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January 25th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
The number of Israeli Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank suffers from international confusion. The figures span between 400,000 and over 700,000. I’ve looked through the data and made statistical adjustments and can say that the 700K figure is likely most accurate.
But before we get into those numbers, I want to point out, that the difference between 400K and 700K is not an essential difference. The really big issue here, which is why the settler numbers are cited, is what that actually means in terms of ever reaching that elusive “two-state solution”. Because those settlers are not just people, they also live in houses – Israel just issued another 2.5K tenders on settler homes, hours before Biden’s inauguration.
And it’s not just settlers and homes – it’s also how Israel’s expansionism is perceived and accepted, sometimes with some critical lip-tax, by the interntional community, and not least, by the United States. I mean, look at US policy now, even after the Israel-adoring Trump presidency is over: Secretary of State-designate Tony Blinken hails Trump’s “normalization” deals with Arab countries, which sold Palestinians out; and asked by Ted Cruz in his Senate Foreign Relations vetting session whether Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and whether he would keep the embassy there, Blinken answered immediately “yes and yes”.
Joe Biden’s commitment to Israeli security is “sacrosanct”, Blinken says, and the 2-state solution is “obviously a solution that is very challenged at this moment”, and “realistically its hard to see near term prospects for moving forward on that.” In a recent speech he underscored that the US “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes. Period. Full stop.” And any other “differences” that may arise with Israel?
“To the greatest extent possible”, he said, they will be kept “between friends and behind doors”.
Oh, the pressure on Israel is huge! Huge!
That institutionalized Israel-protectionism is a big part of the story. “Liberals” like Blinken can bemoan the “very challenged” 2-state solution, but they will not challenge Israel, at least not in daylight.
And we’re supposed to believe this will change things? But it’s an open secret. They are talking the talk of the “2-states” and the settlers are doing the walk! In his outstanding recent essay in the London Review of Books titled “The separate regimes delusion”, Nathan Thrall points out how all the dire warnings about the 2-state possibility fading away haven’t helped Palestinians, just made it worse!
Diplomats and well-meaning anti-occupation groups greet every new act of Israeli expansion with dire warnings that it will be a ‘fatal blow’ to the two-state solution, that ‘the window is closing’ for Palestinian statehood and that now, on the eve of this latest takeover, it is ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the prospect of peace. Countless alarms of this kind have been rung during the past two decades. Each was supposed to convince Israel, the US, Europe and the rest of the world of the need to stop or at least slow Israel’s de facto annexation. But they have had the opposite effect: demonstrating that it will always be five minutes to midnight.
So it’s not just about the number of settlers. The settlers are the actual human bodies that manifest this expansionism, and a body needs a house, and a house needs land and infrastructure, and all that needs political protection–and that’s what people like Tony Blinken are good for! So it’s one big and complex colonialist machine.
And as the human shields for this venture, the Zionist pioneers, the settlers are the first to realise that their numbers are important. So let’s look at those numbers:
The citing of about 400K appears to come from an outdated count of Israeli Jewish settlers in the West bank excluding East Jerusalem. It must be understood that such citations are egregiously misleading. Not only is East Jerusalem a part of the West Bank – but its 1967 conquest by Israel and subsequent annexation resulted in an expansion of municipal boundaries tenfold, to include the lands of 28 Palestinian villages plus municipal lands of Bethlehem and Beit Jala. Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem is “null and void” by international law and UNSC resolutions.
Hence, an uncritical citation of 400K settlers is a way of “handing over” East Jerusalem plus a huge chunk of the West Bank to Israel. Those East Jerusalem settlers are the pioneers securing the “eternal capital” of Israel by cutting off the West Bank from anywhere near Jerusalem. You have to add them in.
So, what are the numbers?
Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem cites rather old population statistics, from 2016 and 2017, and arrives at nearly 623K settlers:
There are an estimated 622,670 settlers in the West Bank. This figure is derived from two sources: According to data provided by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), at the end of 2017, 413,400 people were living in the settlements of the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. According to data provided by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the population of the Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem numbered 209,270 people at the end of 2016.
That is good at the outset. But how has that population increased since? B’Tselem:
According to the CBS, the annual growth rate of the settler population (excluding East Jerusalem) in 2017 was 1.75 times greater than that of the population in Israel: an annual increase of 3.5% in the settlements versus 2% in Israel. Approximately 60% of the increase in the settler population is accounted for by relocation by Israelis and the arrival of new immigrants to Israel who chose to live in settlements.
Yes – the settlers themselves boast about this growth. In a June 2016 piece on the settler outlet Israel National News titled “The precise number of Jews in the ‘West Bank’”, settlers write that “since December 31, 2010 the number of Jews in Judea and Samaria has increased by 23.95%”. That’s more than 4% per year on average in those 5-1/2 years, according to the settlers.
But let’s just go with the low statistic figure of 3.5% cited by B’tselem. We need to adjust the 2017 West Bank figure, excluding East Jerusalem, by multiplying it three times by 3.5% compounded. The figure arrived at is just over 458K. To that we need to add the East Jerusalem figure of 2016– 209,000. Apply the growth figure over four years since 2016 and the result is just over 240,000.
The two figures put together give over 698,000 settlers – nearly 700K.
This number, by the way, does not include the Israeli Jewish settlers of the occupied Syrian Golan – about 25,000. This settler population is often disregarded in commentaries on settlers, pertaining to the Israel-Palestine issue.
Let’s go back to the settler outlet’s figures. They start out with a 2016 baseline for West Bank only.
Based on the Population Registry of Israel’s Interior Ministry, there are 406,302 Jews in Judea and Samaria as of December 31, 2015.
That’s pretty close to B’Tselem’s figure of 413,000 a year or so later. The settlers move on to East Jerusalem.
As clearly stated in the report, the statistics do not include eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem (e.g. Pisgat Zeev, Ramat Shlomo, Ramot, Gilo, Ramat Eshkol, etc.) which are technically part of the West Bank and are home to another approximately 360,000 Jews.
So here the settler’s figure differs widely from B’Tselem’s 209K. And bottom line, the settlers arrive at over 766,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem combined, going back four years!
The annual growth rate in the number of settlers also has upticks, well above 3.5 or 4 percent. A 2009 UN report on “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan” cited Israeli media and stated that “in 2009 the settler population, excluding in East Jerusalem, grew by 4.9 per cent, a much faster rate than the general population in Israel (1.8 per cent).”
As B’Tselem notes, most of that growth is not ‘natural growth’, it is promoted growth: “relocation by Israelis and the arrival of new immigrants to Israel who chose to live in settlements”. It is an active colonization.
It’s interesting that the settler outlet cites none other than the late leftist Meretz politician Yossi Sarid, from his 2012 piece in Haaretz:
I always convinced myself that what was being done can and will be reversed, and that the long-awaited awakening would surely come. Now it’s too late.
In an interview last year with in the Danish Weekendavisen, the celebrated Israeli historian Tom Segev said the two populations are inseparable ideologically, they represent the same Zionist process:
There is no difference between the settlements in Hebron and the first Zionist kibbutz that was established in Degania in northern Israel [Palestine, ed.] in 1910… Because that’s what Zionism is about. To fill up the country with Jews. It is the same process, and it is not over yet. For the same reason, I believe that it is historically wrong to separate between what happened before 1967, and that which happened after. Why is the Palestinian tragedy in 1948 lesser than that which occurred after the war in 1967?
That’s a breathtaking point. It’s actually the same point the settlers themselves make when they say they are today’s pioneers and that elite leftists shouldn’t be telling them they are wrong when the settlers are doing exactly what they did before 1948 and after.
So we’ve arrived at that one Aparthied state, from the river to the sea, as B’Tselem concluded last week. And that seems to be very Zionist indeed.
It’s not a mistake, it’s not an aberration – it’s a fulfilment of the goal. Another settler home tender will be issued, another settler baby will be born, all on the way to make Israel great again. And Tony Blinken will say “yes and yes.”
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