In 1856 Edward Robinson, a US biblical scholar, published a book about his travels in Palestine entitled Later Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions.

One entry describes a journey through the villages to the west of Nablus.

He reaches Jiit, a village located on a ridge. Looking westwards in his direction of travel Robinson, seeing the village of Kafr Qadum situated among the hills, observes that "the mountains here were tilled to their tops."

Today Kafr Qadum, with a population of about 3,400, sits astride Areas B and C - two of the three areas into which the West Bank was partitioned in 1993 as a result of the Oslo accords.

In Area B, which falls under joint Palestinian-Israeli jurisdiction, the village land is cultivated in relative peace.

However, the land within Area C under Israeli jurisdiction offers a very different scenario.

From the village, looking eastwards up towards Jiit, you can see the settlement of Kedumim spread along the ridge with its rows of houses and flats with red roofs, all recently built, descending to a road lower down the hill.

Further across, reaching down from Jiit towards the southern side of Kafr Qadum, are olive groves with ill-kempt, dusty trees on untilled land overgrown with grasses and thorns.

Below, almost skirting the southern side of the village, one is struck by a scene reminiscent of a Western suburb with rows of neat houses with red roofs amid trees and greenery and with a new tarmac road.

Further down still, near the south-western end of the village, is a plant nursery with rows of greenhouses.

The nursery was built in 1982-3 on land belonging to the uncle of the former mayor of the village Saqer Obeyd.

The family went to court to recover their land but lost the case when the settlement, backed by the Israeli army, said the land was needed for security reasons.

Obeyd explained to me how before 1967, Kafr Qadum - first mentioned in 1596 in the Ottoman tax registers - was a quiet agricultural community.

Obeyd, a garage-owner in his late fifties and married with seven children, has always lived in the village.

Following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 village life changed dramatically as lands were taken from the farmers, court cases pursued and olive groves damaged or destroyed.

"Before the six-day war," he told me, "there had been a Jordanian army camp on the top of the ridge where you can see the Kedumim settlement.

"The land the camp occupied was state-owned and measured 300 dunams [approximately 74.131 acres].

"After 1967 the Israeli military used the same camp but took over another 300 dunams of village land to expand the base.

"They surrounded the camp with barbed wire so that the owners of the stolen land could not access it.

"Three years later they declared that, as the land had not been used by the owners during that time, it had become the property of the state."

But worse was to come. In 1975, Gush Enumin, an Israeli settler movement, was granted permission by the Israeli government to settle 25 families in mobile homes next to the army camp.

The land used for this new settlement, named Kedumim, was also taken from the farmers of Kafr Qadum.

On May 19 two years later, then Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin visited the settlement and made his government's view on the matter quite clear.

"We stand on the land of liberated Israel," he declared.

Within weeks the government had granted the settlement full legal status.

Since then Kedumim has expanded to a population of over 4,200, located in three separate areas, having taken, Obeyd tells me, 4,500 dunams (about 1,110 acres) of village land.

The 300-year-old road to Nablus that lies at the bottom of the hill between Kafr Qadum and the settlement was closed to Palestinian traffic in 2003 and to pedestrians in 2005, because of objections lodged by the settlers.

By that time the settlement had spread down to the road. The road still remains closed.

To reach Nablus, 13km away by the direct route, villagers now have to travel a more circuitous way which adds a further 13km to the journey.

In 2004 the villagers first took the issue of the road closure to the Israeli courts. Finally, in 2010, the court found in their favour.

At that point the army took the law into its own hands and declared the road should remain closed for the Palestinians' safety.

Having no other recourse to justice, every Friday is marked by a demonstration by the villagers against the road closure to which the army responds with tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades and arrests.

The olive groves around that part of the village are littered with the shells of various grenades used by the army in these demonstrations.

The ease with which the Israeli army and the settlers have taken Palestinian land for their own use is a result of their government's legal manipulations of local laws relating to land ownership.

Article 43 of the Hague regulations requires occupiers of a country to respect the local legislation in force, which can only be changed for the security needs of the occupying force in the area or for the humanitarian needs of the local population - Palestinians in this case.

The Israeli government has agreed to respect these regulations.

When the West Bank was occupied in 1967, the local land laws governing the territory originated from the Ottoman land code of 1858, with some amendments made during the British mandate and Jordanian rule.

Those laws pertaining to land ownership are particularly important as in 1967 only about 30 per cent of the total land area had been registered.

The Israelis discontinued further land registration. The unregistered 70 per cent of the land is mentioned only in land tax documents, which are not considered to be proof of ownership.

Very few farmers in the West Bank possess the original title deeds to the land they own and none in Kafr Qadum.

The Ottoman land code and subsequent amendments made before 1967 establish other criteria for recognising legal ownership of land.

One article in the code states that a farmer who at any time has cultivated land within 2.5km of his village for 10 consecutive years has acquired permanent ownership rights to it, even if later he no longer uses that land for cultivation.

If he has cultivated the land for fewer than 10 years, the land would be considered ownerless but would not pass to the state. For its part, the Israeli State Attorney's Office allows the state acquisition of land cultivated for fewer than 10 years.

The Israeli state also has the right to expropriate land acquired by a farmer through the 10-year rule, if it has not been cultivated since 1967. These legislative changes were applied in the case of Kafr Qadum.

Further provisions of the Ottoman code, and a British amendment to it, make the definition of "land cultivation" flexible, so that in very rocky, arid terrain - like that around Kafr Qadum - where only small pockets of cultivation are possible, the land is still said to be cultivated and under private ownership.

The Israeli Attorney's Office, on the other hand, stipulates that at least 50 per cent of all types of land must be cultivated to indicate private ownership, otherwise it will be classified as state land.

Similarly, until 1967 all village grazing land was defined as public land. Having come under Israeli jurisdiction, in 1976 grazing land was declared to belong to the state.

As a result of these legal manipulations, land in the entire West Bank classified as belonging to the state has increased from 527,000 dunams (9 per cent of the total area) in 1967 to 1,218,469 dunams in 2012 (just over 21 per cent of the total area).

This figure does not include the 36.6 per cent occupied by settlements and regional councils - much of which formerly was state-owned land - nor the closed military zones (17.6 per cent), nature reserves and national parks (8 per cent) or the 2 per cent closed off by the apartheid wall.

Over and above this, 21 per cent of built-up areas in the settlements are located on land recognised by Israel as being privately owned by Palestinians.

Land taken by Kedumim from Kafr Qadum falls into more than one of these categories.

Meanwhile, in Kafr Qadum the villagers live with the daily threat of settlers who not only steal their land but also burn and uproot olive trees, damage terraces and agricultural installations, attack farmers and enter the village to throw rocks at houses and cars.

The villagers receive virtually no protection from the Israeli army which instead imposes severe restrictions on the farmers, particularly those who live near the settlement.

These farmers can only access their land if they receive a permit to do so, which in almost all cases is just once a year for about a week to harvest their olives.

Therefore trees are left untended and unpruned and the ground cannot be manured or ploughed.

When a permit is granted, only one person - the owner - is allowed onto the land.

On Saturdays, most farmers from Kafr Qadum with land in Area C are forbidden to work on their land as the settlers like to enjoy the Sabbath by taking walks in their olive groves, where they make fires for picnics and drop litter.

During my visit to the village, I took a break from picking olives and interviewed a young man for this article.

He wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. During the course of our conversation I asked him how he viewed the future, to which he said despairingly that all he could do was dream about it.

At that point, his mobile rang. Then, looking rapidly in the direction of Kadumim, he turned pale and, very agitated, told the group that we had to leave as the army jeep watching us, which was stationed down the hill outside the settlement, had just been joined by another one.

A minute later his father who had been working alone nearer the settlement, came running up and insisted we all return to the village immediately.

During those few minutes I became aware of the intense fear that governs the life of this village community.

For his part, Obeyd believes that change can only come about through pressure from outside, although he acknowledges it would be very hard to achieve.

"Israel won't listen to anyone," he says. "All it knows how to do is to use force. Nevertheless, if the Western media increased its coverage of how the situation in the West Bank affects the Palestinian population, some good might come of it.

"Either way, there can never be peace until the occupation ends, the settlers leave and Israel reverts to its 1967 borders."

Jenny Kassman is a member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and also a signatory for Jews for Justice for Palestinians. Grateful thanks to Nir Shalev of the Israeli organisation BIMKOM (Planners for Planning Rights) for his invaluable assistance with the legal aspects of this article.