Conquest, Expulsion, Settlement

Foreign Affairs It is not difficult to project what comes next in Gaza. Featured in the September/October 2026 issue This article is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians and the West Bank, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. The maximalist agenda of Israel’s settlement movement has been energized by the calamity of the Second War for Palestine. The “Conquest” of Gaza, the “Expulsion” of its 2.1 million residents, followed by the “Settlement” of the Gaza Strip are the unabashed objectives of the ideological vanguard of Israel’s twenty-first century settlement movement. This movement traces its roots, and indeed even its current leaders, to the Park Hotel that marked the inauguration of Jewish (re)settlement in Hebron more than