A new dynamic has emerged in the West Bank: Jewish settlers are on the warpath. Hundreds of them are engaged in violence against Palestinians. Palestinians are being intimidated and harassed by the occupiers; this includes the burning of their olive trees and rock throwing against farmers. They are blocking roads, burning tires and setting fire to Palestinian fields.

In the past, it was only a few dozen individuals who took part in such activities but the number has grown into the hundreds as shown by a recent UN report which recorded 222 acts of settler violence in the first half of 2008 compared with 291 in all of 2007. At least five violent settler attacks on Palestinians occurred between July 29 and Aug. 4.

Settler violence is nothing new but the recent increase seems to be part of a strategy to create havoc on the roads and in nearby Palestinian villages. The Israeli Army and government are being sent a message that dismantling any outpost or stopping construction will bear a price. The increasing pressure of the international community for them to evacuate the illegal settlements may be another factor.

Maybe they want to send a message to the administrations that will take over in the US and Israel after the elections. They are trying, it seems, to show what they are capable of doing. About 500,000 of these settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem among a population of about 2.5 million Palestinians. Another 20,000 Israelis live on the Golan Heights plateau. What more do they want? As for their fear of any impending peace agreement that might curtail settlement activity, there is not a whiff of a peace deal on the horizon to worry any settler. The November deadline, set by President George W. Bush, for an accord will come and go with nothing happening and no one being able to predict what may happen next.

Of all the problems preventing a peace agreement, settlements are consistently at the top of anybody’s list — even more than the right of return since that is intrinsically connected with a Palestinian state. But what shape and size will such a state have if settlements and the haphazard way in which dozens of them are situated keep chomping out swathes of land that should be the Palestinian nation?

Settlement building continues relentlessly, and nothing stops it. Not UN Security Council resolutions, not the US government, not European nations, and certainly not Israeli governments past and present who simply look the other way. Coalition politics in Israel, in which any leader needs to lure multiple parties into government — including those more sympathetic to the settlers’ outlook — hold leaders back from taking any concrete actions. Not to mention that Israel even uses the term “unauthorized settlements” when, in fact, all settlements are considered illegal under international law. And once they are built, settlements remain standing. Settlement building defies Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity that can now be modified: What goes up will probably never come down.