Israel’s Ministry of Interior register, as carried in the US Department of State’s 2023 country report on human rights practices, recorded 517,407 Israeli settlers in the West Bank outside East Jerusalem at 31 December 2023, up from approximately 502,991 at the start of that year and more than 15% above the 2018 level. The European External Action Service recorded 1,177 Palestinian structures demolished or seized across the West Bank including East Jerusalem during 2023, which it described as the highest number since 2016. Two published totals for settlement housing units moved through Israeli planning stages in 2024 differ by 18,518 units, and the phrase in the question, settler colonialism, is argued over by named scholars and organizations on both sides while the registers and planning counts they argue about are not themselves in dispute.
Key Findings
- 517,407 Israeli settlers were recorded in the West Bank outside East Jerusalem at 31 December 2023 on Israel’s Ministry of Interior register, as reported by the US Department of State in its 2023 country report, against approximately 502,991 at the start of that year.
- 28,872 settlement housing units were advanced or tendered in 2024, of which 18,988 were in East Jerusalem and 9,884 in the rest of the West Bank, against 30,682 units in 2023, per the European External Action Service’s 2025 monitoring report built on Israeli planning data.
- 1,177 Palestinian structures were demolished or seized in 2023 and 2,296 individuals were displaced as a result, per the European External Action Service’s one-year report, which calls the structure count the highest recorded since 2016.
- The settler population grew more than 15% between 2018 and 2023 on the ministry register, at least about 2.8% a year compounded, against national population growth Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported at 1.0% in the year to September 2025 and 2.2% in 2022.
- 26.9% of 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading UK media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation were coded antisemitic under an IHRA-based scheme by Becker, Ascone and Troschke in 2022, with the apartheid analogy appearing in 5.2% of those antisemitic comments.
What do the official records count in the West Bank?
Israel’s Ministry of Interior register, as carried in the US Department of State’s 2023 country report on human rights practices, recorded 517,407 Israeli settlers in the West Bank outside East Jerusalem at 31 December 2023. That figure comes from the residency register held by the state that issues the permits, not from an outside estimate.
The same report gives approximately 502,991 settlers in the same territory at the beginning of 2023 and states that the West Bank settler population had risen by more than 15% since 2018.
It is often said that more than 700,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem together. The nearest published arithmetic for that figure sits in the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ 2024 thematic report on Israeli settlements, which drew on data compiled by the Israeli organization Peace Now and gave roughly 465,000 settlers in the West Bank and roughly 230,000 in East Jerusalem, along with about 3,000 living inside Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. Those are that office’s figures on its own compilation, and the two components sum to about 695,000. They are not the same quantity as the ministry’s 517,407, because they cover different territory, rest on a different compilation and carry a different date.
The scope choice is what separates them. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s national population total, while international monitoring reports the West Bank and East Jerusalem as separate series. Any settler figure therefore has to be read with its territory stated, and the West Bank settler population appears in the record as at least two distinct series rather than one.
Is the settlement project expanding at a record pace?
The European External Action Service recorded 28,872 settlement housing units advanced or tendered during 2024, against 30,682 units in 2023, in its monitoring report built on Israeli planning data.
Within the 2024 total, 18,988 units were advanced in occupied East Jerusalem and 9,884 in the rest of the West Bank, the two components summing to the 28,872 figure. On this series the year-over-year movement is a decrease of 1,810 units.
A second published total for the same year runs the other way. A 2025 report summarized by UN bodies put settlement housing units approved, advanced or tendered in 2024 at 47,390, against about 26,170 in 2023, an increase of some 21,220 units. The two 2024 totals differ by 18,518 units, and the direction of the annual change differs with them, because the counts cover different planning actions: one series counts units advanced or tendered, the other adds approvals to those categories.
Both series count Israeli planning decisions rather than completed construction. A unit that has been advanced through a planning stage or put out to tender is a unit inside an administrative process, and neither monitor reports how many were built.
So the direction in the question holds on either count: tens of thousands of housing units moved through Israeli settlement planning in a single year, with the majority of the European Union’s 2024 count falling in East Jerusalem. Which of the two totals a reader has met determines whether 2024 reads as a slight decline or a record high, and the gap is a difference in counting rules, not in the underlying planning record.
How many Palestinians lose homes to demolition or seizure?
The European External Action Service’s one-year report recorded 1,177 Palestinian structures demolished or seized across the West Bank including East Jerusalem during 2023, which it described as the highest number recorded since 2016.
The same report records 2,296 individuals displaced as a result of those demolitions and seizures, and 439,875 individuals affected. Those two are different measures: displacement counts people who lost the structure they lived in, while the affected count is a wider category taking in people whose services, access or property were touched without their being displaced.
It is often said that the settlement system has produced record displacement. In the demolition and seizure series, the record is a stated one with a stated start: highest since 2016, on the European Union’s own monitoring.
A wider displacement figure for the same year comes from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which published about 4,000 Palestinians displaced in the West Bank during 2023 on its own definitions, counting demolitions for lack of Israeli-issued building permits, structures destroyed during Israeli forces operations, and departures from Area C communities associated with settler violence, access restrictions and shrinking grazing land. That office’s count spans a broader set of causes than demolition and seizure alone, which is why it sits above the 2,296 figure. Neither number corrects the other, and the two are not summed.
| Measure, 2023 | Count | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Palestinian structures demolished or seized | 1,177 | European External Action Service, 2024 |
| Individuals displaced by those actions | 2,296 | European External Action Service, 2024 |
| Individuals affected by those actions | 439,875 | European External Action Service, 2024 |
How many settler attacks does the annual record register?
The largest published tally is the more than 5,330 alleged settler attacks in the West Bank recorded by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and reported in 2025. That is the office’s own compilation on its own definitions, and the word it carries is alleged.
It is often said that settler violence is state violence, a formulation published by the Israeli organization B’Tselem. What the record registers is narrower than any such characterization: a running count of reported incidents, aggregated by a monitoring body from field reporting, with no adjudicated determination attached to the aggregate.
The attribution inside those incidents is itself measured. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s 2024 report, Civilians or Soldiers? Settler Violence in the West Bank, sets out the coding problem directly: incidents recorded in the West Bank frequently involve settlers, Israeli security forces, or both present at the same event, so the decision about which actor an event is attributed to changes what any settler-violence total contains. Two datasets applying different attribution rules to the same field reports will not produce the same number, and the difference is a rule about coding rather than a disagreement about whether events occurred.
The US Department of State’s 2023 country report documents settler violence against Palestinians and Israeli authorities’ handling of it as part of its human rights reporting on the West Bank, without publishing an annual incident tally of its own. What exists in the record, then, is a monitoring aggregate labelled alleged, a documented dispute over attribution, and no official Israeli annual count set beside them for comparison.
Does settler growth outpace Israel’s own population growth?
Yes. The West Bank settler population rose more than 15% between 2018 and 2023 on Israel’s Ministry of Interior register as reported by the US Department of State, which is at least about 2.8% a year compounded, against national population growth Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported at 1.0% in the year to September 2025.
The 2.8% is arithmetic on the department’s stated floor of more than 15% spread evenly across five years, so it is a lower bound rather than a measured annual rate. The national comparison figures come from the bureau’s own releases: about 10.148 million residents in September 2025 with growth of about 1.0% over the year, growth of 1.4% in the 11.75 months to the eve of Independence Day 2025, and 2.2% in 2022 against 1.8% in 2021.
Across those readings the annualized settler growth rate sits above the national rate in every year the bureau published, from roughly 1.3 times the 2022 national figure to roughly 2.8 times the 2025 one.
The registers do not decompose that growth. Neither the ministry figure nor the department’s report separates natural increase from movement into settlements, so the comparison establishes the differential and not its composition. Both series also count residents by administrative status, which is why the bureau’s national total includes the settlers whose growth rate is being compared against it.
Do the disputes concern the counts or the label?
The dispute runs on the label. Of the six named publications below, two argue that the settler-colonial category applies and four argue that it does not, and none of them contests the settler register, the housing-unit series or the demolition counts on which descriptions of the West Bank rest.
| Publication | Type | Position on the label |
|---|---|---|
| Locker-Biletzki, 2025, Review of Radical Political Economics | Refereed symposium paper, published for the Union for Radical Political Economics | Applies the settler-colonial framework to 1920 to 1956 |
| Notes on the “Exceptionalism” of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project, 2024, Taylor and Francis | Peer-reviewed article | Argues inside the framework about how the case departs from others |
| Ukashi, 2018, Peace and Conflict Studies | Peer-reviewed argumentative essay | Rejects imperial and settler-colonial characterizations, arguing for Zionism as indigenous emancipation |
| Dowty, 2022, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies | Faculty essay, not peer-reviewed | Argues Israel is not a settler colonial state |
| American Jewish Committee, 2024 | Advocacy organization | Rejects the characterization |
| Anti-Defamation League, no date | Monitoring and advocacy organization | Rejects the characterization |
Locker-Biletzki’s paper and Ukashi’s essay measured nothing: both are interpretive arguments, and the figures inside them are quoted from other authors. Ukashi states his conclusion in his introduction and describes his purpose as an intervention in a live argument.
The enacted text both sides argue over is on the record. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, states at clause 7, in the Knesset’s own English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial, that “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
Israel’s own highest court has ruled on that law. In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, delivered on 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel of the Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice dismissed fifteen petitions and upheld the Basic Law, while holding that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful” and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic. The law stands, and the court set a constitutional limit it held the law had not crossed. The named scholarship on the settler-colonial framework argues over the category; the enacted clause and the judgment are the documents it argues about.
Where is the record thinner than the description?
Three circulating numbers have a second published version. The 2024 housing-unit total appears as 28,872 and as 47,390, a gap of 18,518 units, and the 2023 West Bank displacement total appears as 2,296 and as about 4,000, depending on which causes and which planning actions each publisher counts.
The settler-attack tally is labelled alleged by the body that compiles it, and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s 2024 report documents why totals in this category move with attribution rules rather than with events. An aggregate of reported incidents is a different object from a determination, and no adjudicated count of settler attacks sits beside the monitoring tally.
The Levy Commission report on the legal status of building in Judea and Samaria is often named in arguments about the outposts. It was never officially published or adopted, so there is no government record of it to read, and what circulates is an advocacy reprint. Israel’s own reviews and court records on unauthorized outposts, which do exist as official documents, are set out in the Institute’s report on Israel’s own record on unauthorized outposts.
What is dated and official is narrower than the descriptions built on it, and stronger where it exists. The Ministry of Interior register counts residents by permit status, so it establishes how many settlers there are and not why, and it does not separate natural increase from arrival. The European Union’s planning series counts units advanced, tendered or approved, so it establishes administrative activity and not construction completed. The demolition report counts structures and people at two different scopes, displaced and affected, and the larger of those two numbers is the wider category.
How does settlement discourse appear in measured antisemitic content?
26.9% of comments on the Facebook pages of leading UK media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation were coded antisemitic under an IHRA-based scheme, according to Becker, Ascone and Troschke’s 2022 peer-reviewed study.
The analysis covered 1,504 UK comments, against 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments on the same event, per the same study.
Within the UK comments coded antisemitic, the study reports the “evil” stereotype in 39.8%, Israel’s sole guilt in 27.9%, child murder or blood libel in 8.1%, denial of Jewish self-determination in 7.7%, the apartheid analogy in 5.2% and the Nazi analogy in 4.2%. Thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK cases. The categories are coding dimensions rather than mutually exclusive slices, and the shares are of a keyword-scoped sample of comments on specific pages, not of the platform.
Two further peer-reviewed measurements bear on how conflict discourse relates to attitudes, both correlational and both carrying their authors’ caveats. Huesmann, Dubow, Boxer, Souweidane and Ginges (2012) surveyed 89 Jewish American and 180 Arab American high-school students and found that total media exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not directly predict ethnic stereotypes, the association instead running through identification with the groups as portrayed. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), in two British experiments priming war-in-Gaza material with samples of 354 and 490, report that political orientation was positively associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation, and that conservative orientation was negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people, a separate identity-based pathway. Both findings are associations measured in samples, not causes.
Methodology and limitations
This report measures the published counts about the West Bank and the discourse around them. It does not assess the legal or historical characterization at issue in the phrase settler colonialism.
The evidence draws on four source types. Official records: the US Department of State’s 2023 country report on human rights practices, which relays Israel’s Ministry of Interior settler register; the European External Action Service’s 2025 settlement monitoring report and its one-year report on demolitions and seizures for 2023, both built on Israeli planning and field data; Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics releases for national population and growth; the Knesset’s published text of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, in a translation the Knesset labels unofficial; and the Supreme Court of Israel’s judgment in HCJ 5555/18. Peer-reviewed research: Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), Huesmann and colleagues (2012), Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), Locker-Biletzki (2025) and Ukashi (2018), with the last two interpretive rather than measuring. Dataset organizations: the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s 2024 report on attribution in settler-violence coding. Organizational publications naming a position: the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the Stroum Center faculty essay by Dowty.
Where a figure circulating in public discussion is a monitoring body’s own compilation, that body is named in the prose as its source and its definitions are stated: the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ 2024 settlement figures compiled on Peace Now data, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ 2023 displacement count and its settler-attack tally, which that office labels alleged, and B’Tselem’s published characterization of settler violence.
Limitations carried into the prose. Settler counts differ by territory covered and are never summed across compilations. Housing-unit series count planning actions, not completions, and the two published 2024 totals differ by 18,518 units because they count different actions. The 15% settler growth figure is stated by the department as a floor, and the 2.8% annual rate is arithmetic on that floor rather than a measured annual series. Monitoring tallies and official registers are not compared as like quantities. The Levy Commission report was never officially published or adopted, so no government record of it is available to read. Ozer and colleagues (2025), Locker-Biletzki (2025) and the 2024 Taylor and Francis article are cited from published abstracts and stated arguments; the Becker sample is scoped to comments on named media pages during one event; the Huesmann and Ozer findings are associations in survey and experimental samples.
Conclusion
Is the West Bank as bad as it is described? On the measures that carry a dated official count, the direction in the description holds. Israel’s own residency register recorded 517,407 settlers outside East Jerusalem at the end of 2023, more than 15% above 2018 and growing faster than the country’s population as its own statistical bureau counts it. European Union monitoring of Israeli planning data put 28,872 housing units through settlement planning in 2024, most of them in East Jerusalem, with a second published total nearly 18,518 units higher. The same monitoring recorded 1,177 Palestinian structures demolished or seized in 2023, the highest since 2016, with 2,296 people displaced and 439,875 affected.
Where the record thins is not in those series but around them. The settler-attack aggregate is a monitoring compilation labelled alleged, its totals moving with how incidents are attributed between settlers and security forces. The Levy Commission report has no published government text. And the term at the centre of the argument is where the named publications actually divide: Locker-Biletzki in 2025 and the 2024 Taylor and Francis article work inside the settler-colonial framework, while Ukashi, Dowty, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League reject the category, none of them contesting the housing-unit or demolition figures. Israel’s enacted Basic Law names Jewish settlement a national value, and its Supreme Court upheld that law in 2021 while setting a constitutional limit around it.
That leaves a live question for anyone weighing the vocabulary. The comment corpora coded by Becker, Ascone and Troschke show that the language of land, occupation and analogy travels: the apartheid analogy sat in 5.2% of the UK comments they coded antisemitic, alongside older tropes about evil and collective guilt that ran far higher. When a dispute over territory is argued in categories rather than counts, what happens to the categories once they leave the argument and reach a comment thread, and does the answer belong in how any of us describes this place?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which register produces the settler figure Israel itself keeps?
Israel’s Ministry of Interior maintains the residency register, and its figures reach the public record through other publishers, including the US Department of State’s 2023 country report, which gives 517,407 settlers in the West Bank outside East Jerusalem at 31 December 2023. It is an administrative count of residents by permit status.
Why do settler totals differ so much between sources?
Territory scope is the main reason. Figures for the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem are a different quantity from combined West Bank and East Jerusalem figures, and Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts both inside Israel’s national population total, which international monitoring reports separately.
Does an advanced or tendered housing unit mean homes were built?
No. The European External Action Service’s 2025 report counts units advanced or tendered through Israeli planning stages, 28,872 of them in 2024, and reports no construction completions. A planning approval and a completed home are different events.
What does “affected” mean in demolition reporting?
It is a wider category than displaced. For 2023 the European External Action Service recorded 2,296 individuals displaced by demolitions and seizures and 439,875 individuals affected, the second figure covering people whose access, services or property were touched without losing their home.
Why is the word “alleged” attached to settler-attack counts?
Because the compiling body applies it. The tally of more than 5,330 incidents reported in 2025 is the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ own aggregation of reported events on its own definitions, and no adjudicated determination is attached to the aggregate.
Why do two datasets disagree about how many settler attacks occurred?
Attribution rules. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s 2024 report documents that incidents in the West Bank often involve settlers, Israeli security forces, or both, so the coding decision about which actor an event belongs to changes any total built from the same field reports.
Has Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on the law naming Jewish settlement a national value?
Yes. In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, decided on 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel dismissed fifteen petitions and upheld Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, while holding that the Knesset cannot deny the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic.
What does the Levy Commission report say about the outposts?
There is no published government text to read. The report on the legal status of building in Judea and Samaria was never officially published or adopted, and what circulates is an advocacy reprint rather than an official record.
Sources
- American Jewish Committee, 2024. Why Israel is Not a Settler Colonial State. ajc.org. Advocacy organization.
- Anti-Defamation League, no date. Allegation: Israel is a Settler Colonialist Enterprise. adl.org. Monitoring and advocacy organization.
- Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, 2024. Civilians or Soldiers? Settler Violence in the West Bank. acleddata.com. Conflict-event dataset organization.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Dowty, 2022. Is Israel a settler colonial state? Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. jewishstudies.washington.edu. Faculty essay, not peer-reviewed.
- European External Action Service, 2024. One Year Report on Demolitions and Seizures in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, 1 January to 31 December 2023. eeas.europa.eu. Official record.
- European External Action Service, 2025. Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. eeas.europa.eu. Official record.
- Huesmann, Dubow, Boxer, Souweidane and Ginges, 2012. Foreign Wars and Domestic Prejudice: How Media Exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Predicts Ethnic Stereotyping by Jewish and Arab American Adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence. DOI 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2012.00785.x. Peer-reviewed.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Israel in Figures 2023: Selected Data From the Statistical Abstract of Israel. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset. versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (enacted legislation, unofficial English translation).
- Locker-Biletzki, 2025. Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956. Review of Radical Political Economics. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed symposium paper.
- Dana, Tariq, 2024. Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project. Middle East Critique, Routledge, pp. 165 to 172, published online 12 May 2024. DOI 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342733. Peer-reviewed journal; a critical-theory argument containing no figures.
- Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh, 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed.
- Ukashi, 2018. Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis. Peace and Conflict Studies, 25(1), article 7. nsuworks.nova.edu. Peer-reviewed.
- US Department of State, 2024. 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank and Gaza. state.gov. Official record.