Israeli flags become the latest weapon of settlers in West Bank domination

A profound sense of anguish accompanies 25-year-old Taghreed Yahya during her daily commute from her town of Kafr Ra’i to the city centre of Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank.

Along the main road connecting Jenin and Nablus, she is routinely confronted by hundreds of Israeli flags, a jarring visual imposition of Israeli domination and occupation on a route heavily used by local Palestinians.

Yahya said it started with a flag here, an outpost there, a new road cutting through the landscape.

“[It] makes the scene that was familiar for years change; all of this naturally leaves sadness, anger and fear, in addition to a feeling of helplessness,” she told Al Jazeera. “But at the same time, it strengthens the clinging to the land, memory and identity.”

This aggressive visual display of Israeli occupation represents an escalating phase of colonisation, extending beyond the physical outposts and attacks to a forced disfigurement of the geographical identity of the Palestinian territory.

When dozens of olive trees owned by the Palestinian residents of Arrabeh were uprooted, groups of Israeli settlers simultaneously decked a bypass road in northeastern areas of Jenin with Israeli flags to assert their dominance.

These flag-hanging campaigns, often facilitated by Israeli military incursions to secure the area, aim to artificially alter the Palestinian landscape. This is done in conjunction with the rapid deployment of mobile homes to establish dozens of settler outposts in new areas of the occupied West Bank.

For Palestinians who commute through this territory to work or home, the erasure of familiar landscapes is disorienting.