The settlements on the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, a stumbling block to successive peace proposals.

On the day I see Beni Raz I traverse the spine of Israel's settlements in the West Bank from west of the Palestinian town of Qalqilya to Jerusalem.

There are the Jerusalem settlements that probe into the Arab neighbourhoods in the city's Arab east, pushing between the towns and villages. Prising them apart.

In the countryside, I speed along fast Israeli bypass roads punctuated with their watchtowers grey and tall as giant exclamation marks. Ariel goes by in a blur, big as a city, sprawling across a long ridgeline. Then the hardline settlements around Nablus, some of which I've visited: Eli, Elon More, Yitzhar, Shiloh, breastworks of red-roofed villas spread over successive hills like the fortified communities they are. Commanding the countryside.

Israel's complicity in these communities' continued expansion – despite the demands of the US-backed road map for a freeze on settlement building – was revealed with the recent leaking of a secret Israeli defence ministry database that showed the involvement of government agencies and private companies, in defiance even of the state's own laws. Included in it are a number of structures at Qarne Shomron, where Raz lives.

And in the present election campaign the issue of the settlements has inevitably been unavoidable. It is not only the settlers' own party that has been campaigning on the issue. Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the rightwing Likud, who the polls suggest will win the largest number of Knesset seats, also has been rallying his supporters in the settlements with a visit to Beit Ariyeh.

There he warned that Kadima, the centre-right party led by Tzipi Livni, "would have us vacate this place in the belief that it would purchase peace. It won't."

Instead, Netanyahu told the crowd: "It will simply implant a new Hamas terror base here, stacked by Iran with Iranian missiles that would fire on Tel Aviv."

And while Livni has said she would push ahead with the path to peace negotiations outlined in late 2007 at Annapolis, she is squeezed between a hawkish Netanyahu, and the ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, who would annex Israel's West Bank settlements and place towns that house some of Israel's 20% Arab minority on the other side of a new border.