Expert: Amjad Iraqi, International Crisis Group Senior Analyst for Israel/Palestine.
Question: In recent weeks, the Israeli government has taken several steps to further entrench Israel’s nearly six-decade-old military occupation and settlement enterprise in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. Many observers - and senior Israeli officials themselves - say these measures amount to Israel de facto annexing the West Bank. Can you describe these steps and their significance?
Amjad Iraqi: Israel’s cabinet made several legal and administrative changes in early February that are at first glance very technical, but in fact are deeply consequential. As Israeli rights groups Yesh Din and Peace Now summarize, these include: (a) declassifying the land registry in the West Bank, thereby releasing sensitive information about Palestinian landowners and their property; (b) cancelling a Jordanian law that restricted the sale of West Bank property to Palestinians and other Arabs; (c) reviving a committee of Israeli officials tasked with acquiring West Bank land for the state; (d) enforcing powers relating to violations of water, archaeological, and environmental laws in Palestinian cities and towns located in Areas A and B; (e) taking away the Palestinian municipality of Hebron’s authority to issue building permits for the city’s holy sites and state property, and handing them to the Civil Administration (the branch of Israel’s military that governs the West Bank); and (f) creating a new administration to manage Rachel’s Tomb, a holy site in Bethlehem.
What binds these measures together is an explicit policy by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, spearheaded in particular by Finance Minister and Deputy Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich, to apply what it describes as Israeli-Jewish “sovereignty” over Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the occupied West Bank. The result is that Israel is not only expanding its methods of seizing Palestinian land for settlements, but is demolishing what little remains of the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Authority (PA). As Palestinian and other NGOs have flagged, in the eyes of the International Court of Justice, UN bodies, and many legal experts worldwide, these Israeli actions amount to formalizing the annexation of occupied territory in violation of international law.
Q: What impact will these changes have on Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have already been driven from their homes by the Israeli military and a massive wave of settler violence over the past several years?
AI: On the one hand, one can argue that these new measures do not deviate much from the trends in Israeli policy that we’ve seen for years. Israel has long been expanding settlements and intensifying violence and expulsions against Palestinians. Israeli civilian officials have increasingly been replacing military officers in the bureaucracies that manage the occupation. The Israeli army regularly carries out operations in Area A – which according to the Oslo Accords is meant to be under the civilian and security control of the Palestinian Authority – with no regard for the latter’s jurisdiction. Even archaeology is used as a pretext for confiscating land. The current government has certainly catalyzed these efforts since taking office in December 2022, and the cabinet’s recent decisions place more tools at Israel’s disposal, but the practices are essentially the same.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t understate how dangerous these incremental changes are. At the micro-level, Palestinians and their families are now more vulnerable to an array of Israeli actions with even fewer means of pushing back. Speaking to fellow Palestinians, all sorts of scenarios are coming to people’s minds: Israeli authorities may cut off the water supply to buildings by claiming some violation of regulations; the army may cordon off neighborhoods if they decide an archaeological finding or heritage site requires “protection”; settlers may use information from the land registry to attack and threaten land owners; Hebron’s settlements may grow and squeeze Palestinian residents further out of the city center; and so on. And at the macro-level, these small steps are accumulating to solidify Israel’s one-state regime, shrinking Palestinians’ hold on their land and disempowering them even further.
Q: These moves contradict and complicate President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, parts of which are opposed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners, who continue to openly declare their intention to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank. Trump himself says he opposes West Bank annexation and his plan holds out the possibility of a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood, however remote, which would require Israel to withdraw from most, if not all, the West Bank. What do you think about the timing of Israel’s actions?
AI: Firstly, this is an Israeli election year. Not only are politicians gearing up for an intensive battle at the polls, but those in government are rushing to fulfill as much of their agendas as possible. The annexation drive is supported by swathes of the ruling coalition and even by many opposition members; Defense Minister Israel Katz, from Netanyahu’s Likud party, has closely collaborated with Smotrich on several major decisions. For a settler leader like Smotrich, even if he does not retain his cabinet portfolio in the next Knesset (parliament), his tenure has laid new institutional groundwork that he and his partners in the settlement enterprise can capitalize on outside of government. And aside from his own ideological sympathies, Netanyahu will promote the annexationist program if he believes it will keep him as prime minister.
Secondly, it’s doubtful that Israel’s West Bank provocations will affect Trump’s plan for Gaza. Foreign policymakers say the occupied territories should be treated as one Palestinian entity in accordance with international law, but they have long decoupled the two enclaves in practice. Few world leaders, including Arab states, are willing to jeopardize the Gaza “ceasefire” process – which Israel is still violating with its ongoing siege and military attacks – and risk a return to war for the sake of a West Bank that they know has been annexed in all but name. Some officials and experts suspect that the U.S. may have, at least implicitly, made a quid pro quo that greenlights the Israeli government’s annexation moves in exchange for Netanyahu giving more leeway on Gaza. This could be correct, but it belies the fact that the Trump administration has been on board with many of Israel’s West Bank ambitions: just this past week, Ambassador Mike Huckabee reiterated his support for Israeli expansionism, and the U.S. embassy announced it will be opening consular services in two West Bank settlements for the first time.
Q: For decades, Israel has systematically worked to preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state being created, primarily by building settlements on West Bank and East Jerusalem land that is supposed to form the heart of that state. At the same time, Israel has refrained from formally annexing the West Bank like it did with East Jerusalem. Why do you think that is, and what, if anything, do you think Israel would have to do for the international community to acknowledge the one-state, apartheid reality that Israel has imposed in all of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as described by human rights organizations, including Israeli rights groups, legal experts, and Palestinians themselves?
AI: Until recently, Israeli governments tried to keep a delicate balance between transforming realities on the ground and containing tensions in their ties abroad. The current far-right coalition, however, is more ideologically-driven and less interested in holding back. If Israeli officials (such as in the security establishment) believed the PA and the Oslo Accords were assets to Israel’s occupation, today far-right politicians view them as constraints. Even officials who don’t subscribe to the far-right’s agenda have learned, especially through the Gaza war, that Israel could go beyond the diplomatic and military limits they thought existed with even more impunity than they imagined. Israel’s reputation has certainly suffered – especially under the growing legal and public opinion that it has committed the crime of genocide – and there may yet be latent costs internally and externally. But for now the government believes that the opportunity is ripe to shape the regime for years to come.
The one-state reality exists whether or not policymakers abroad choose to recognize it. The diplomatic outcry over annexation, even from well-meaning actors, does not compensate for the fact that governments are not exercising any serious leverage to stop it. Israel’s hold on the occupied territories is entrenching, not lifting. The PA’s control is shriveling, not growing. Gaza has been decimated and its population severely weakened. World leaders like to point to Trump’s occasional remarks, as well as the brief clauses in the UN Security Council resolution that adopted Trump’s Gaza plan, to claim that everything is moving toward Palestinian statehood. Anyone who spends a day in the West Bank, and certainly anyone trapped in Gaza, knows the exact opposite is occurring.