Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / November 29, 2024
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced that 2025 will be the year Israel annexes the West Bank. With the Trump administration entering the White House, the stage is set for Israel to finally take total control over the occupied territory.
As the year approaches its end, fears are mounting over what is to come in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, after Israeli finance minister and far-right settler leader Bezalel Smotrich announced that 2025 “will be the year of Israeli annexation of the West Bank.”
Smotrich’s statements around his plans for annexation came on the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump’s election win. Given Trump’s track record of being favourable towards Israeli settlement expansion and annexation, timing of the announcement did not come as much of a surprise. It was even less surprising that it was coming from a man like Smotrich.
Smotrich, a hardline right-wing Israeli settler, has in the past called for entire Palestinian towns to be “wiped off the map”. He has said that the Palestinian people don’t, or shouldn’t exist.
He has publicly stated that he dreams of a Jewish state from the Euphrates, in Iraq, to the Nile, in Egypt, where the limits of the Jewish Jerusalem would reach Damascus in Syria, noting that it would be done “step by step.”
Smotrich has also been open about saying the quiet part out loud: that the purpose of Israeli settlements is to cut the geographic continuity of Palestinian cities in the West Bank, preventing the viability of a future Palestinian state.
Smotrich’s well-documented supremacist beliefs, coupled with a supportive incoming Trump administration and the fact that Smotrich now wields more administrative powers than ever before, indicate that announcements of Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank are more than just another controversial talking point or empty rhetoric. It is a promise that Smotrich plans to deliver on.
Decades in the making
The Israeli annexation of the West Bank has been in the making for decades.
For years rights groups and experts have pointed to the fact that, on the ground, Israel has already effectively extended its sovereignty and control to large swathes of the occupied territory. They argue that Israel treats most of it, practically and officially as part of its own proper, having carried out a de facto annexation.
In 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine at the time, Richard Falk, stated that “Prolonged occupation, with practices and policies which appear to constitute apartheid and segregation, ongoing expansion of settlements amounts to de facto annexation.”
The Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq said in 2021 that “de facto annexation is widespread across the West Bank and has been occurring for over 50 years,” while the Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, said in 2020 that “by engineering the space, Israel has radically changed the map of the West Bank to suit its interests, creating contiguity for the settlements and pushing Palestinians into scores of isolated, crowded enclaves.”
The foundation for Israel’s extensive control of the West Bank today was laid down in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, which essentially facilitated the segregation of the West Bank into cantons of varying degrees of Israeli and Palestinian control, and gave Israel complete power over more than 60% of the land of the West Bank. The Accords also gave Israel control over the West Bank’s borders, its most fertile farming land, its natural water reserves, and the hilltops that sprawl across the territory.
Israel’s land grab continued in the years after Oslo, with the proliferation of illegal settlements, and the building of the apartheid wall that twisted and turned deep inside the Palestinian territory, swallowing up more land and further strangling Palestinian towns, villages, and urban centers. Israel built networks of settler-only roads, gates and tunnels, further cementing a system of apartheid, where two populations – the local Palestinians and the colonial settlers – lived in one area, but under two different sets of rights and life conditions.
During Donald Trump’s first term, Israel moved the needle further on its path towards annexation, with Benjamin Netanyahu overseeing the rapid expansion of settlements in the Jordan Valley, the long plain of the West Bank’s most fertile farming land along the Jordanian border. By the end of Trump’s administration, the U.S. had recognized Israel’s sovereignty over occupied Jerusalem, the occupied Golan Heights, and, critically, over the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Connecting the dots, it becomes clear that over the decades and throughout various Israeli administrations, the Israeli vision has always been working towards annexation, by aiming to: strangle Palestinians in their main urban centers, prevent them from growing, turning their demographic growth advantage against them, all the while swallowing up more land and handing it over to the settlers.
But if Israel has been working towards annexation, and enacting de facto annexation on the ground in the West Bank for years, why does Smotrich feel confident that 2025 will be the year that it happens?
Analysts say that, if the announcement came now, it is because Israel feels it is finally ready to make the move. The question is – how is Israel going to do it?
Israel’s strategy to achieving annexation
According to Khalil Tafakji, a Palestinian expert on Israeli settlements and the Director of the Mapping Unit at Jerusalem’s Orient House, Israel’s current plan for the West Bank under Smotrich “relies heavily on infrastructure” – the groundwork of which Israel has been laying for the past few decades.
Such examples, Tafakji noted, are Israeli infrastructure projects like the ‘Samaria road’, which runs north to south across the West Bank, connecting numerous Israeli settlements to a network of bridges and tunnels from Nablus all the way to Jerusalem. The network allows Israeli settlers to move completely separately from Palestinians, and makes it that much easier for Israel to implement annexation.
Another part of Israel’s current strategy is, according to Tafakji, “the control of a maximum of land with a minimum of resources” through violence, particularly by terrorizing Palestinians armed settler presence, which intimidates and threatens Palestinians off their land.
Settler outposts are key to this strategy, as are outposts typically erected and inhabited by the most radical, violent, and fringe Israeli settlers. In recent years, Israel has also promoted the establishment of ‘herding outposts’. This strategy, introduced systematically across the West Bank, particularly in the Jordan Valley, relies on settlers who are given government-funded livestock to herd on the grazing lands of Palestinian Bedouin communities. These settlers utilize their livestock, and the protection of the Israeli military, to exercise effective control over large areas of agricultural Palestinian land, and intimidate Palestinian shepherds and herding communities to move.
Tafakji explains that “herder settlers and even violent settler groups are all part of Israel’s state-policy, as they are supported, armed and funded by the state itself.”
He points out that “the settlements’ regional councils work closely with settler groups that establish outposts, from the midst of which violent settlers emerge and organize attacks on Palestinian communities.” Notably, Tafakji says, these settlement regional councils, despite being located in occupied territory, already function as extensions of the Israeli state, another critical part of the foundation of annexation.
“These settlers are the executive tool of the Israeli state in implementing annexation, and have been for decades,” he adds.
After October 7, settler presence in the West Bank exploded into large-scale violent attacks that expelled at least 25 Bedouin communities and villages, particularly in the Jordan Valley. The expulsion of these communities over the past year have further cemented Israeli settler strongholds in the West Bank, once again paving a clearer path towards annexation.
Smotrich’s final touches
While the Israeli state has been laying the foundation for annexation for years, the presence of Bezalel Smotrich in the highest levels of Israel’s government has played a critical role in Israel’s ability to finally make the move towards full annexation.
Last January, Netanyahu handed Smotrich full powers on settlement policy in the West Bank, and with it, the keys to implementing annexation.
Smotrich’s vision for the West Bank is in fact a tactical implementation of the larger Israeli colonial strategy across Palestine. From one end, he pushes for choking Palestinian existence in the West Bank, geographically, administratively, and economically. On another end, he pushes for more settlement expansion with the stated goal to settle one million Israelis in the West Bank in the coming years. Finally, he pushes to make the settlements both legally and administratively part of Israel, run by Israeli government civilian agencies, erasing all distinctions between ‘Israel proper’ and Israeli-occupied territories under international law.
With Smotrich at the helm, a far-right Israeli government, an intensifying Israeli military crackdown in the West Bank, and an international lack of action against any of it, the stage is set for 2025, and Smotrich’s “year of annexation.”
Of course, annexation is not possible with Smotrich, or Netanyahu alone. The U.S. and Western failure to counter Israeli settlement expansion with economic or political pressure preceded Smotrich and the current Israeli government. The global crackdown on, and criminalization of, the Palestine solidarity movement’s attempts to call out Israel’s colonial policies in the West Bank also preceded Smotrich.
Many of the governments and leaders who will criticize Smotrich’s and Netanyahu’s coming actions in the West Bank, and Trump’s expected support of them, have been active participants in annexation through their years-long failure to stop it, even as the writing on the wall was as clear as ever.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
