The American Mondoweiss website said that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is confident that they will annex the West Bank in 2025, and his confidence stems from several factors, including years of preparation for this process, a supportive far-right government, and a favorable international climate, especially with the re-election of Republican Donald Trump as president of the United States. United States, and its track record of supporting settlement expansion.
According to the report written by Palestinian journalist Qassam Maadi, Smotrich has an important role in the process of annexing Palestinian territories. He is known for his “extremist” position and has previously called for “wiping out entire Palestinian towns from the map,” adding that the Palestinian people do not exist or should not exist.
Settlement: a systematic policy
According to Khalil Al-Tafakji, a Palestinian expert in settlement affairs and director of maps at the Arab Studies Association in Jerusalem, Israel’s current plan for the West Bank during the Smotrich era “depends heavily on establishing a specific infrastructure” that Israel has been laying its foundations over the past decades, as a network of settlements has led to the fragmentation of the lands. Palestine, which prevents the establishment of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state.
Al-Tufakji mentioned the example of the “Samaria” road extending from the north of the West Bank to its south, which connects many settlements with a network of bridges and tunnels from Nablus all the way to Jerusalem. This network allows settlers to move completely separately from the Palestinians, and also separates the Palestinian areas from each other while strengthening the interconnectedness of the settlements. .
The other part of the current Israeli strategy is to employ armed settlers to terrorize, intimidate and expel Palestinians from their lands, according to the report.
Settlement outposts are an essential element in this strategy, and are usually established by the most “extremist and violent” settlers, according to the report’s words. Al-Tufakji explains that “herders’ settlers and even violent settler groups are part of the Israeli state’s policy, which supports them and provides them with money and weapons.”
The report also referred to the strategy of integrating the new territories occupied by Israel legally and administratively, which is being worked on by the regional settlement councils and managed by Israeli civilians, as an extension of the Israeli state in the occupied territories. These councils are keen to establish settlement outposts from whose center attacks on Palestinian communities emanate.
Smotrich’s role
According to the report, Smotrich’s presence at the highest levels of government will have a decisive role in Israel’s ability to take the final step towards the complete annexation of Palestinian lands, especially after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu handed him the powers of settlement policy in the occupied West Bank last January.
The ideology of Smotrich, who is considered a right-wing extremist settler, is not only limited to annexing lands, but he has publicly stated that he dreams of a Jewish state from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt, so that the borders of “Jewish Jerusalem” reach Damascus in Syria, indicating that this will be done. “Step by step.”
This minister worked – to achieve this dream – to stifle the Palestinian presence in the West Bank geographically, administratively and economically, and to support settlement expansion with the aim of settling a million Israelis in the West Bank in the coming years, according to the report.
Smotrich also aims to make the settlements part of the occupying state in both legal and administrative terms, so that they become under the management of Israeli governmental civilian bodies, which will erase the borders between current Israel and the territories occupied under international law.
