Just as more Western countries club together this week to recognize a Palestinian state, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is redoubling efforts to ensure it can never exist.
The simplest way to do that is to accelerate the construction of Israeli settlements, which the overwhelming majority of the international community regards as illegal. But some of Netanyahu’s more hardline ministers are also calling for a full annexation of the West Bank, which includes major cities such as Ramallah and Nablus.
The prime minister on Sunday had a stark message for Britain, France, Canada and Australia and other Western nations that are joining the vast majority of U.N. countries in recognizing Palestinian statehood. “It will not happen. There will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan,” he pledged.
It is still uncertain how precisely Israel will respond to the latest round of diplomatic pressure. Netanyahu is not showing his hand, but is vowing to punch back.
“The response to the latest attempt to impose a terrorist state on us in the heart of our country will be given after my return from the United States,” he said, referring to a trip this week to New York, where he is scheduled to deliver a speech on Friday to the United Nations General Assembly.
The Israeli response is almost certainly going to focus on building more settlements and expanding areas of military control on the West Bank that will fragment Palestinian communities into ever smaller islands.
More than a map
Minutes after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the U.K.’s formal recognition of a Palestinian state, the website of the Foreign Office replaced the reference to “Occupied Palestinian Territories” on the map of the region with the simple word: “Palestine.”
But it will take more than a stroke of a cartographer’s pen to bring about a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
In reality, it is the Israelis who hold the power to render Palestinian statehood a physical impossibility with an acceleration of settlement building. The aim is to ensure there can be no coherent borders defining a new Palestinian state.
For their part, Israeli ultranationalists want Israel to include all the biblical lands of the Jews, and are not disguising that goal.
“They will talk about a Palestinian dream, and we will continue to build a Jewish reality,” far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last month. “This reality is what will permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.”
Netanyahu himself made the threat explicit in his reaction Sunday. “Indeed, we doubled Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria and we will continue on this path,” he said, using the Israeli ultranationalists’ biblical names for the West Bank.
Last month, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned that the ferocious pace of new settlements in the West Bank was destroying the very feasibility of a two-state solution, as well as breaching international law.
Splitting territory
The immediate focus of her concern was a controversial settlement plan on the outskirts of East Jerusalem to build thousands of new housing units in the occupied West Bank, effectively splitting the territory in two and making it impossible for East Jerusalem to serve as the capital of a new Palestinian state.
“If implemented, settlement construction in this area will permanently cut the geographical and territorial contiguity between occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and sever the connection between the northern and southern West Bank,” Kallas said.
The plan for the huge settlement in what is technically termed E1, just east of Jerusalem, has been pushed for years by Israeli ultranationalists and settler leaders, including Smotrich, but had been on hold for decades because of fierce international opposition.
In August, the project for 20,000 housing units got final approval, prompting Smotrich to brag, “the Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans, but with actions.”
Most peace plans envision the Israeli and Palestinian states being based on the borders as they existed before the Six-Day War of 1967 with some agreed land swaps to smooth things out — but that formula has always been anathema to Netanyahu and Israel’s rightwing parties. They reject outright any prospect of Palestinian statehood.
Aside from the East Jerusalem project, Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition government has been ramping up settlements at the fastest rate in years, expanding them significantly and then quickly consolidating them with road networks and other permanent infrastructure.
From November 2023 to October 2024, an unprecedented 49 new Israeli outposts have been established, bringing the current total in the West Bank to 141 settlements.
Dozen of others are in the pipeline, escalating what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a Netanyahu critic, told POLITICO recently was “annexation by stealth.”
“It is the logical conclusion of where Netanyahu is going,” he said.
Annexation threats
That might not, though, satisfy the ultranationalist parties Netanyahu needs to placate if he wants to his coalition government to survive.
Their leaders have been advocating an even more audacious and explosive plan — to formally annex the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel’s hard-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is pressing for the cabinet this week to debate an “immediate” annexation of the West Bank following the declarations of Britain, Canada and Australia. In a post on X, he called for “the immediate application of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria” as well as “the complete dismantling of the ‘Palestinian’ Authority.”
Ominously, Netanyahu hasn’t ruled anything out and Israeli media is reporting he’s considering all proposals.
One other proposal under consideration is to expand the security area Israel controls currently in the West Bank from 60 percent of the territory to 80 percent.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, Gulf Arab states are already scrambling to warn Israel not to annex all or part of the West Bank in reaction to the current wave of countries recognizing formally a Palestine state.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper also warned on Monday that Israel should not encroach further on Palestinian territory in the West Bank, telling the BBC: “We have been clear, and I have been clear to the Israeli foreign minister: We have been clear to the Israeli government that they must not do that.”
Even without any formal annexation, though, it is hard to see how a two-state solution can be viable while settlements are being established at such a pace. With nearly half-a-million Israeli settlers now in the West Bank, it would likely be politically unthinkable and highly hazardous for any near future Israeli government to do what then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon managed to do in 2005 — namely withdraw armed forces from Gaza and dismantle 21 settlements housing 8,000 Jewish settlers.
That caused partisan uproar in Israel.
Trying to move half-a-million zealous Jewish settlers from the West Bank would be bound to thrust Israel into even greater strife.
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