The plans for Israeli settlement construction in an area known as E1, a small but strategic patch of land in the occupied West Bank, were laid before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first came to power nearly three decades ago.
Actually breaking ground there was long taboo, since the land is considered critical to any future Palestinian state, but building may now begin soon.
Israel’s final approval for the settlement project, granted last week, shows how far Mr. Netanyahu and his hard-right government have gone in bucking the internationally accepted parameters for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the devastating war in Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu, with the apparent backing of President Trump and his administration, seems to have dropped any semblance of accepting a form of Palestinian statehood, however limited, in favor of a greater Israel — one that extends beyond the boundaries of the original Jewish state founded in 1948.
Experts say Mr. Netanyahu also appears to have given up on his vision of forging relations with an outer circle of moderate Arab states, which he used to argue would help squeeze the Palestinians into territorial compromise.
Instead, he is etching the contours of indefinite dominance over the lands Israel conquered in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, dismantling the scaffolding of a future Palestinian state.
On a recent visit to Ofra, a West Bank settlement, for the 50th anniversary of its establishment, Mr. Netanyahu remarked, “I stood here half a century ago and said that we would do everything to ensure our continued hold on the land of Israel, that we would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and that we would thwart all attempts to uproot us from here.”
Over the years, Mr. Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea of the two-state solution, but on that visit to Ofra, he declared, “Thank God we kept our promise.”
In an interview this month with a right-leaning Israeli news channel, Mr. Netanyahu said that he was on a “historic and spiritual mission” and that he identified with the interviewer’s vision of the “whole land of Israel.”
The establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is widely viewed as the only practical possible solution to the century-old conflict, and foreign and domestic peace builders have long held that building in E1 would complicate the prospects of a viable, contiguous Palestinian heartland.
Until now, every American administration had vehemently opposed Israeli housing construction there to preserve the option of a negotiated peace agreement, and the approval granted last week prompted strong international condemnation from many of Israel’s traditional allies.
Support for a two-state solution dwindled among the Israeli public after a spate of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings in the early 2000s and even more so since the Oct. 7 attack. Even left-leaning Israeli politicians avoid mentioning the old land-for-peace formula, speaking only of leaving open a pathway for a future separation from the Palestinians.
The prospects of a two-state solution have also receded as West Bank land has been eaten away by the settlement expansion championed by the far-right coalition partners Mr. Netanyahu relies on to stay in power, among them Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister.
About 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, amid about three million Palestinians. Most of the world considers Israeli settlements there to be a violation of international law.
“It’s Smotrich’s government now,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, and former American ambassador to Israel. He said, “Netanyahu can’t resist him, and Trump shows no appetite to push back.”
Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, said in a radio interview that large-scale development in E1 was “a decision for the government of Israel to make, and so we would not try to evaluate the good or the bad of that.”
For Mr. Smotrich, precluding any possibility of a future Palestinian state is precisely the point. He has described each new settlement and housing unit as “a nail in the coffin of that dangerous idea.”
Much of E1 consists of steep inclines and deep ravines that make construction difficult, but about 3,400 housing units are planned to go up on two plateaus.
“Construction in E1 may or may not block a future Palestinian state; there are conceivable workarounds,” Mr. Shapiro said. But what it will do, he said, is end any near-term prospect of formal diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region and increase Israel’s international isolation, coming as the Israeli government plans to expand its military occupation of Gaza.
An abbreviation of East 1 (as it was marked on old maps), E1 sits on roughly 4.6 square miles of rugged desert terrain at the cinched waist of the kidney-shaped West Bank, connecting the northern and southern halves of the territory. It is one of the last open areas for development between the West Bank and predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem.
Israeli settlement there would reduce the link between the two halves of the West Bank to a series of roads and bridges, and to a narrow land corridor farther east, in the direction of the Jordanian border.
Successive Israeli governments have coveted E1 — if quietly — to create a different kind of contiguity, one that would connect Jerusalem and the large Israeli urban settlement of Maale Adumim, just east of E1, and to seal Israel’s control of the high ground around its contested capital.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin formally included E1 within the jurisdiction of Maale Adumim in 1994, a year before he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, but with the first of the Israeli-Palestinian agreements known as the Oslo Accords in play, he did not promote building there.
The series of prime ministers who followed him, Mr. Netanyahu included, tried to advance construction plans but bowed to American objections. Other than roads and basic infrastructure, the only building there is an Israeli police station that went up about two decades ago and could be easily removed, unlike a populated neighborhood.
Around that time, Mr. Netanyahu, who was out of office, went to E1 to kick off a campaign to regain leadership of the Likud party.
When he once again won the premiership in 2009, he delivered a landmark speech, under international pressure, essentially endorsing the two-state solution. He pledged to work for peace and laid out terms for “a demilitarized Palestinian state” alongside the Jewish state of Israel.
He has since suggested that Israel should maintain security control over all the West Bank and has spoken of a Palestinian “state minus” with limited powers.
Even during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Netanyahu held off approving construction in E1 as the administration in Washington worked on an ultimately unsuccessful Middle East peace plan.
But the region looks very different now. The West Bank is undergoing transformation, and the future of the Gaza Strip is in limbo. Israel has recently fought wars with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has been fighting in Syria, too.
The significance of E1 appears to have shrunk to a tiny, beige square on the map.
“If you look at the grand picture, E1 is a very minor detail, hardly worth looking at,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian expert in national security and resident of East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu, he said, is on a mission “to re-engineer and redesign the geography, demography, history and ideology of the entire region.”
Still, it remains unclear whether the E1 decision truly buries the two-state solution or whether the idea might still be salvageable.
Shaul Arieli, head of the T-Politography research group, which provides data to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said it would take months for building to start.
The approval came ahead of elections scheduled for next year, he noted, adding that the outcome of the elections would determine the results on the ground.
Mr. Arieli, a map expert who helped prepare Israel’s official negotiating teams in the past, believes that it is still feasible to create a Palestinian state and redraw the borders, with land swaps, in a way that would allow 80 percent of the Israeli settlers to live under Israeli sovereignty.
Construction in E1 would make things more difficult, he acknowledged, but he said that every peace proposal up until now called for Israel to give up on dozens of settlements.
“It could always evacuate that one,” he said.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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