In the West Bank, Trump Is Not Standing in Israel’s Way

As Israel’s army prepared to launch its ground assault on Gaza City, and days after Israel tried to assassinate Hamas leaders in Qatar, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Israel this week was inevitably dominated by discussions of the war. The Doha strikes likely ended any near-term prospects for a cease-fire and dimmed hopes of freeing Israel’s remaining hostages. The new military operation in Gaza, now underway, will prolong the suffering of its roughly 2 million residents.

While it deservedly gets most of the attention, Gaza is far from the only looming crisis on Israel’s borders. The past several weeks have also seen an acceleration of Israeli plans to take over — if not formally annex — the West Bank, a development that would almost certainly lead to more violence and further turn Israel into a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world.

For the last two years, extreme-right nationalists in the current Israeli government — who have long dreamed of extending Jewish control to both Gaza and the West Bank — are taking advantage of the war in Gaza, their political stranglehold over Mr. Netanyahu, Palestinian leadership disarray and what amounts to a green light from the Trump administration to implement that dream. Without international action to stop it, it could soon become reality, and a nightmare for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Israel’s creeping takeover of the West Bank has, of course, been decades in the making. The population of Israeli settlers there and in East Jerusalem has grown to about 740,000 today from around 10,000 in the early 1970s. But the expansion of settlements and illegal outposts is accelerating, with more than a hundred new developments established over the past year alone.

On Aug. 20, Israeli defense ministry planning authorities in the West Bank approved a large settlement bloc called E1. The plan, often called the “doomsday” settlement by proponents of a two-state solution, would make it nearly impossible to create a contiguous Palestinian state, by physically separating the Palestinian-populated cities of East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.

In announcing the plans to move forward with E1, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the quiet part out loud, stating the settlement “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.” That notion was echoed last week by Mr. Netanyahu, who, while signing an agreement to press ahead with E1, said: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.” At a news conference in Jerusalem on Sept. 3, Mr. Smotrich presented a plan to formally annex roughly 82 percent of the West Bank, which would isolate Palestinians into small enclaves while Israel unilaterally took formal ownership of the rest. Mr. Netanyahu has not endorsed the plan, nor does it have a majority of public support. But the prime minister has backed at least partial annexation in the past and more recently hinted that European plans to recognize a Palestinian state could prompt Israel to respond with its own “unilateral actions,” which might include annexation.

It’s not just the physical expansion of settlements threatening the territory. With support from the Israeli government, settlers across the West Bank have stepped up the use of intimidation and violence to drive Palestinians from their homes. They harass local Arab residents, many of whom have lived in their homes for generations — destroying crops, cutting off water and sometimes burning their cars or even killing them. A few weeks ago, a radical settler named Yinon Levi was caught on video allegedly shooting the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen. It took Israel more than a week to return Mr. Hathaleen’s body to his family, but Mr. Levi was quickly released by an Israeli court that said it lacked evidence he had committed a crime. (Mr. Levi has denied the allegation.) There have been more than 1,000 cases of West Bank settler violence against Palestinians documented by the United Nations this year, about 16 percent more than during the same period last year and the highest monthly average since the U.N. started compiling such records in 2006.

The Trump administration has not officially given its blessing to Israeli annexation of the West Bank. But it appears to be doing nothing to stand in Israel’s way. When asked about the possibility of annexation earlier month, Mr. Rubio said only that annexation is “not a final thing,” and was being discussed “among some elements of Israeli politics.”

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, himself an overt proponent of the “Greater Israel” concept, told an Israeli journalist this month that the United States “has never asked Israel to not apply sovereignty” to the West Bank, even though every past administration — including Mr. Trump’s first — has done just that. Similarly, whereas every past U.S. administration in recent decades has opposed and helped to prevent the building of E1, Mr. Huckabee said it was a “decision for the government of Israel to make.”

The Trump administration now even seems to be aiding Israel’s attempts to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority, which would make it easier to justify permanent Israeli control of both the West Bank and Gaza. In August, just after meeting Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar of Israel, Mr. Rubio announced that he would not issue U.S. visas for authority officials, including President Mahmoud Abbas, to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week, claiming, among other things, that they had failed to “consistently repudiate terrorism” including the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. (Mr. Abbas has done so.) Meanwhile, the administration had rescinded U.S. sanctions on far-right Israeli settler groups and individuals, including Mr. Levi, before Mr. Hathaleen’s killing.

Congress could help — for example by passing pending legislation to restore and expand such sanctions or insisting goods produced in West Bank settlements be so labeled, rather than “Made in Israel” — but the Republican majority seems unlikely to act. Last month, Speaker Mike Johnson visited the West Bank, where he had dinner with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Huckabee at a settlement and reportedly declared that the mountains of Judea and Samaria (the biblical term for the West Bank favored by Israeli settlers) “were promised to the Jewish people and they belong to them by right.”

Israel’s expanding control over the West Bank has not yet led to a major conflagration, though nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there by Israeli forces or settlers since Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. More violence and mistreatment seem inevitable if Israel tries to expel Palestinians or put in place Mr. Smotrich’s plan to pack over three million West Bank Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves surrounded by settlers.

Given America’s apparent acquiescence, only international action can prevent a coming disaster. It was encouraging that the United Arab Emirates said earlier this month that Israeli annexation in the West Bank would be a “red line,” jeopardizing Israel’s prized relationship with Abu Dhabi. A conference sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia at the U. N. General Assembly next week on the Palestinian issue will be another chance for the international community to put down a marker that most of the world objects to this Israeli government’s agenda.

The government of Mr. Netanyahu should know that it can have flourishing relations with the rest of the world, or total control of the West Bank — but not both.

Philip H. Gordon is a scholar at the Brookings Institution. He served as national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris and as White House coordinator for the Middle East under President Barack Obama. He is the author of “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.”

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