Creating facts on the ground
This phrase has been used to describe Israel’s policies in regards to the occupied territories ever since they were taken during the 1967 Six Day War. At the end of the war, Israel realized that at some point they might have to give back the occupied territories. After all, it is illegal according to international law to take land through war. Saddam Husayn tried it in the 1991 Gulf War and paid dearly for it. Soon after the Six Day War, Israel started to create an Israeli presence in the occupied territories by moving settlers into those areas and building settlements and roads. The idea was that when Israel was eventually forced to give back those territories, it would be impossible because of the “fact” that hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers were living there.
In a sense this theory has worked. The settlements, especially those in the West Bank, have proved to be a major stumbling block for a two-state solution. The Palestinians for their part will rightly not agree to a nation that is crisscrossed by Israeli roads, settlements, and barriers. No Israeli government in recent memory has been strong enough to remove the settlements that need to be removed in order to make a Palestinian state in the West Bank feasible. With almost 500,000 settlers in the West Bank, some of those ideologically and religiously driven to remain on the land, the idea of removing them is unfortunately almost laughable. Evidence of this is the battle the Israeli army had to go through to simply evict a couple dozen settlers from Hebron.
So does all this mean that Israel’s policy of “creating facts on the ground” has worked? Since the alternative to creating a Palestinian state is incorporating the Palestinians into a single state which would effectively lead to Israel not being a state only for Jews, I think the practice is coming back to bite them.