Israel's West Bank Annexation Efforts Just Accelerated. Could That be a Good Thing?

Over the last two weeks, the Israeli website +972 reported, "Six ‘game-changing’ recent cabinet decisions may push the occupation past a tipping point toward permanent Israeli rule."

Many think this will spell political disaster by ending all hope for a negotiated two-state solution. I suggest a different, and perhaps overly optimistic perspective. Maybe - just maybe - these new moves could spark a long-term process ending in a more democratic, egalitarian, and peaceful Israeli-Palestinian space.

The Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank Territory, divided into Zones A, B, and C

Background

The current government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been heavily influenced by its ultra-nationalist cabinet members, including Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich, who leads the political party "Religious Zionism," and whose responsibilities include administering the Palestinian West Bank (known to his supporters as "Judea and Samaria").

Another key right-wing government figure is National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the Israeli party, "Jewish Power,” who was handed control over the powerful national police.

Under the influence of these and other right-wing coalition partners, the Netanyahu government - which won Israel's national elections in late 2022 - wrote policy guidelines that committed itself to efforts aimed at ensuring the Jewish people's full and exclusive rights over what they called the entire "Land of Israel.”

These guidelines were interpreted by many as commitments to strengthening Israel's legal and administrative hold over the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation.

The New Rules

In the last week or so, the government has passed new rules enhancing Israel's ability to take over more West Bank land and tighten its administrative and legal grip over the area. These include:

·      Declassifying West Bank land ownership records, which would allow settler groups to place pressure on individual Palestinian owners to sell or abandon their property.

·      Striking down a Jordanian law, long applied to the West Bank, barring private land sales to foreigners, including Israelis.

·      Mandating a new land registration process, which might allow the government to register more West Bank property as "state land," which could then be turned over to settlers, and opening the door to fraud during the registration process itself.

·      Eliminating the need for a special permit to register land sales, again expanding opportunities for skulduggery.

·      Expanding the Israeli military's law enforcement role in the West Bank's "A" and "B" zones, which are supposed to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority, to varying degrees.

·      Transferring control over some West Bank areas from Israeli military commanders to civilian agencies, normalizing their incorporation into the Israeli state. Until now, the West Bank has been legally defined as an object of "military rule," although Israel’s civilian ministries have long crept into specific areas of jurisdiction.

Taken together, according Ziv Stahl, director of the Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din, these actions are accelerating processes of de facto West Bank annexation by Israel.

“Legally speaking,” Stahl told +972, “I don’t know if we can still call it occupation. I think we have been shifting to a reality of annexation. It’s hard to determine where exactly the pivotal moment was, but the physical situation on the ground in the West Bank has completely changed in these three years of this government.”

The +972 article about the recent Israeli cabinet decisions

Views on Annexation

Many regard annexation as an absolutely disastrous political development that will permanently end all hope of a two-state solution. It is this solution, in turn, that is the desired outcome of most European states, the Palestinian Authority, most Arab countries, most UN members, and the US government.

Under President Trump, US support for the two-state option has grown muddier; he hasn’t endorsed annexation, but hasn’t made any effort to promote the two-state idea either.

Among some of Israel’s more moderate political parties - as well as left-of-center Jewish advocacy groups such as J Street or Peace Now - the idea of two separate, sovereign states is also sacrosanct. One would be for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and another would be for Israeli Jews living in roughly 70% of Mandatory Palestine.

For most international diplomats and many advocacy groups, the two-state option has long been regarded as the best possibility for long-term political stability, justice, and human rights for all.

A Different Perspective

I'd like to offer a different perspective.

If Israel were to annex the entire West Bank, the demographics of Israel's official polity (as opposed to its hybrid 'internationally recognized state plus militarily occupied Palestinian zones') would include an additional three million Palestinians.

This number includes some 2.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank's A and B zones (Palestinian Authority-controlled, in theory), and another 250,000 living in the West Bank’s C zones (controlled by the Israeli military).

To these, add another roughly 1.6 million current Palestinian citizens of Israel, living chiefly in the country’s north, along with some 350,000 Palestinians who are permanent residents of Israel, living in East Jerusalem.

This combined total of roughly 5 million Palestinians would represent just over 40% of the entire population under direct Israeli sovereignty, using today’s figures. It would not include the roughly 2.2 million Gazan Palestinians now living in utterly dire conditions. (I do not include them here because the Israeli cabinet’s new regulations do not refer to Gaza).

Although only 1.6 million of these five million Palestinians currently have Israeli citizenship and the right to vote today in Israeli elections, there might be pressure, over time, to add more Palestinians living in sovereign Israeli territory to the voter rolls.

Over the next few decades, newly enfranchised Palestinians could exert increasing influence on Israel's legislature and governments. With a bit of luck, this pressure might eventually lead to a softening of Israel's commitment to Jewish political, legal, and cultural supremacy, gradually leading to a more pluralistic and democratic space.

Importantly, this could give desperate Palestinians a viable, non-violent alternative for shaping their political fate, relegating the Palestinian Authority's moribund diplomatic efforts and the violence of Hamas and others to the back of the line.

A Fifth Option?

Several authors have discussed the possibility of a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a 2010 volume by American academic Virginia Tilley, and the more recent book by Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Omer-Man. These analysts have identified a fifth option that is distinct from the four possibilities currently on the table for Israelis and Palestinians. These five options include:

·      The Israeli radical right's current plan for Jewish annexation and eternal Palestinian subordination.  

·     The two-state solution promoted by the international community and other mainstream actors ever since the Oslo Peace Accords.

·     A new set of proposals for a political consociation of "two sovereign peoples living in a single land," promoted, among others, by the Palestinian-Israeli NGO, A Land for All.

·     The violent status quo, in which the Palestinian Authority continues to crumble, Palestinian militant groups occasionally strike Israelis, and Jewish settlers, backed by the Israeli army, wield violence against Palestinians.

·      The "one-state solution," which involves the creation of a single, unified state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, in which all residents are lawful citizens, have the right to vote, are equal before the law, and share in the country's internal and external defense.

If Gaza were to be included in this single state, the new entity's population would include roughly coequal ethnic populations, although divergent birth rates might, over time, lead to an Arab majority.

If Gaza were excluded, Palestinians would make up just over 40% of the unified territory's population, using contemporary numbers.

Could Annexation Lead to a Democratic State?

If the Israeli cabinet’s recent annexation-enhancing efforts lead to the eventual annexation of the West Bank's A, B, and C, this may prepare the ground for an eventual move towards political, cultural, and legal democratization.

For West Bank Palestinians to become full-fledged voters would likely take years. It would require repeated cycles of social protest, and might include at least some violence from all sides. Still, the death toll could hardly rival today’s horrific conditions.

The radical right is well aware of the one-state possibility and talks of threading that needle by annexing only Area C. Although C includes the vast majority of the West Bank’s landmass, it has only a fraction of the Palestinian population. C is also the zone where most of the Jewish settler-colonies are currently situated.

To avoid including Palestinians from A and B, the right would devise a hybrid, "neither fully in, nor fully out" arrangement that granted them very limited self-governance - essentially, a Bantustan-like arrangement.

Still, the momentum for including all three West Bank areas into Israel's sovereign territory would persist, both among settlers and Palestinians. The A and B zones are small, isolated enclaves, and they will struggle, over time, to remain truly distinct from their much larger and more encompassing Area C hinterland.

The radical right and its associated settler movement, moreover, will continue to cast their eyes over A and B for religious, security, economic, and other reasons. Stripped of the "sea" of Area C, the "islands" of A and B could eventually also be incorporated. This would not happen overnight, and it would require Palestinian interest to do so, but it is not impossible to imagine.

In my optimistic reading, the Israeli radical right's new turbo-charged efforts to annex more Palestinian land may include a silver lining, offering a more hopeful path forward.

Political Ju-Jitsu?

In the martial art of ju-jitsu, the weaker party seeks survival by using and redirecting their opponent's strength.

For almost a century, Palestinians have tried to blunt or reverse the Jewish community's land encroachments by fighting fire with fire: guns, regional military and political alliances, international diplomacy, and UN maneuvering.

Those efforts have all failed, spectacularly. Israel's Jewish community is just too strong, committed, well-organized, and capital-intensive. It has developed one of the strongest air forces in the world, and its land forces can defeat all conceivable challengers. Its international alliances, while deeply frayed because of the Gaza horror, are still strong enough to defeat serious diplomatic attacks. Israel cannot be overcome with the weapons that Palestinians and their dwindling circle of allies have at their disposal, or by economic boycotts, diplomacy, the International Criminal Court, or UN resolutions.

International human rights reporting, after all, did nothing to prevent Gaza's destruction, Hamas' horrendous (if briefly successful) October 7 attack yielded nothing good, and the Oslo Peace Accords have, in the end, been spectacularly useless.

The UN’s many resolutions, moreover, have proved about as useless as everything else.The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, BDS, has not, and probably will not ever, make a real dent in the Israeli economy.

Now, perhaps, the time has come to absorb and metabolize the "blow" of West Bank annexation, and then turn that strike back towards its origin.

Once Palestinians have been incorporated as legal subjects of the Israeli state, and not as mere objects of military occupation, they can try to transform their opponent's overwhelming kinetic energy into something new and more positive for both sides.

The path towards incorporating West Bank Palestinians into the Israeli state as equal citizens will be long and difficult. The first step along that process is for politically active Palestinians to genuinely embrace that option, and not to just use it as a threat to bludgeon Israeli annexationists. For now, many Palestinians see the option as silliness, defeatism, or even treason.

A good case in point is East Jerusalem Palestinians, who have permanent Israeli residency but have repeatedly refused citizenship. If those 350,000 persons were to accept Israeli citizenship and vote with the 1.6 million Palestinians who already have Israeli political rights, they could make a real difference at the polls. A combined force of 1.95 million Palestinian voters in a population of only 9 million could make a real difference. The first step in this act of Palestinian ju-jitsu would be to accept that they have lost the fight for their own state. That ship has sailed, and it's never coming back, at least not in our lifetimes, or those of our children and children's children.

The next step should be to start thinking of ways to demand and achieve inclusion within Israel and, from there, to fight for democratization from within. This will require learning Hebrew, getting to know Israeli laws, culture, and politics, and adopting an entirely different political mindset. Now, anyone in the West Bank who cooperates with Israeli groups - even human rights groups - is branded as a boycott breaker and regarded with intense suspicion. West Bank groups eschew collaboration with like-minded Israeli entities because to do so would be to accept the fact of Israeli domination and the reality of encroaching annexation. That mindset needs to change. Palestinians have lost the war for an independent Palestine. Now, the struggle should be to create a binational state and to democratize from within.

About James Ron

James Ron is an author and retired social scientist.

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