EZARIYA, West Bank — Hanging by the desk of the mayor of Bethany — Ezariya, in Arabic — is a blown-up aerial photo from 1938 showing this Palestinian town on Jerusalem’s edge how it once was:
Before the Israeli separation wall severed its access to Jerusalem to the west, before the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim settlement took root nearby, and before a new wall that will soon block it from the east and effectively rend the occupied West Bank in two.
Mayor Khalil Abu Al-Rish stared at the photo one recent morning, a cigarette in one hand and a glum look on his face, then pointed with his other hand out his office window at Ezariya’s bustling main thoroughfare, the primary artery connecting north West Bank cities like Ramallah to Bethlehem and Hebron in the south.
“There are 55,000 living in this town. This road alone has 60 cars passing through it every minute, according to our research. The [Israeli] plan now is to shut it down,” he said.
“Do that, and there’s no Palestinian state.”
“The plan” Abu Al-Rish was referring to is East One or E1, the long-deferred Israeli project that aims to build 3,400 new settlement homes over a 3,000-acre area in the mountains stretching out from East Jerusalem to Maale Adumim.
It’s another in a series of moves Israel has taken over the last two years to further the possible annexation of the West Bank, which Palestinians consider a part of their future state and which Israel snatched from Jordan in 1967; its occupation is considered illegal by international law. President Trump said annexation is a red line he will not allow Israel to cross, but he also has not discouraged Israel from expanding settlements in the region.
E1 would cut any Palestinian link to East Jerusalem — where Palestinians hope to make their capital — and torpedo any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state.
This week, ultranationalist ministers in the Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval to a bill granting Israel authority to annex the West Bank — a largely symbolic move that appears to have been an attempt to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has long called for the annexation of the West Bank, but has demurred from doing so for fear of angering Israel’s main patron in the U.S.
Vice President JD Vance, who visited Israel this week, on Thursday said of the vote that if it is “political stunt, then it is a very stupid political stunt.”
“I personally take some insult to it,” Vance said. “The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel.”
But Israel has taken plenty of steps aimed at making annexation a de facto scenario that may soon turn irreversible. It has restricted movement by erecting 288 gates on entrances and exits of Palestinians towns and villages, adding to what the U.N. says are 849 “movement obstacles,” even as settlements have increased in number and size, further penning Palestinians into islands of territory they have little chance of leaving.
One such gate, a yellow metal barrier on the road that Israeli soldiers lock and then leave, appeared this month at Ezariya’s eastern entrance, said Abu Al-Rish.
“We watched them install it one night. It’s not like they talk to us or ask us for permission,” he said, a wan smile on his face.
Businesses and homes near the gate were issued demolition orders to make way for a separation barrier, the Israeli-built barricade composed of 26-foot-high cement walls resembling rows of piano keys slicing through so many parts of the West Bank.
One of the affected owners, 50-year-old Omar Abu Saho, who runs a toy store, said he received a legal notification Oct. 4. The deadline for leaving the area had passed, he said, but no one has come to enforce it for now. But the order certainly hasn’t helped business.
“Look around you, the place is empty. And I’m not getting more inventory. If I sell anything, that’s it,” he said.
Abu Saho had already been forced to move here with his two sons and five daughters from the West Bank city of Jenin. Though Jenin is about 100 miles from the Gaza Strip, when Israel launched its campaign on the enclave after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the city was nevertheless the focus of sustained Israeli military operations, forcing many merchants like Abu Saho to close up shop.
“We couldn’t continue there, so I came here. Now it seems I’ll have to move again. You follow your business,” he said. “The Israelis destroyed me for three or four times. But every time I continue. And besides, I like to work. If I despair, I won’t live.”
Omar Hassan Abu Ghali, 51, who co-owns a car wash on Ezariya’s main road with his family, was less sanguine. The night he saw the gate installed, he said, felt like his “life was ending.”
“You put a wall here, this area goes bye-bye. There’s nothing any more,” he said, staring at cars making their way through the gate, which at that moment was open.
“The Israelis want to shut down my livelihood, for me and my kids. What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Tourism to the area has all but withered away, said Hussein Hamad, the caretaker of the archaeological pilgrimage site in Ezariya thought to be the site of Lazarus’ tomb.
“October is supposed to our best month. I’d get 20 to 25 groups a week. How many do you see around you now?” he said, waving his hand around the seemingly abandoned area. A nearby shop owner looked expectantly at two people visiting the tomb, but turned back and locked up the shop when she discovered they were reporters, then walked away.
As part of the E1 project, Israel intends to build a Palestinian-only bypass — euphemistically called the “Fabric of Life Road” or “Sovereignty Road” — through parts of Ezariya that it says would solve the problem of movement between parts of the West Bank, without allowing Palestinian traffic near Maale Adumim.
But critics, including Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that promotes a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dismissed the bypass in a statement when the project was first approved in March as an “apartheid road” that “serves no purpose in improving Palestinian transportation.”
“Instead, it is solely aimed at facilitating the annexation of a vast area,” Peace Now said. The group noted the irony that the road wouldn’t be funded by Israeli taxpayers, but would use customs revenues Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority but which it frequently withholds.
The bypass road would also chomp off more of Ezariya’s territory, a significant portion of which has already been expropriated by Israel, said Abu Al-Rish. That would prevent the town from the expansion it desperately needs to house the growing population. He added that if the roadworks go ahead, Ezariya’s role as a top Palestinian commercial hub would end.
“We have more than 1,000 businesses here. What you see in front of you is the longest commercial street in all the West Bank,” he said.
“It’s just inconceivable to me that this will go away.”
It’s not the first time Israel has tried to bring E1 into being. First proposed in 1994 under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (a year after he signed the Oslo Accords that were to bring about a Palestinian state), E1 stalled before concerted international opposition, including from traditional allies of Israel, which feared the project’s impact on the West Bank.
As recently as two years ago, Abu Al-Rish said, U.S. officials would reassure him the plan wasn’t going through. Even now, European nations have remained against E1 and condemned the Israeli government when it approved the plan in August. The Trump administration took a different tack.
“We will not tell Israel what to do. We will not interfere,” said U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an avid supporter of Israel and settlements, in an interview with Galatz radio in August.
Israel has so far constructed approximately 160 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, housing some 700,000 Jews alongside 3.3 million Palestinians.
Israel argues E1 is a necessity to link Maale Adumim to Jerusalem both for the purposes of urban planning and security. But for their part, Israeli politicians are clear on E1’s effect.
“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not by slogans but by deeds,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the ultranationalist finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, after the August approval. He framed the decision as a response to a raft of countries recognizing the state of Palestine.
“Every settlement, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea,” he said.
Ever since the E1 project was on the books, Atallah Mazaraa, a Bedouin who lives near Ezariya in an area called Pope Hill — or Jabal Al-Baba, so named because it was gifted to the pope when the area was under Jordanian control — has kept up a grinding legal fight to keep his community in place.
Sitting in a pre-fabricated hut that doubles as an office from where he runs his legal campaign, Mazaraa reminisced about the time when his flock of sheep and goats could roam and graze where Maale Adumim now stands. Then the spring from where they drank was commandeered for the settlement’s use, even as the thousands of square miles open to his livestock shrank with every passing year.
“Every day they try to take more and more. You just don’t have stability,” he said.
For Mazaraa, international recognition means nothing.
“We Palestinians know if you go from Nablus to Jericho, there’s no state. What, I want a passport, a piece of paper that says I have a state, when every 200 yards there’s a checkpoint?” he said.
“All we want the Israelis to do is leave us alone,” he said. “But they’ve taken away so much of the West Bank.”
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