Under international law, the occupying power may temporarily requisition the private property of a civilian living under occupation only if it is done strictly for the purposes of security. Thus, whenever a West Bank Palestinian, whose land was confiscated by the IDF to build a settlement, challenged the legality of that confiscation in Israel’s High Court, the military always argued that the settlement in question was temporary and was built strictly for the purposes of security.
But, of course, anyone who saw through the IDF’s smokescreen could see that all settlements are intended to be permanent in nature, and a large number, especially those built for religious Zionist settlers, were built for ideological reasons, not security. Thus, the settlement enterprise can be seen to be a grave violation of international occupation law as it violates the very fundamental core of that law: there is no legitimacy to annexation through conquest.
