Illegal Settlement Deconstruction

That's "deconstruction" in the sense of

The term denotes a particular kind of practice in reading and, thereby, a method of criticism and mode of analytical inquiry. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term:

"Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct...Deconstruction: School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgium/North American literary critic Paul De Man. Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within texts.

Are "settlements", aka Jewish residential communities, "illegal" or "illegitimate"?

Well, let's ask two people.

The first is David Matas who writes in his The settlements: dismantlement or deconstruction?:

...To say that Israeli Jews cannot live in the West Bank is racist...It makes no more sense to say Israeli Jews cannot live in the West Bank than to say Israeli Arabs cannot live in Israel.  There is no international law breached by Israeli Jews living in the West Bank. The laws of war prohibit the forced transfer of nationals of an occupying power to occupied territory. No Israeli Jew, not one, has ever been forced to live in the West Bank.

Moreover, the West Bank is not territory occupied at international law. The West Bank was never called occupied territory when Jordan had control before the 1967 war. Yet, at international law, the status of the West Bank is the same since 1967 as it was before 1967, the only difference being a change in the name of state in control of the territory....The only conceivable occupied power for the West Bank is Jordan. Yet Jordan has renounced all claims over the West Bank.

...the label ‘settlements’ and ‘occupied territory’...are obstacles to peace...The labels ‘settlements’ and ‘occupied territory’ are elements of anti-Zionist war propaganda against the Jewish state. If we want peace, we have to avoid using the vocabulary that impels to war...To anti-Zionists, the language of settlements and occupied territory applies to all of Israel. The very phrase “occupied Palestinian territory since 1967” in the vetoed resolution implies that there is other Palestinian territory occupied before 1967.

...To get to peace in the Middle East, we do not need to freeze and then dismantle the settlements. We rather have to deconstruct and then drop the settlement vocabulary.

The second is David Harris in his Why History Matters

...Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of [the 1967 Six Days] war, but rarely provide context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.

First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn't exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world...

Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they destroyed many of those sites....the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule...

Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn't.

Fourth, the 1967 boundary at the time of the war, so much in the news these days, was nothing more than an armistice line dating back to 1949 -- familiarly known as the Green Line...

Fifth, the PLO, which supported the war effort, was established in 1964, three years before the conflict erupted. That's important because it was created with the goal of obliterating Israel. Remember that in 1964 the only "settlements" were Israel itself.

...after winning the war of self-defense, Israel hoped that its newly-acquired territories, seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, would be the basis of a land-for-peace accord. Feelers were sent out. The formal response came on September 1, 1967, when the Arab Summit Conference famously declared in Khartoum "No peace, no recognition, no negotiations" with Israel.

Today, there are those who wish to rewrite history. They want the world to believe there was once a Palestinian state. There was not.  They want the world to believe there were fixed borders between that state and Israel. There was only an armistice line between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.

They want the world to believe the 1967 war was a bellicose act by Israel. It was an act of self-defense...

They want the world to believe post-1967 Israeli settlement-building is the key to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Six-Day War is proof positive that the core issue is, and always has been, whether the Arab world accepts the Jewish people's right to a state of their own...

(k/t = BT)
^