Of course they exist as a physical and demographic reality. I share none of the messianic fantasies of the Israeli far right about the euphemistic term "transfer". But why rely on the Brits and Ottomans when we have it straight from PLO leaders that their national identity is a tactical invention and that there already is a Palestinian state called Jordan.
In 1948, 1956 and 1967 there were no settlements, no occupation. Gaza and the West Bank were part of Egypt and Jordan. And their genocidal dream of "from the river to the sea" was the same as today. So don't blame Israeli settlements for it. In the multiple massacres of Jewish settlements of 1920, 1925, 1929 and 1936-39 there was no Israel, no IDF, no settlements, no occupation. The toxic fantasy of Muslim Arab supremacy and Jewish powerlessness and subjugation to dhimmitude was the same as it is today. And it targets not just Jews but Assyrian Iraqi Christians (1.5m 30 years ago, 150000 today), Yazidis, Palestinian Christians, Egypt's Copts, Iran's Zoroastrians, Lebanese and Syrian Christians just as Muslim Turks targeted Christian Armenians. You want ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the Middle East. Here's a fact-based catalog of one way Muslim supremacist on dhimmi violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giktOwxfK-M&t=284s.
Therefore the correlation between Jewish settlements and their delusion that they'll one day they'll reverse 1948, have all the land from the river to the sea and deport or exterminate all the Jews currently there is a very simple number: zero. The sine qua non of peace is delusion demolition, not expelling Jews from Hebron (again) and the remaining Jewish settlers living on 4% of the West Bank. Israel tried unilateral settler removal from Gaza in 2005 in a land for peace trade. Instead it got five wars culminating in the gleeful GoPro and call home on WhatsApp orgy of mass murder, necrophilic rape and mutilation, beheadings, torture of precisely those lefty peacenik Israeli kibbutzniks who most believed in co-existence (remember Vivian Silver, leader of Women Wage Peace: burnt to a cinder).
These are facts you choose to ignore, not a selective interpretation of history.
