Settlement Policies and the Sovereignty Regime in Palestine: Demographic Engineering, Settler Colonialism, and Spatial Politics

This study analyses Israel’s settlement policies in the Palestinian territories — which gained momentum in the late nineteenth century and were institutionalised with the establishment of the state in 1948 — as a long-term sovereignty project and a practice of demographic engineering. Whilst the existing literature predominantly addresses the settlement issue from the perspectives of conflict studies, international law, or human rights, this article explains these policies through an integrated theoretical framework articulating the concepts of demographic engineering, settler colonialism, and spatial politics. Drawing on a qualitative research design, 69 secondary documents — comprising reports from United Nations agencies, international human rights organisations, peer-reviewed academic literature, legal texts, and cartographic sources — were systematically examined through directed content analysis. The findings reveal that Israel pursues its settlement project through four coordinated strategies: (1) dispossession through legal and administrative instruments, (2) spatial fragmentation and control regimes, (3) population transfer and demographic transformation, and (4) legitimising discourses. The original contribution of this study lies in its multi-mechanism operationalisation of demographic engineering — moving beyond conventional definitions confined to forced migration or direct population transfer to explain the combined operation of legal-administrative dispossession, spatial fragmentation, and legitimising discourse. The findings demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian issue transcends a simple territorial dispute, representing a structural and long-term project that systematically targets the spatial and political sovereignty of a people.