The Zionist ideal of Jewish agriculture in the Land of Israel reached the occupied West Bank within months of the end of the 1967 War.
The agricultural takeover of large swaths of land requires relatively few resources and time in comparison with actual construction or the establishment of outposts, and facilitates the quick establishment of facts on the ground.
This activity is part of a widespread and well-funded strategy, whose explicit goal is to expand the territory controlled by Israeli settlers throughout Area C in the West Bank.
A recent report by Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot shows that the wholesale takeover of agricultural land is not and isolated effort of individual settlers or settlements, but part of a long-term and well-funded strategy that has been encouraged and supported by governmental and public agencies for many years, despite the blatant illegality of much of the activity, even in terms of Israeli law.
Kerem Navot is a new Israeli civil society organization, established during 2012 and employing comprehensive land-use research to challenge the systems and policies that enable ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their land in the West Bank.