The Trap of the Herd and the Closed Land: From Land Theft to Famine Engineering... How Livelihoods Are Destroyed to Strip Palestinians of Their Land?

In continuation of our previous article that addressed pastoral settlement as the on-ground mechanism for land theft through settlement outposts, we shed light today on the next phase of the plan: turning the economy itself into a weapon to dismantle Palestinian society. The colonial apparatus has surpassed the stage of controlling geography to a more dangerous phase: "engineering dependency" and "manufacturing fragility." The goal is no longer merely to displace settlers in place of the population, but to transform Palestinians from free producers into constrained consumers, with their daily choices trapped between the military barrier and precarious work permits. The policy of "economic strangulation" that we are experiencing today is not an emergency measure, but an integrated system aiming to achieve one brutal equation: making the economic survival of Palestinians contingent on their political silence. Geographical Partition: Turning Barriers into Market Constraints... Cutting the Lifelines If we look at a map of the West Bank, we see a complex network of "scattered islands" – population clusters besieged by a maze of barriers, iron gates, and bypass roads that serve only the settlements. These obstacles are no longer mere security checkpoints, but have transformed into tools for federal economic control, disrupting internal supply chains and artificially multiplying transportation and production costs. The numbers speak the truth: according to estimates from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) in March 2024, the Palestinian industrial sector lost $3.2 billion in production during the first four months of the aggression on Gaza, due to the paralysis of goods and raw materials movement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This strangulation deepens with the targeting of the agricultural sector, the first line of defense for the land. Targeting agriculture is not a side effect but a direct strategic objective. However, the plan today goes beyond land theft to destroy the very tools of production. Livestock theft and mass culling practices – which complement pastoral settlement – have turned into a systematic economic punishment tool aimed at destroying the livelihoods of pastoral families. This war peaked during the last olive season, where more than 150 attacks by settlers and the occupation army were recorded against farmers, in a clear attempt to transform agriculture from a source of dignity into an impossible profession. **Manufacturing Dependency... Turning Livelihood into a Tool of Blackmail** After geographic restrictions paralyzed the Palestinian economy's ability to create sufficient job opportunities, work permits in Israel transformed from an economic option to a political control tool. A distorted equation emerges here: the economic stability of the family versus the political silence of the individual. The numbers reveal the scale of the catastrophe: in the West Bank alone, the unemployment rate jumped from 18% in 2023 to 31% in 2024, while the number of workers in Israel decreased by 85,000, according to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. This is not a normal economic regression but a deliberate activation of a pressure card that makes any activism or resistance threatened with cutting the livelihood source. Concurrently, these policies create a massive human flow from rural areas and "C" classified regions (which constitute over 60% of the West Bank) towards crowded urban centers. This is not voluntary migration but a "systematic economic displacement" aimed at emptying Palestinian rural areas and facilitating settlement expansion, while cities turn into crowded "cantons" that are easy to control and dominate. **Economy of Resilience... From Defense to Offense** In the face of this total strangulation, supporting national production turns from a moral choice into an existential line of defense. What is required today is to transform it into a major economic policy that includes: First, a self-sufficiency strategy in core value chains such as dairy, eggs, and vegetables, and connecting rural producers with urban consumers through trade platforms protected from the complications of barriers. Second, funding small projects in threatened areas not as humanitarian aid but as an investment in the "resilient geography" capable of absorbing labor and reducing dependence on Israeli blackmail. Third, reclaiming the right to movement; demands to open closed roads and cancel bypass roads are not mere service demands but a restoration of the cut geographical arteries and part of the battle to assert sovereignty over movement. As pastoral settlement revealed the sharp face of the needle, economic strangulation today exposes the long thread that stitches pockets of dependency. The confrontation is no longer limited to defending the last hill, but has shifted to the battle of building an "economic immunity" capable of shattering tools of blackmail. What is required today is for every citizen to become an economic defense trench; supporting national products, nurturing rural resilience projects, and exposing blackmail tools through every available platform. Resilience is no longer just surviving in place, but the ability to produce, communicate, and live with dignity within that place. The land remains for those who cultivate it, build upon it, produce from it, and defend it with their economy as much as they defend it with their blood.