Aziz Mustafa
Middle East Monitor / November 21, 2024
As soon as it was known that Donald Trump will be back in the White House in January, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that 2025 would be the year to impose the occupation state’s sovereignty over “Judea and Samaria”, known to the rest of the world as the West Bank. Naftali Bennett made a similar announcement in 2016, when Trump was a US presidential candidate for the first time. The Palestinian territory, said Bennett, should be part of the occupation state.
Annexation is illegal under international law.
Any Israeli attempt to annex the West Bank projects a worrying picture of the consequences. The Israelis themselves are monitoring this, but it is not acknowledged by the right-wing government, because even partial annexation could lead to some negative responses that would jeopardise the occupation state’s position. While the Jewish settlers and their leaders who support annexation claim that it can be implemented gradually and thus be revealed as a fait accompli, with reduced negative consequences, research suggests that this is a delusion.
The gradual annexation of so-called Area C of the West Bank (delineated by the Oslo Accords and controlled fully by Israel), or even part of it, is expected to lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and thus the end of its security coordination with the occupation state, and the occupation army will have to control the occupied Palestinian territory. In such a situation, Israel will be forced to fund a military-run regime and be responsible for the lives of 2.8 million Palestinians. The cost of such a move is estimated at $14.5 billion annually, including expenses for health services, education and national insurance for Palestinians.
Moreover, the annexation of the West Bank could damage the Israeli economy due to a predicted decline in foreign investment and the imposition of international sanctions. Security will also be affected, as the occupation army will be required to double its presence on the ground, hindering its readiness for war on other fronts. Vital security cooperation under the peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt will be hit, with the potential for Jordan to become dangerously unstable within the international arena, and Israel could find itself in a serious diplomatic crisis.
Even if the incoming Trump administration supports the annexation move, even tacitly, the reaction of Europe and the Arab world is expected to be harsh. It is likely to include economic and diplomatic sanctions, and Israel’s international legitimacy, such as it is, will be damaged severely.
It might even be declared to be a pariah state, similar to South Africa during the apartheid era.
The main fear, though, is that annexation will lead to a point of no return, where the occupation state will be forced to choose between two impossible options: a binational state in which it will lose its Jewish majority, or an apartheid regime in which millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military rule, without full civil rights. Israel has already been found to have passed the threshold as an apartheid state by B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Coinciding with Israeli preparations to annex the West Bank, the government’s attitude towards Palestinian construction, especially in Area C, means implementing a demographic and population revolution in favour of the Jewish immigrant settlers at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.
There were 2,868 new Palestinian buildings built in Area C from June 2023 to May 2024, less than half of the number built in the corresponding periods in previous years since 2018. The monthly average in 2023 was 260 new Palestinian buildings, compared with an average of 608 buildings per month in previous years from 2018 onwards. This is a 57 per cent decrease. Meanwhile, there has been very intense activity by the occupation army, prompting many Palestinians to stay in their homes and postpone their housing plans.
The operations of the army-run Civil Administration in the West Bank; the appointment of far-right extremist Smotrich as Finance Minister and as an additional minister in the Defence Ministry; and the establishment of the Settlement Directorate have all contributed to imposing more control over Palestinian land in the West Bank. This began with building a strategy for work and determining the location for Palestinian construction, and has been extended to a legal advisory system to deal with petitions, the confiscation of engineering equipment and the demolition of “unlicensed” structures that deter Palestinian residents from trying to extend their homes or build new properties.
A major factor in the decline in Palestinian construction has been the decisive move by the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions, headed by Orit Strook, to fund land coordinators in all settlement councils. Their job is to patrol in a vehicle and use drones to detect and report any Palestinian construction. The result has been the confiscation of more than 440 tractors, small trucks and engineering tools used by Palestinian contractors, leaving them without tools for lengthy periods, which is costly and forces them to think twice before their next construction project.
The occupation authorities do not hesitate to demolish any new Palestinian building.
Unlike the past, the procedure is short and sharp. The heads of Palestinian villages know that anything being built has a low chance of survival and faces rapid demolition. The occupation authorities have destroyed 901 Palestinian buildings in Area C this year alone, and declared 5,978 acres to be state land. This is equivalent to half of the entire area that was declared as state land since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
With 19 per cent of Palestinian new-build sites destroyed in 2021, 27 per cent in the following year, 2022, and 22 per cent in 2023, a shocking increase has been recorded this year, with 68 per cent of new Palestinian buildings destroyed. All of this is in preparation for the annexation of the West Bank as soon as Donald Trump takes office in January. With many supporters of Israel’s illegal settlements nominated for major positions in his administration, the incoming US president may be unable to stop the annexation plan, even if, as Republican Party sources claim, he opposes it.
Aziz Mustafa writes for Middle East Monitor
