Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?

The world's gaze is fixed on Gaza, said Luc Bronner in Le Monde (Paris), but some 30 miles away, Israel's far-right is waging a quieter, less visible and more "methodical" war.

For the past three years, the ultra-nationalist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who thinks Jews have a divine right to all the land that makes up biblical Israel, has driven his own personal offensive in the West Bank – approving the development of hundreds of illegal new settlements (29 have been authorised as recently as May), and occupying and demolishing swathes of several refugee camps.

Armed militias from Jewish settlements roam numerous areas of the territory, harassing and assaulting Palestinians, and seizing their land. Settler violence has surged in the first half of this year, during which the UN has recorded 757 attacks on Palestinians and their property.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And now Smotrich has revived a deeply controversial plan to build more than 3,000 apartments in Ma'ale Adumim, in the so-called E1 area – essentially cutting off the West Bank from East Jerusalem, the presumptive capital of any future Palestinian state. Mindful of fierce US objections to this, Israel had for more than a decade frozen construction plans there, said The Jerusalem Post. But Smotrich, who claims he has the cabinet's blessing, is just ploughing ahead, pointedly citing his initiative as "the final nail in the coffin for the concept of a Palestinian state".

"Smotrich has never made a more accurate prediction," said Haaretz (Tel Aviv). The E1 apartments "would cut the West Bank in two" – separating north from south – while strangling the three central Palestinian cities of Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. That would be "a death sentence" for any two-state solution.

And as if that were not bad enough, Smotrich and his gang are also pushing for Israel to officially annex the West Bank, or "Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley" as they prefer to call it. In July, the Knesset voted 71-13 to approve a measure which recognises "Israeli sovereignty" over the area. The resolution was "largely symbolic", said The National (Abu Dhabi), but it shows how far Israeli public sentiment has shifted. A poll in February found that 35% of Israelis favour a "Jewish-only state, from the river to the sea". The fact that annexation is now an established vote-winner in the Knesset only "makes its success as (eventual) national policy much likelier".

And the pro-annexation movement also has the backing of several prominent Republicans in the US, said The Economist. On a visit this month to West Bank settlements, where he had dinner with Israel's PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, reportedly proclaimed that the "mountains of Judea and Samaria" belong to the Jewish people "by right". In fact, today the Republican Party (including much of the Trump administration) doesn't just back Israel's right to exist; it endorses the ethno-nationalist policies of Netanyahu and his hard-right cabinet – and that includes formal annexation of the West Bank.

People talk of the prospect of annexation as if it's yet to come, said Tamar Megiddo in Haaretz, as if Israel's illegal takeover of the West Bank requires some sort of "official announcement" or legal mechanism to change the status of the territory. In reality, "through quiet, consistent, humdrum bureaucratic activities" that have created irreversible facts on the ground, annexation has already occurred.

Bit by bit, the government has transferred power from the military apparatus that for decades governed the West Bank to Israel's civilian ministries: by accelerating licensing processes; by developing infrastructure in favour of the settlements; through the wording of administrative documents, it has effectively claimed sovereignty over the area, cutting Palestinians out of its administration in the process. Knesset votes and other declarations are a "smokescreen"; the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal.