Since October 2023, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank; 11,000 more have been injured, either by the Israeli military or by “settlers”—Israeli citizens who establish settlements and drive Palestinians from surrounding areas. More than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished in ongoing attempts to steal their lands.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 1,800 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 alone. The goal is to eradicate Palestine “between the Sea and the Jordan” river, as the original charter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads.
Around 900,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, more than 30 percent of the population, are registered refugees from 1948 and 1967. But more are being internally displaced. Penny Green, a professor at Queen Mary University of London and founder of the International State Crime Initiative, a research centre, recently spent two weeks in the West Bank observing the situation in the so-called humanitarian camps. She was interviewed by Janey Stone, author (with Donny Gluckstein) of The Radical Jewish Tradition.
Tell us about your engagement with Palestine.
My first project, fifteen years ago, looked at forced evictions in the Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. A process of Judaisation was taking place, and Palestinians were being forced out of their homes by settlers with the support of the Israeli state. I also visited the Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Negev Desert. The Israeli government had a policy of removing them from their lands, destroying their villages and pushing them into towns and cities where their traditional ways of life were no longer possible.
You’ve returned to the West Bank many times. How much has changed?
The central change relates to the way in which the settlement project links to the military project of Israel’s settler colonialism. Since October 2023, when eyes were off the West Bank, the settlements have expanded dramatically, as has the violence deployed by settlers, who were greatly emboldened by the Gaza events. But we shouldn’t just categorise the settlers as crazy, insane, deranged fanatics; they are, in effect, Israel’s frontier shock troops. The Palestinians are brutalised by the Israeli occupying forces, and they’re brutalised by an illegal settler population which has expanded now to about 800,000.
Each time I go, I see new settlements throughout the West Bank, looking like European holiday towns with rows of identical houses and always pitched on top of hills. And the residents, who are recent arrivals, are massively supported by the state and given homes and subsidies.
What were you researching on your most recent visit?
My major research is to look at the humanitarian camp as a site of genocidal reproduction. It’s crucial to understand that genocide is not an event. It’s a process, and it always begins with strategies of dehumanisation, which are state-sponsored. Dehumanisation leads to violence, and if that violence gets a green light, then more and more violence follows. This very often leads to or runs parallel with apartheid forms of segregation, and often camps. Once people are in camps, they’re much easier to weaken physically and emotionally; it’s easier for their communities to become fractured. When people are weakened to such an extent, and fragmented and isolated from their former neighbours, then it is much easier for genocidal states to annihilate and erase them.
Given that many of the elements of the genocidal process appear in the camps, the question is whether humanitarian camps are less about safety and security and more about containment and reproducing the genocidal process, irrespective of the aims of the humanitarians who manage them.
This makes me think of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ plans to exterminate all Jews, which began by segregating them into ghettos. So before people were sent off to concentration camps, they were separated from other people, where the process you’ve just been describing could occur.
Yes, exactly. My project is to look at the structures of the camp, how they were formed, how they are managed and the ways in which dehumanisation and systematic weakening are fostered within the segregated nature of the camp setting. The replication or persistence of these processes continues the genocide and makes target populations vulnerable to annihilation and erasure.
Can you provide a couple of examples that illustrate this process?
Shu’fat in Jerusalem, the only camp under direct Israeli control, is by far the most miserable Palestinian camp I visited. It’s not the poorest camp, but it’s incredibly densely overcrowded, polluted, and crime is endemic. Residents attribute these conditions directly to Israeli policy, which is to depopulate Jerusalem of its Arab citizens and move them to camps where they can be contained and controlled. Inside these camps, people remain effectively stateless, and Israel seeks to make conditions of life so unbearable that Palestinians will leave. Palestinian resistance has had its historical base in the refugee camps—another reason why Israel wants them destroyed.
Until they were forcibly evicted last year and their camps destroyed, people from places like Tulkarm camp who wanted to work would have to get up at midnight or one in the morning to join queues, enter metal cages, shuffle along extremely oppressive metal corridors and through electronic turnstiles just to cross into Israel to work. They were treated worse than cattle.
So when I visit the West Bank, I see that dehumanisation, the apartheid segregation, the daily and increasing violence and the persistent efforts to systematically weaken and displace Palestinians.
New settlements are being established all the time. This is part of the process as well—an expansion of an already very unjust system. Can you say more about that?
Israeli apartheid is fundamental to its Palestinian dehumanisation strategy. The segregation/apartheid wall is massive, unimaginably intrusive and disruptive. It’s designed to be this way—it was never about “protection”. It was designed to fragment Palestinian communities, to make life for Palestinians intolerable and to grab land. Each time a section of the wall is built, it grabs metres and metres and metres of land and very often divides and completely segregates one section of a Palestinian village from another.
Then there are the roads that link the settlements to Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Palestinians are not allowed to travel on these because they’ll be shot at. Driving in Palestine is the most arduous experience. You never know if you’re going to make it to your destination because, at a whim, a checkpoint will be closed, at a whim, you’ll arrive at a yellow barrier or be prevented by soldiers from going any further.
Palestinians are always on their phone using apps that help them work out how they can move from one place to another, which checkpoint is open or just closed, which is a safer route to travel, where they can and cannot drive. Where once it would have taken ten minutes to get somewhere, it can now take two and a half hours.
How do Palestinians cope in this increasingly vicious cycle of dehumanisation, segregation, systematic weakening and violence?
The Palestinians are extraordinary in the way in which they resist the systematic process to weaken them. They talk about sumud (“steadfastness”). It is something incredibly powerful that, despite all of this, Palestinians remain resolutely committed to staying inside Palestine, to resisting in non-violent ways. But it is exhausting.
You’ve talked about the disruption of daily life. But Israel is also destroying Palestinian traditions, their culture and their history. We saw in Gaza the bombing of schools and universities and historical buildings and so on. Recently, Israel has destroyed seed banks in Hebron. Why?
The seed banks represent the future for the Palestinian people, an agricultural and sustainable future. It’s yet another means of trying to ensure that there is no way forward for Palestinians. Another way is to destroy all the schools, which is why Israel has now expelled the United Nations Relief and Works Agency from the West Bank. Since 1948, UNRWA has done an extraordinary job in educating Palestinians, but no longer. The Palestinians from Gaza are the most highly educated people in the Middle East.
Another aspect is the settlers and the military constantly ripping up olive groves and apricot orchards, and poisoning and stealing Palestinians’ water.
It’s a cruel form of punishment for existing as a Palestinian. As Patrick Wolfe said of the settler colonial project, the goal is the elimination of the native. And genocide is the mechanism by which that erasure, that elimination, is taking place.Of course, this is not new. It didn’t begin in October 2023. We have to start with 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. The idea that Britain would gift Palestine with its Palestinian population to European Zionists intent on building a Jewish homeland is perhaps the most grotesque act of dehumanisation.
And then the Zionists say, “A land without people for a people without land”. So the land has no people. As Golda Meir famously said, “They did not exist”.
The opposite was true, of course. In 1917, Arab Palestinians amounted to 92 percent of the population. They lived in thriving towns and cities and cultivated the land rich in olive groves and orchards. The settlers arriving from Eastern Europe and beyond had no idea about agriculture and animal husbandry. They destroyed Palestinian farmlands, stole livestock and ripped up ancient olive groves and orchards.
In Hebron today, settlers have occupied the heart of the old city. There are huge banners in the main street perpetuating this lie: “Palestine never existed”, “There are no Palestinians”. There is also graffiti reading “Gas the Arabs”. The genocidal intentions of these settlers have been absolutely clear for decades. But crucially, the settlers can only commit their crimes because they are fully protected by the Israeli military.
You’ve described the camps in the north of the West Bank as looking like Gaza. How so?
Last year, Israel attacked the camps of Jenin and Tukaram and Nur Shams with no notice and forced 40,000 people to flee their homes and communities. Many had nowhere to go. In the very early hours of the morning, soldiers came with bulldozers and began destroying huge swathes of the camps, pillaging homes as they went.
But looking at it politically, the whole settler colonial project is a demographic one. The Israelis need to remove the Palestinians to prevent them from challenging the Jewish supremacy of the Israeli state. From the start, the Israeli state was very clear about its need to create and maintain a Jewish majority. Now, Israel is facing what its supporters consider a “demographic crisis”: in addition to the existence of Palestinians, more Jews are now leaving than entering Israel.
But that raises an enormous question—the right of return for Palestinians previously expelled by Zionist militias or by the Israeli state or by settlers.
The right of return is critical. Refugee status for the Palestinians traverses generations. It has been ratified in at least five United Nations resolutions, including Article 11 of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194. That’s something that Palestinians hold on to. Not everybody will want to return, but the idea and the possibility of return are central to Palestinian resistance.
But Israel gives no credence to it at all—quite the opposite. Anyone with Jewish ancestry, regardless of nationality, can come there to live, but Palestinians who were or whose families were forcibly evicted from Palestine have no possibility to exercise the right of return.
Reflecting on your recent visit, how do you think the West Bank compares to Gaza?
Like so many others, I have watched Gazan journalists, doctors and academics convey exactly what’s been happening. I saw clearly on this visit how the West Bank is coming to resemble present-day Gaza. In the camps, I saw blue stars of David sprayed over destroyed buildings, destroyed homes where military snipers have made their bases, and thousands of Israeli flags planted by settlers every ten metres along Highway 60 between Ramallah and the camps. Israel was never concerned only with Gaza. Its destruction of the West Bank, while different in character, is driven by exactly the same eliminationist goal.
