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For the past 30 years I have considered the settlements a destructive phenomenon that raises a large question mark over Israel's future. In fact, the settlement enterprise is an ideological, political and social phenomenon that has succeeded in creating an original androgynous creation: colonial Zionism.

There have already been variations of Zionism: general, revisionist, socialist, with or without quotation marks. Now we also have colonial Zionism, based on ethnic and religious inequality, which considers itself the exclusive emissary of Jewish history. The Divine promise and not the natural rights of human beings to freedom, independence and self-government is, in its eyes, the one and only source of legitimacy for the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. According to this viewpoint, the land belongs not only to living Jews, but to all the past generations and those yet unborn; therefore, members of the present generation have no right to share possession of the land with members of another nation.

As a matter of course, when we speak of "the settlements" we are not referring to that vast majority of Israelis who are living in the West Bank for reasons of convenience or necessity (cheap and improved housing). In addition, we do not talk about each settler separately: We talk about the settlement enterprise the way one talks about "socialism," "conservatism" or "nationalism;" in other words, about that which is essential to the ideology and the movement, and typifies it.

Even the ideological core, which is in essence "the settlement movement," is not all of one stripe. Between the hilltop youth and many of their parents there is a large gap, not only in patterns of behavior but also in the degree of connection to universal values.

However, overall, they are all nurtured by the same principles and aspire to the same goals. Since this small minority is convinced that it owns the absolute truth, it considers itself permitted to force it on all of society.

Therefore its leaders and spokespersons show disdain for both the weak politicians and the basic tenets of democracy itself. They know how to exploit democratic institutions, but they ignore human rights and recognize only the rights of the Jews. Since the High Court of Justice decision on Elon Moreh in 1979, in which the court ruled that seizing private lands is illegal, they have been attacking this basic institution of Israeli democracy, the guardian of individual rights.

Despite the power he has acquired thanks to the cowardice of the government, the ideological settler always wears the mantle of a martyr, persecuted by the left-wing elite and the media it ostensibly controls. Although he controls the territories, he likes to be portrayed as a perpetual victim of leftist conspiracies. Although for almost four decades the ideological settler has created a reality about which Israeli voters have never been called on to decide, and in subversive ways has turned the military occupation into civilian control that contradicts every accepted norm in the Western world, he does not cease to cry that he has been robbed.

In Hebron a situation has been created that is a national disgrace, a genuine sin and crime: Apartheid, as legal scholar Boaz Okun wrote in the weekly Yedioth Ahronoth last week, is already here. But not only in Hebron: The situation in the territories in general and the lawless outposts in particular, along with the theft of private lands, is testimony