Who has the right to the land in Israel-Palestine?: The Story

Fifty-six percent for one-third of the population

714,000. That is the number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as of 2024. It was 110,000 at Oslo in 1993. It was 250,000 at Camp David in 2000. The number has grown at roughly five percent per year, through left-wing and right-wing governments, during negotiations and during wars. Apply it forward ten years and you reach a million settlers in territory that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

October 7, 2023, stripped whatever remained of the abstraction. Hamas fighters killed roughly 1,200 Israelis in a single morning. Israel’s military response killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, displaced nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, and produced satellite imagery that suggested something happened to the urban grid itself. The International Court of Justice found it plausible that genocide was occurring. The word entered the legal record and changed nothing on the ground.

The claims underneath

Jewish connection to the land is archaeological, scriptural, and continuous. Palestinian families hold deeds to properties inside Israel’s 1948 borders. Some still have the keys. The Nakba displaced roughly 700,000 people; their descendants number over five million, living in camps that have outlasted most UN member states. The biggest problem is that each side’s narrative requires the other’s to be illegitimate.

Since 1967, over 700,000 settlers have moved across the Green Line, connected by bypass roads that fragment Palestinian territory into an archipelago. Israeli settlers live under civil law. Their Palestinian neighbors live under military law. How you classify that arrangement is where Israeli security, Palestinian rights, binationalists, and one-state realists diverge so sharply they sometimes seem to be describing four different countries.

The demographic tiebreaker

Both major American candidates ran as pro-war, which means the external actor with the most leverage has opted out. Between the river and the sea, the Palestinian population is growing faster. By most projections, Jews will be a minority within the territory Israel controls by the early 2030s. The one-state realists have been pointing at this graph for twenty years. The other three perspectives are arguing about a map the birth rates have already redrawn.

Perspectives:
- Israeli security
- Palestinian rights
- Binationalists
- One-state realists