If "settlers" are so terrible, why are so many Palestinians moving into Area C? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, January 05, 2026

If "settlers" are so terrible, why are so many Palestinians moving into Area C?

Yesterday a commenter on my Substack said something about "ongoing despoliation of Area C Palestinians."

So I thought to look up how many Arabs lived in Area C when it was first defined, and how many live there now.

I found an AP backgrounder from 1997 that said that there were about 30,000 Arabs in Area C at that time.

Today, that number is some 354,000. (And Area C is significantly smaller than it was in 1997, now 62% of the West Bank, not the 73% of the time of this backgrounder.)

That's a twelve-fold increase in less than 30 years, far higher than normal Palestinian population growth, which roughly doubled in the same time period.

Clearly, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians decided to move into Area C, often illegally, but with the backing of the EU. It is also a result of the "Fayyad Plan," a 2009 plan by then-prime minister Salam Fayyad to encourage building in Area C to take it over demographically.

This is not natural growth. These are families who had houses in other parts of the West Bank who were encouraged to move to areas that the Oslo Accords said they should not be moving into.

They are the illegal settlers!

And now the world is complaining about how Israeli policy doesn't accommodate hundreds of thousands of Arab residents in Area C - nearly all of them who are illegal squatters!

"Settlers" are not allowed to go to Areas A and B. If Arab life near settlements is as intolerable as we are constantly told, then why are Palestinians still moving their families into those areas?

The media is not doing its job. As usual.