INSIGHTS: For Two-Staters, Even a “Bite-Sized” Annexation Will Require a Wholesale Reappraisal

INSIGHTS

For Two-Staters, Even a “Bite-Sized” Annexation
Will Require a Wholesale Reappraisal
By Ron Skolnik

Six days after U.S. Election Day, Bezalel Smotrich, the influential far-right Israeli finance minister, celebrated the victory of Donald Trump by publicly declaring 2025 to be “the year of [Israeli] sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the Biblical term for the Occupied West Bank. In our complex geopolitical world, there’s no certainty that Smotrich’s prophecy of annexation will be fulfilled. But his pronouncement also needs to be treated as more than idle bravado or a screwball rant that can safely be dismissed out of hand.

Not that long ago, Smotrich’s brand of Orthodox Zionism – not just expansionist, but supremacist, segregationist, and homophobic, too – kept him a junior partner in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, a rankly illiberal figure whom the prime minister preferred to keep at arm’s length. But with his coalition options dwindling, and his corruption trials reaching a critical stage, Netanyahu embraced Smotrich and his associate, the Meir Kahane disciple Itamar Ben-Gvir, as his main allies during the 2022 election campaign.

Smotrich has long advocated for Eretz Yisrael HaShlema, the idea that the Jewish people holds exclusive God-given title to the “Complete Land of Israel”, from the River Jordan to the Sea Mediterranean; and that Israel’s Knesset must translate that into statute through the “application of sovereignty”, i.e. annexation. To advance that goal, Smotrich capitalized on Netanyahu’s limited alternatives during the post-election coalition bargaining season and extracted a major concession: In addition to the powerful Finance Ministry, he would also be given control of the Defense Ministry’s authority over all nonmilitary affairs (land management, planning and construction, home demolitions, trade and economy, and more) in the Occupied Territory.

For the last two years, as the de facto “Governor of the West Bank”, Smotrich has been using his expanded powers to extract IDF command from the area’s day-to-day administration – a process he refers to as the “normalization” of Israeli rule. Now, he is instructing the Defense Ministry’s “Settlement Directorate” and the IDF’s “Civil Administration” to “prepare the necessary [bureaucratic] infrastructure” for full-blown annexation. Smotrich has indicated that he seeks to shut down these bodies so that Israeli government ministries can start to run the West Bank directly (while keeping the Palestinians there disenfranchised), just as they do within the Green Line, in Ashkelon, Beersheva, or Tel Aviv. 

We should pause here to note that, while Smotrich’s goal is full Israeli sovereignty, not just over the entire West Bank, but all of Gaza, too, his short-term plan is a more limited annexation, taking in “only” Israel’s West Bank settlements. A believer in Divine promise, Smotrich clearly can’t abandon his “Complete Land” dream; but he is clever and experienced enough to realize that he’ll need American support to move the ball forward at all. Trump’s 2020 plan (“Peace to Prosperity”), let’s recall, involved an Israeli annexation of roughly 30 percent of the West Bank (but reportedly more were the Palestinians to reject his so-called “Deal of the Century”). So Smotrich’s willingness not to go “whole hog” right away seems designed to avoid overstepping the good graces of the incoming president.

Smotrich, it must be pointed out, is not leading some rogue operation. His initiative is grounded in the coalition agreement itself, in which Netanyahu consented to “the formulation and implementation of policy [through which] sovereignty will be applied to Judea and Samaria”. And the government’s very first policy guideline states that the Jewish people has an “exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” In principle, in other words, Netanyahu is on board.

What would an annexation of settlements mean from the standpoint of land mass? That depends on what source you consult. The right-of-center “Jewish Virtual Library” claims that the “built-up settlement area is less than two percent of the disputed [sic] territories”. The Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem, dismisses that data point, however, reporting in 2010 that, while technically true, “the municipal jurisdiction of the settlements and their regional councils” – i.e., the area demarcated for settlement – “cover more than 42 percent of the West Bank”. Not so, countered then-chair of the “Yesha” (Judea/Samaria/Gaza) Settlers Council, Dani Dayan: That number is really 9.2 percent. More recently, the Carnegie Endowment reported that Israel’s 199 authorized settlements and 220 supposedly unauthorized outposts take in about 201 square kilometers, “representing 3.6 percent of the total area”.

Clearly, the quantitative dimension matters in practical terms. But it is really only a secondary concern, compared to the immense challenge of principle posed by the annexation plan’s blatant unilateralism, which violates the most fundamental premise of the last three decades of on-but-mostly-off Israel-PLO diplomacy. Indeed, once the precedent has been set that Israel can annex land outside a bilateral framework, it will collapse the entire edifice of “negotiated peace”. In that sense, any act of unilateral annexation, even if it were just a single settlement, should be viewed as no different than if the entire West Bank was coming under Israel’s sovereignty.

(While it is true that sections of Occupied Territory were annexed by Israel in 1967 under the heading of Jerusalem reunification, that lengthily preceded Israel’s 1993 commitment to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians through a “peace process”. That process, Israel promised, would be based on “the implementation of Security Council resolutions 242 and 338” which stressed “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”.)

It is incumbent on supporters of a two-state solution, therefore, not to be lulled into inaction by “just a small annexation”, should that come about. Here are some perilously soothing reassurances we’re liable to hear: “Well, it’s only the settlements, not the whole territory.” Or, “It’s only the Ma’aleh Adumim” – for example – “bloc, and that was going to be part of Israel under a deal in any event”. Or even, “well, this can always be reversed in the future”. (While outside the scope of this column, it’s important to note that Israel’s Knesset has, over the years, imposed much greater obstacles on ceding territory where the “law, jurisdiction, and administration of the State of Israel” prevails. The Law Library of Congress provides details.) 

The danger, of course, is that, because the Israeli right’s overarching end goal remains unaltered, accommodating even the smallest legal change is a prescription for what might be called “full de jure annexation by a thousand cuts”. (By contrast, de facto annexation by a thousand cuts has been going on for decades.)

In response, therefore, an alternative path must be conceptualized. Rather than allow the annexationist movement to statutorily cement its gains, piece by piece, over the years to come, supporters of a two-state solution must regard even the most minute annexation as a trigger for adopting a new strategic orientation. 

One theoretical path could be the idea of reaching two states through consensual partition by the Land’s populace, with both Israelis and Occupied Palestinians having voting and representational rights in such a process. This would not, to be clear, mean adopting the rather problematic idea of permanently packing two peoples, each seeking its own unique national self-determination, into one political unit. Nor would this involve asking the two peoples to suddenly become “post-national” in outlook and identity.

It would mean accepting, however, that, once any unilateral annexation takes place, the idea of achieving two states through the internationally accepted, Oslo-oriented, third party-brokered “land for peace” negotiating route might be irrevocably impaired.

In 2020, Israeli law professor Itamar Mann and sociology professor Yael Berda argued that, in a situation of “indeterminate occupation”, such as Israel maintains, the granting of the franchise to Palestinians under occupation is a human right, necessary for them to have “a voice in choosing the government that has effective control over them”. Holding such rights, though, would not amount to “forfeit[ing] their right to self-determination, nor the path to independent statehood” since they could be utilized to “help establish any political framework they want, including one state, two or a confederation”. (Mann and Berda later published a more academic treatment of their idea in the Texas Law Review.)

Perhaps, therefore, the proper response to partial annexation should not be “we mustn’t allow this to proceed any further”, but instead a call for the full democratization of the area under Israel’s control, from the river to the sea, so that all the people who live there can decide its future. The goal for two-staters, of course, would not be a transition into a single state, which would be unlikely to provide for both peoples’ national ambitions, nor produce outcomes of equality, balanced power-sharing, or interethnic tranquility. Instead, enfranchising all residents of the Land could serve as a transitional stage, a bridge to a “final-status” two-state arrangement – either “side by side” or in a confederative framework.

Clearly, the idea raised above sounds terribly fanciful. The same power imbalance that would enable Israeli annexation (even if piecemeal) in the first place will not quickly change; Israel will not rush to proffer any such voting rights to those under occupation. On the other hand, might it not appear even feebler and more Pollyanna-ish to adhere to the same-old call for the same-old process (U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian talks) once Israel’s government, with American permission, had kicked the old rules to the curb?

If supporters of two states wish to avoid having their target goal look obsolete, even frivolous, in this new reality; if they wish to restore gravitas to the two-state vision, it might be necessary, once partial legal annexation gets underway, to consider a fairly radical reorientation: Acknowledging that the Oslo mindset needs to finally be put to rest and that the search for alternate routes to the same destination must begin apace.

Ron Skolnik is an American-Israeli political columnist and public speaker, whose articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including Haaretz, Al- Monitor, Tikkun, the Forward, Jewish Currents, & the Palestine-Israel Journal.