The Annexation of the West Bank Is Complete

At a settler conference on May 6, ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, head of the Religious Zionist Party, and a member of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, declared that Gaza would be “totally destroyed” within months, its population trapped in a narrow strip of land, “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza.” Shocked but not surprised was the consensus reaction—Smotrich has never hidden his desire to ethnically cleanse the land from the river to the sea. His incendiary remarks are routinely covered in the Israeli media, fawningly or critically, depending on the outlet, and as the genocide grinds on, they’ve increasingly broken through to the West.

Israel’s critics responded with the familiar refrain that Smotrich had “said the quiet part out loud.” But that was the whole point. His provocation was a smokescreen, drawn from the black clouds of Gaza’s hellfire, which have drifted north and settled over the centers of Israeli power—from the Knesset in Jerusalem to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv to the Civil Administration in the Beit El settlement. There, an army of messianic bureaucrats under his command is working furiously and diligently to erase the Green Line that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank.

Smotrich’s next comments were far more consequential than his passing observation about what the world could already see unfolding in Gaza. He reported that after thirty years of delays due to international condemnation, Israel was finally set to begin construction in E1, a twelve-square-kilometer stretch of land strategically located between Jerusalem and the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement. The project would sever Palestinian East Jerusalem from the West Bank, cut off northern and southern Palestinian villages from one another, and establish uninterrupted Jewish sovereignty across the Green Line—“a historic opportunity,” as Smotrich put it, to “kill the Palestinian state de facto.”

The revelation marked a bold leap forward in Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan,” his 2017 blueprint to annex “Judea and Samaria”—the biblical name religious settlers use for the West Bank—without triggering the diplomatic blowback of formally calling it annexation. The goal was to make Jewish sovereignty an irreversible fact on the ground, and to leave Palestinians with three options: submit to life as colonial subjects, accept a payout to relocate, or be eradicated by force.

After the E1 announcement, Smotrich dropped more news: Israel had approved over 15,000 settlement housing units so far in 2025, compared to less than 10,000 in all of 2024, invested another $1.9 billion into West Bank roads, and completed its largest land grab since the Oslo Accords. “This is how you bring in a million residents,” he boasted. And all of it had been done “quietly and without spectacle.”

Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, in place since Israel seized the two-thousand-plus square miles of land from Jordan in 1967, is bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, which require an occupying power to protect the local population while temporarily administering the territory. In 1981, following the Camp David Accords, Israel established the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA), a governing body that sought to normalize the occupation by presenting it as administrative rather than strictly militarized, though it remained within the Defense Ministry. In 1995, the Oslo II Accord carved the West Bank into three sections: Area A under full Palestinian Authority (PA) control, Area B under PA civil control with joint Israeli security, and Area C—comprising over 60 percent of the land—under full Israeli control. The divisions created a noncontiguous patchwork, turning the West Bank into an expanse of Israeli control dotted with isolated enclaves of limited Palestinian governance. Despite this nominal division of responsibilities, the IDF continued operating across the entire West Bank.

Ironically, the military occupation—and by extension, the ICA—has provided some insulation against Israel’s expansionist politicians by erecting legal barriers to annexation, even as it enforces a violent apartheid system on the ground. Any settlement expansion or policy shift had to contend with the occupation’s formal obligations and the Defense Ministry’s lawyers. The settlement movement has hardly been stymied, but being in constant violation of international law has at least slowed its pace. Even as Israeli society, including its military leadership, has drifted rightward, the army’s legal constraints—and its broader interest in avoiding unrest—have, until recently, acted as a check on the settlement movement’s most aggressive territorial ambitions.

Before right-wing extremists took over Israel’s government, settlers in the West Bank frequently clashed with Israeli security forces, which occasionally demolished outposts—unauthorized settlements associated with the most violent settlers—to maintain order. But in 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power by forging an unprecedented coalition with ultra-nationalist and theocratic parties like Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit. Though Netanyahu had long been a hardline right-winger, his new allies were something else entirely: open theocrats, racist extremists, messianic settlers. They won just under 11 percent of the vote, but Netanyahu, desperate to avoid prison as his corruption trial dragged on, handed them sweeping control over the government.

Now in power, Smotrich, who spent his youth “running on the hills, erecting tents,” has taken it upon himself to dismantle the system that tore them down.

The first significant step came in February 2023, when Smotrich, whose support was key to Netanyahu’s fragile new coalition, struck a landmark deal with Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant to create and lead the Settlement Administration inside the Defense Ministry. To preserve the façade of military rule and obedience to international law, Smotrich was named an “Additional Minister in the Ministry of Defense”—technically subordinate to the real minister of defense but with effective control over both settlers and Palestinians—allowing the new civilian body to formally remain under military authority even as it took over day-to-day governance of the West Bank. In effect, Smotrich had been named governor of the occupied territory, part of a reverse coup in which civilian ideologues quietly usurped control from the military.

Smotrich now controlled Israel’s finances, directed West Bank governance, held a decisive Knesset voting bloc, and had allies embedded throughout crucial ministries. In the new government’s first few months, Israel retroactively legalized ten outposts and repealed part of the Disengagement Law, clearing the way for settlers to return to privately owned Palestinian land in the northern West Bank that had been officially off-limits since 2005. The Finance Ministry allocated billions from the 2023–24 state budget to West Bank development, including nearly $1 billion for road infrastructure—25 percent of Israel’s entire road budget, despite West Bank settlers comprising just 5 percent of its population—and over $70 million for illegal outposts. The government approved $33 million to take control of thousands of archaeological sites across the West Bank—ostensibly to “salvage, preserve, develop, and prevent antiquity theft”—and an additional $8.8 million to transform the historically rich town of Sebastia into a biblical Disneyland, part of a broader push to embed settlers in the region under the guise of tourism and heritage preservation. Just weeks later, Smotrich froze over $80 million in funding to Arab municipalities and blocked budgets for East Jerusalem education programs that had already been approved. Security officials pushed back, warning the cuts could fuel unrest and “terrorism,” but Smotrich won out, demonstrating cynical awareness that Palestinian violence, while inconvenient for the army, offered political cover to accelerate annexation.

By the summer of 2023, Smotrich had eliminated many of the internal checks on zoning and construction, marking the start of a period of settler abundance: plans for the largest-ever settler industrial zone in the West Bank, exclusive settler tourism enclaves in places like Jericho and Hebron, and a surge in settlement construction. In 2023, more than 12,000 housing units were approved in the West Bank and more than 18,000 in East Jerusalem, figures not seen since the Oslo Accords. He launched plans for a segregated highway, dubbed the “Sovereignty Road” by supporters and an “apartheid road” by critics, designed to funnel Palestinian traffic away from the heart of Israel’s annexation corridor, and lay the groundwork for building in E1.

Still, even with these sweeping changes, diplomatic red lines hadn’t entirely vanished. Netanyahu was under fire over his judicial overhaul and working to ease tensions with Washington. In June 2023, Israel once again shelved the E1 construction plan after the Biden administration issued a rare rebuke, expressing concern it would undermine the prospects for a two-state solution—a fiction the West needed intact to justify its continued backing of the state now taken over by right-wing fanatics.

October 7 demolished the last restraints on annexation by erasing the Israeli public’s sympathy for Palestinians, turning “security” into an unquestioned mandate, and diverting attention toward Gaza and away from the illegal settler movement. Smotrich immediately began reframing Hamas’s attack as a problem for the West Bank. “We need to understand that there is no big difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority,” he said in November. “The Arabs are the same Arabs, and the land is the same land. The sea they want to throw us into is the same sea.” Smotrich’s collapse of the distinction between the PA and Hamas—despite PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s reputation as “Israel’s subcontractor”—has enabled him to craft a sweeping reinterpretation of “national security” to circumvent the remaining safeguards of international law. He has deemed virtually all Palestinian Authority civil activity “hostile” to justify withholding tax revenues, imposing sanctions, and extending enforcement powers beyond Area C.

Through all this, Smotrich has occasionally mused about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, at one point drawing condemnation from Washington for suggesting the removal of 90 percent of its population. It’s impossible to know to what degree his statements are meant to distract from what’s going on in the West Bank—to be sure, he’s made no secret of his hatred for Palestinians wherever they live—but he never went further than flirting with the idea of rebuilding settlements in Gaza. His legislative and governing energy remained fixated on the West Bank, where he continues to cite October 7 to call for increased Israeli control, like Palestinian-free buffer zones and bans on olive harvesting near settler roads. As government spending was slashed across the board to support the war effort, he quietly funneled another $105 million to West Bank settlements for “security” purposes, and $20 million to go directly to illegal outposts. He claimed there were “two million Nazis in Judea and Samaria, who hate us exactly as do the Nazis of Hamas-ISIS in Gaza” and said any push for a Palestinian state is “ensuring the next massacre.” He made a habit of showing up at the scene of Palestinian attacks on settlers to announce new settlement projects, using the violence as justification for plans that were already underway.

In the wake of October 7, settler violence was no longer just tolerated—it was enshrined as policy. Thousands of settlers were drafted into hastily expanded “Regional Defense Battalions” and issued army uniforms and M16s. Many have used their new authority to raid Palestinian villages, destroy homes and infrastructure, uproot crops, beat residents, occasionally shoot them, and expel entire communities. As attacks on Palestinians spiraled out of control, Smotrich, in partnership with far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, enforced a near-total halt on illegal outpost evacuations and law enforcement against settlers. Meanwhile, the IDF intensified its own operations, sealing off Palestinian towns with locked gates and ad hoc roadblocks, barring 150,000 workers from entering Israel, and escalating raids, arrests, and shootings across the territory. Ben-Gvir elevated his former security secretary to lead the prison system and actively supported policies to worsen conditions, starve Palestinian prisoners, and eliminate oversight.

By June 2024, Smotrich was ready to declare victory over the West Bank. At a closed-door Religious Zionism Party conference held in the illegal Shaharit Farm outpost, he bragged about creating a “legalization bypass route” to fund roads, infrastructure, and housing for outposts without requiring legal sign off, by designating them as “sites under legalization.” But this loophole was only an on-ramp to a permanent method of bypassing legal accountability: he’d built a new legal department inside the Defense Ministry, staffed by over two dozen lawyers tasked with managing settlement affairs. West Bank decisions would soon be managed entirely through a civilian legal team handpicked by Smotrich, driven by political aims rather than international law. He revoked the authority of the IDF’s top West Bank commander to block settlement construction plans, eliminating one of the last remaining checks on expansion. He joked about his dual roles and self-contained funding system, saying, “The finance minister and the minister in the Defense Ministry are from the same party, so they know how to talk to each other, so somehow there are budgets.” He had also helped pass two new laws that, for the first time, allowed West Bank settlements to receive municipal tax revenue collected inside Israel, while exempting them from the typical financial obligations. A steady stream of smaller moves—like sanctioning cell phone carriers that failed to provide service across 95 percent of the West Bank—quietly normalized settler life.

Smotrich told the audience at Shaharit Farm that the transfer of power from military to civilian hands was complete. On paper, the West Bank was still under military occupation. In practice, the entire administrative apparatus is now run by ideologues inside a civilian chain of command. The apartheid system that had long governed every aspect of Palestinian life—access to land, water, money, movement—was now streamlined for control, its last legal and bureaucratic guardrails stripped away. “The truth is,” Smotrich told the audience, “at first we thought of transferring it altogether from the defense ministry. In the end, we did it in a way that would be easier to swallow in the political and legal context.”

A month later, he was back in the news for suggesting at a public conference that it may be “justified and moral” to allow two million Gazans to die of starvation.

Smotrich and his allies are deploying a dual strategy to advance annexation of the West Bank: eroding military and PA control inside the West Bank, and pursuing a litany of policy initiatives intended to dissolve its boundary with Israel. He has fast-tracked the retroactive legalization of dozens of illegal outposts and expanded settlements to incorporate surrounding “neighborhoods.” He secured two new zoning tools, both capable of halting construction and authorizing demolitions beyond Israeli-controlled Area C: first, military orders that invoke nature preservation, used in December for the first Area B demolition since Oslo; and second, a cabinet decision that expands archaeological enforcement into Area B, freezing virtually all municipal activity in towns like Sebastia and providing the IDF cover to storm the town near-daily under the pretext of protecting Jewish heritage—operations during which soldiers shot a fourteen-year-old boy dead in January.

In May 2025, Smotrich gained cabinet approval for Israel’s first-ever land registration drive in the West Bank, a process that formally maps, verifies, and records ownership claims, and reclassifies any land without official documentation as belonging to the state. The campaign functions as a legal mechanism for large-scale dispossession, enabling Israel to claim vast areas of Palestinian-held land that were never formally registered, largely because Israel froze the process in 1968. The same cabinet decision declared the PA’s parallel registration efforts legally void, instructed Israeli forces to block Palestinian officials and surveyors from the field, and ordered the IDF, Shin Bet, and Mossad to gather intelligence on funding for the project so the Finance Ministry could deduct those amounts from tax revenues owed to the PA.

During the Knesset’s winter session, Smotrich and his allies have advanced a slate of bills aimed at dissolving the Green Line by applying Israeli civil law to the West Bank. A new antiquities bill from Likud Knesset member Amit Halevi seeks to transfer control from the Civil Administration’s archaeology unit to the Ministry of Heritage, run by a Smotrich ally, paving the way for sweeping land grabs under the guise of heritage protection. A bill from the Religious Zionist Party’s Moshe Solomon would allow settlers to directly purchase land from Palestinians without military approval, privatizing annexation by turning extremist buyers into de facto landlords. Another from Dan Illouz, dubbed the “Metropolitan Jerusalem” bill, would expand Jerusalem’s municipal footprint, pushing out the Green Line to incorporate surrounding settlements into Israel. The government also initiated plans to connect settlements to Israel’s natural gas grid and began expanding urban renewal laws to the West Bank, enabling high-density development. As housing prices and the cost of living in Israel soar, the state is luring priced-out, often secular families into the West Bank with generous tax breaks, incentives, and subsidies. For good measure, the Knesset advanced a bill from Simcha Rothman, of the Religious Zionist Party, to enshrine “Judea and Samaria” as the West Bank’s legal designation, while the Diaspora Ministry took over a settlement council’s PR arm to launch a state-backed marketing campaign, flying in influencers to “bolster the legitimization of settlements” and reframe the occupied territory as “not just the historic heart of our homeland, but also a central front in the struggle to delegitimize Israel.”

With these changes in motion, settlement growth is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The government is on track to approve over fifty thousand new settlement housing units by the end of 2025—more than in the previous five years combined. As Smotrich retroactively legalizes outposts, emboldened settlers have established dozens more and paved illegal roads. The settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now numbers between 600,000 and 750,000, and is growing at more than twice the rate of Israel proper. Smotrich is openly aiming to bring an additional one million settlers into the West Bank alone.

The impact on Palestinians has been catastrophic. Since the start of the war, Israel has demolished thousands of homes and structures in the West Bank, issued tens of thousands of demolition orders, and displaced tens of thousands of residents, including more than forty thousand from Jenin and Tulkarm alone amid months of raids and bombardments. Settlers, fully aware that the IDF has been ordered to stand down, are methodically erecting outposts beside Palestinian villages and carrying out daily pogroms until residents pick up and leave—at least sixty communities have been expelled since October 7. On the rare occasions the IDF does show up, they’re more likely to arrest the victims. Movement restrictions, mass detentions, and other punitive measures have deprived Palestinian workers of their wages, resulting in monthly losses reportedly totaling $373 million.

On June 10, after five Western governments sanctioned Smotrich for inciting settler violence, he retaliated by directing his office to cancel a critical financial waiver that enables billions in annual transactions between Israeli and Palestinian banks—an act that could paralyze the West Bank economy by cutting off salaries, trade, and access to essentials like food, water, and electricity. The Palestinian Authority, bled dry from years of corruption and Smotrich’s tax revenue freezes, was already nearing financial collapse before this latest move.

Between October 7 and the end of 2024, settlers attacked Palestinians an average of four times per day, double the 2022 rate—and that’s only what victims, most of whom have lost all faith in the segregated legal system, chose to report. Israeli soldiers and settlers, often acting in coordination, have killed over 943 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7—more than the total over the past fifteen years combined—including at least 196 children. By contrast, 33 Israelis were killed by Palestinians in the West Bank in that same time period, roughly two-thirds of them on-duty soldiers.

Annexation is, for all intents and purposes, complete. Since Trump’s reelection—reportedly bankrolled in part by a $100 million donation from Miriam Adelson in exchange for backing annexation—Smotrich has grown more confident, calling 2025 “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” He’s built a close relationship with U.S. ambassador Mike Huckabee, who once said there was “no such thing as a Palestinian,” and Smotrich has declared they are now “raising the flag” of building and settling rather than “hiding and apologizing.” Still, he understands the strategic value of keeping the machinery of dispossession running quietly beneath the surface; if Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide livestreamed to the world, its project in the West Bank is an extraordinarily efficient campaign of ethnic cleansing executed through the hidden levers of civil governance. The Western press, fixated on Gaza and Israel’s new war with Iran, may occasionally report on settler violence and the siege on Jenin and Tulkarm—often called “Gazafication,” as if it were merely derivative—but remains largely oblivious to the bureaucratic coup redrawing the map of the West Bank.

Now, as Israel and Iran trade blows and the specter of regional war looms, Israel has used the crisis to ramp up its troop presence in the West Bank and impose indefinite lockdowns on Palestinian towns.

On May 19, with Gaza on the brink of famine after a monthslong blockade, Netanyahu announced that a limited number of aid trucks would be allowed into the Strip. Smotrich, who weeks earlier had threatened to leave the government if Israel allowed aid into Gaza, held a press conference that same day to announce that he endorsed the move so “the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes” before offering his familiar assurance that Israel was “dismantling Gaza, leaving it in ruins with unprecedented destruction, and the world still hasn’t stopped us.”

The following day, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Smotrich had only offered his support after Netanyahu pledged to fund hundreds of new housing units in illegal outposts and to consider authorizing twenty-two new settlements—the largest expansion in decades that has since been approved. The sequence of events suggests that Smotrich anticipated a moment would arise when international pressure would force Netanyahu’s hand, and staged a calculated display of leverage to extract a quiet payoff. It wouldn’t be the first time such a pattern unfolded: in January, just days after Israel agreed to a hostage deal and temporary ceasefire in Gaza that Smotrich loudly objected to, Netanyahu green lit the military escalation in the West Bank that has flattened the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps and led to an indefinite expulsion.

Gaza, after all, was never the prize. In the Old Testament, the coastal strip is chiefly known as the domain of the Philistines—the Israelites’ eternal foe—and a frontier of unrelenting conflict to be conquered or razed, but not inhabited. Judea and Samaria, by contrast, formed the cradle of ancient Jewish civilization. Never mind the archaeological record, which testifies to dozens of lineages—Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and non-Abrahamic—or the Palestinian one still enduring today. In the Bible, this is the land of Jerusalem and the First and Second Temples, of the southern kingdom of Judea and the northern land of Samaria, the stage for David and Solomon, and the soil where biblical law and prophecy took root.

For Smotrich and his ilk, it’s not just sacred ground, it’s home—where they live, raise families, and profit off its possession. In their world, there is no clear boundary between faith and ambition, history and scripture, politics and ideology, or territorial conquest and the sincere belief that Palestinians shouldn’t exist. Smotrich acknowledged as much when introducing his 2017 “Decisive Plan,” saying it was a “pragmatic document—but it resides comfortably within my faith-based worldview. Those who wish can see it as nothing more than a practical, political solution; others are invited to see it as an encounter between faith and realism, vision and reality.”

The Netanyahu coalition—split over the issue of religious exemption from military service—is as fragile as ever. But Smotrich’s structural transformations to West Bank governance were always meant to outlive his time in power. Last June, he assured his followers that he sought to “change the system’s DNA,” making lasting changes that would endure, he promised, “even if the government falls tomorrow.

As for how he’s managed to pull off this remarkable government takeover with virtually no meaningful opposition, Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria.”

For Zionism, Smotrich knows, the formula has never changed: the founding myth will drive you forward, force will deliver the promise.