assert “it is disputed, not occupied” as settled and you will be corrected, and everything you say afterwards will be discounted.

Weak: “The West Bank is disputed territory. It is not occupied.”

Strong: “There is a serious legal argument, made by Schwebel and Stone and by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, that occupation law does not fit territory with no prior sovereign. It is a minority view. I hold it, and I know the Court went the other way.”

The second cannot be knocked over, because it has already conceded the fact the knock-over depends on. The first dies to one sentence.

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Part two: if you do not support them

You are allowed to say so, and nothing here will ask you to pretend otherwise. But saying it carelessly hands over the argument, and this half is about the difference.

Concede something specific, never something general

“I don’t support the settlements” is an unforced surrender, because your opponent now gets to decide what you have agreed to. Name the thing you object to.

Weak: “I’m against the settlements.”

Strong: “I think the outposts are indefensible, and I think building deep in the West Bank has cost Israel more than it ever bought.”

The second gives away no more than the first, and tells the room you hold a view rather than a reflex.

The separation that carries the whole thing

Two sentences, and you have to be able to say the first without the second following.

I think that policy is wrong.

I think that state should not exist.

Almost every trap in this argument works by making the second sound like the conclusion of the first. No other country is treated that way. So say the separation out loud rather than assuming it is understood.

I can think a policy is wrong. That isn’t a view about whether the country should be there.

The reciprocity move

This is the strongest line in this half. Use it when somebody demands a disavowal and then treats the disavowal as an admission.

I don’t defend that, and you don’t defend Hamas. Neither of us has just conceded that the other side has no right to exist.

It works because it is fair, not because it is clever. You have offered exactly the terms you are asking for, and refusing them means saying out loud that criticism disqualifies one side and not the other.

Where this backfires. With an audience that reads any concession as disloyalty it will sound like changing sides. With a hostile opponent hunting for a clip, “I do not defend that” is the four seconds that gets posted. Say the whole thing in one breath or do not start it. You know your room and this page does not.

Concede the settlers as people, not as a category

About 541,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements on 2025 figures. Modi’in Illit has around 92,000 residents and Beitar Illit nearly 75,000, both ultra-Orthodox towns minutes from the Green Line where the draw is housing a large family can afford. Voting patterns between 2000 and 2015 classify 48 per cent of the settlements as non-ideological secular and a further 7 per cent as non-ideological ultra-Orthodox, and 45 per cent of all settlers lived in those non-ideological settlements.

So do not argue against a category. Half a million people treated as one political object is factually wrong, and weak in front of an audience, because everybody listening knows somebody who moved somewhere for the mortgage.

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Part three: what both readers need

The distinction nobody makes and everybody should

About 77 per cent of settlers live west of the security barrier, in a small number of blocs on or near the Green Line. Every serious final-status proposal assumed Israel keeps them under a land swap, one detailed Israeli plan putting the swap at 3.9 per cent of the territory. There is more on what was offered.

The outposts are a different object, illegal under Israeli law rather than only under anybody else’s. More than a hundred went up between 1992 and 2020 without government approval, and an Israeli government inquiry reported in March 2005 that it knew of 105 of them, built by bypassing procedure and violating the law, with state bodies helping put them up. It added that 105 was probably an undercount. Amona was demolished by court order in 2017.

A reader who cannot make that distinction is defending or attacking one undifferentiated thing that does not exist.

Israel has evacuated settlements, twice

In 1982, under the treaty with Egypt, Israel dismantled every settlement in Sinai, including Yamit, a town of roughly 600 houses, cleared on 23 April. In August 2005 it removed 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank, Ganim, Kadim, Sa-Nur and Homesh, more than 8,000 Jewish residents in a week.

Say the sequel yourself. In March 2023 the law barring return to those four northern sites was repealed by 31 votes to 18, and Israelis have gone back to one of them. Leave it out and somebody else will put it in, and it will look as though you hid it.

The evacuations still matter. They make settlement a policy rather than an identity, and a policy is a thing a state can change.

The comparative point, and the limit that goes with it

Populations settled into territory under disputed control are not unique to this conflict. The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly has estimated 115,000 Turkish settlers in northern Cyprus and called the policy hidden colonisation. In Western Sahara, Moroccan settlers are reckoned to outnumber the indigenous Sahrawi population. A study of eight such occupations, from East Timor to Crimea, found settler growth to be a standard feature of long occupations that is almost never called a Geneva Convention breach.

Now the limit, in the same breath. This is an argument about the standard being applied, not a defence of anything. Deploy it as one and you are running whataboutery, you will be told so, and you will have earned it. There is a whole entry on doing this properly.

Weak: “What about Turkey in Cyprus?”

Strong: “I am not using Cyprus to excuse anything. I am asking why identical conduct produces a global movement in one case and silence in the other. Answer the settlements separately and I will too.”

Settler violence

Concede this by name, early. A reader who has never heard of it will be ambushed by it.

Israeli monitoring of police files on ideologically motivated offences against Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005 finds 93.6 per cent closed without an indictment, and about 3 per cent ending in full or partial conviction. Nearly thirty incidents of organised mass violence are recorded between 2023 and November 2025.

Two things are true together. Israeli police open files, prosecutors bring charges and courts convict. And the enforcement rate is poor enough that Israeli organisations have spent twenty years documenting it.

The line to have ready:

Settler violence is real, it’s documented, and the prosecution rate is bad. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Now ask me about the blocs, which is a different question.

The move that works for both of you

Whichever half you read, the opening is the same.

Which ones? The blocs, the isolated settlements, or the outposts? I’ve got a different answer for each.

It concedes no position and turns a loyalty test into a subject. From there the reader who supports them argues the blocs, and the reader who does not concedes the outposts by name. Both are standing on ground they can hold.

The lines

Gathered from both halves above, so you can find them without reading the page. Nobody follows these mechanically. Take the shape and use your own words.

Which ones? The blocs, the isolated settlements, or the outposts? I’ve got a different answer for each.

About three quarters of settlers live in a few blocs on the Green Line that every serious peace plan assumed Israel keeps. Which ones are you asking me about?

A study of eight long-term occupations found settler populations grew in every one. Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, Crimea. Which of the other seven do you have a position on?

I can think a policy is wrong. That isn’t a view about whether the country should be there.

I don’t defend that, and you don’t defend Hamas. Neither of us has just conceded that the other side has no right to exist.

Israel has taken settlements down twice, in Sinai and in Gaza. So tell me what it is you think can’t be negotiated.