Trump comeback restarts Israeli public debate on West Bank annexation

JERUSALEM: When Donald Trump presented his 2020 plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it included the Israeli annexation of swathes of the occupied West Bank, a controversial aspiration that has been revived by his reelection.
In his previous stint as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for partial annexation of the West Bank, but he relented in 2020 under international pressure and following a deal to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates.
With Trump returning to the White House, pro-annexation Israelis are hoping to rekindle the idea.
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler in the Palestinian territory, said recently that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” referring to the biblical name that Israel uses for the West Bank.
The territory was part of the British colony of Mandatory Palestine, from which Israel was carved during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, with Jordanian forces taking control of the West Bank during the same conflict.
Israel conquered the territory from Amman in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has occupied it ever since.
Today, many Jews in Israel consider the West Bank part of their historical homeland and reject the idea of a Palestinian state in the territory, with hundreds of thousands having settled in the territory.
Excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and its 200,000 Jewish residents, the West Bank is home to around 490,000 Israelis in settlements considered illegal under international law.
Around three million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization for the municipal councils of West Bank settlements, insisted the status quo could not continue.
“The State of Israel must make a decision,” he said.
Without sovereignty, he added, “no one is responsible for infrastructure, roads, water and electricity.”
“We will do everything in our power to apply Israeli sovereignty, at least over Area C,” he said, referring to territory under sole Israeli administration that covers 60 percent of the West Bank, including the vast majority of Israeli settlements.
Even before taking office, Trump and his incoming administration have made a number of moves that have raised the hopes of pro-annexation Israelis.
The president-elect nominated the pro-settlement Baptist minister Mike Huckabee to be his ambassador to Israel. His nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said this would be “the most pro-Israel administration in American history” and that it would lift US sanctions on settlers.
Eugene Kontorovich of the conservative think thank Misgav Institute pointed out that the Middle East was a very different place to what it was during Trump’s first term.
The war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel’s hammering of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of Syrian president Bashar Assad, all allies of Israel’s arch-foe Iran, have transformed the region.
“October 7 showed the entire world the danger of leaving these (Palestinian) territories’ status in limbo,” Kontorovich said, referring to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel 15 months ago that sparked the Gaza war.
He said “the war has really turned a large part of the Israeli population away from a two-state solution.”
The two-state solution, which would create an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, has been the basis of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations going back decades.
Even before Trump won November’s US presidential election, NGOs were denouncing what they called a de facto annexation, pointing to a spike in land grabs and an overhaul of the bureaucratic and administrative structures Israel uses to manage the West Bank.
An outright, de jure annexation would be another matter, however.
Israel cannot expropriate private West Bank land at the moment, but “once annexed, Israeli law would allow it. That’s a major change,” said Aviv Tatarsky, from the Israeli anti-settlement organization Ir Amim.
He said that in the event that Israel annexes Area C, Palestinians there would likely not be granted residence permits and the accompanying rights.
The permits, which Palestinians in east Jerusalem received, allow people freedom of movement within Israel and the right to use Israeli courts. West Bank Palestinians can resort to the supreme court, but not lower ones.
Tatarsky said that for Palestinians across the West Bank, annexation would constitute “a nightmare scenario.”
Over 90 percent of them live in areas A and B, under full or partial control of the Palestinian Authority.
But, Tatarsky pointed out, “their daily needs and routine are indissociable from Area C,” the only contiguous portion of the West Bank, where most agricultural lands are and which breaks up areas A and B into hundreds of territorial islets.