The approval by Israel of a longtime and controversial settlement plan on Wednesday intends to end any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state, says that analysts, local human rights groups and the Palestinian communities likely to be affected.
Known as East1 or E1, the plan would link thousands of illegal colonies to occupying Jerusalem – which is already illegally annexed by Israel – to the colony block of Maale Adumim expanding in occupied West Bank.
This would fully break East Jerusalem – that the Palestinians have long considered the capital of their own future state – from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
European states have long warned that the E1 plan is a red line, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert in Israel-Palestine of the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Some of these states, such as Ireland, France, Norway and Spain, recently announced its intention to recognize a Palestinian state in the face of increasing pressure to take measures against Israel for its war in Gaza.
The Minister of Finance of Israel, Bezalel Smotrich, warned last year that a new regulation would be established for each country which recognizes Palestine.
More recently, Smotrich, who himself lives in an illegal colony on the Palestinian lands, said last week that the E1 plan “would bury” the hopes of a Palestinian state.
Israeli politicians, including Smotrich, have long been opened by pointing out that the creation of colonies in occupied West Bank creates “facts on the ground” and consider the territory as an integral part of the “land of Israel”.
Mustafa said ISRAEL calculated that the world community would take no significant measure for Israel for a long time ago from killing the two -state solution.
“There is nothing left to recognize if these states continue to authorize Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Appropriate
The E1 plan was for the first time in 1994 under the time, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, only a year after signing the OSLO agreements supported by the United States, which was consumed ostensibly to provoke a Palestinian state before the new millennium
In 2004, Israel began to build a police station and build new roads in this region of Palestinian lands. Since then, subsequent construction and planning have been mainly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that the construction of thousands of new housing units will make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state through the West Bank and Occupied Gaza.
However, since the attack by Hamas against southern Israel on October 7, the United States and Europe have enabled Israel to violate each previous “red line” in the name of “self-defense”, said analysts and human rights monitors.
Over the past two years, Israel has waged his war against Gaza – killing more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroying the territory – and violently attacked large expanses of the West Bank, forcing tens of thousands of Palestinians at their home.
Israeli soldiers and settlers also accelerated their violence against the Palestinians, killing more than 1,000 people without repercussions.
Israel is now betting on his strong support from the American president Donald Trump to accelerate the E1 plan, which would put the final “ball” in the coffin of a Palestinian state and will uproot the Palestinian Bedouin communities, said Murad Jadallah, a researcher to the Palestinian Human Rights Organization.
“Israel knows it’s time (to pass with the E1 plan) because it has American support in Washington to do so,” ICG told Tel Aviv Tribune.
In addition to the separation of East Jerusalem, the controversial plan would physically divide the north of the Southern West Bank, more confining the Palestinians to ever smaller and isolated earth pockets.
In addition to this, several thousand people live in 18 Palestinian shepherd communities in the region encompassing the E1 colony plan.
The United Nations and Israeli and Palestinian groups of human rights have declared that this plan would uproot the Palestinian communities and would probably constitute a “forced transfer of a population”, which is a crime against humanity under international law.
“It is very strategic for Israel to push these communities (out of their land),” said Jadallah d’Al-Haq.
Fight to stay
For decades, the shepherd’s communities of the Jordan valley have protected the possibility of a Palestinian state by refusing to leave their land, despite repetitive settlers and demolition orders.
Most of these communities emigrated to Khan al -Ahmar – a central West Between Jerusalem and the Colony of Maale Adumim – after being driven out of the Naqeb desert (Neguev) by Israel in the 1950s.
The expulsions were part of a wider campaign of ethnic cleaning, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land by Zionist militias to make way for the State of Israel – an event the Palestinians call the Nakba or the catastrophe.
Imad al-Jahalin, the leader of a Bir Al-Maskub’s shepherd community, one of the many villages in the E1 zone, says that his community has managed to protect himself from expulsion for years.
Last year, the community hired an Israeli Jewish lawyer to bring legal action against settlers who occupied some of their houses. The Amnesty rights group previously accused the Israeli judicial system of serving to “buffer in rubber” of occupation of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.
However, Al-Jahalin said that his village had succeeded in winning a court to expel the settlers from their houses. This ordinance has been implemented, but it fears not to win another legal battle if the State begins to implement the E1 plan.
“There is fear and panic because we do not know if this (colony) will cross our village and our houses,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
But Jadallah is quite certain that the E1 plan will uproot the Bedouin communities in and around Khan al-Ahmar, adding that they will be forced to migrate to the big cities of the West Bank.
Their forced displacement to urban centers would force them to leave their livelihoods as a shepherds behind.
“Palestinian history and society lose a layer – or a component – of its identity (due to the Israeli attacks against the Bedouins),” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Irreversible changes
The E1 plan must be understood as the culmination of Israeli attempts to change the spatial reality of the West Bank, so that a Palestinian state will never materialize, Mustafa of the ICG said.
She added that this is a strategy that has deployed by Israel since the signing of the Oslo agreements.
Israel, for example, has long uprooted whole Palestinian villages and dispersed communities, refugee camps animated in bulldozer and erected dozens of barricades to hinder the movement of Palestinians.
“The fact that Israel is able to reshape the urban landscape of the West Bank and to make (these changes), so irreversible is indicative that Israel does not intend to engage in a solution to two states,” she said.
Alon Cohen, head of the Cisjordan region for Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organization, defending the end of the occupation, added that there is no economic justification or housing for the implementation of the E1.
He stressed that the logic behind E1 was simply to irreversibly encroach and fragment the Palestinian territory.
“Israel still uses the planning of stands as a weapon,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Mustafa and Cohen think that the implementation of E1 will make life for the Palestinians in the West Bank even more unbearable, stressing that the ultimate plan is to push more Palestinians to consider leaving the West Bank.
However, Al-Jahalin said it was not an option for him and his community in Bir Al-Maskub.
“No one here has any idea where they will end up in the future (if we are moved with force),” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“(Nos) for the moment … don’t think about going anywhere.”
