On the Origin of the Goal to Dissuade the Establishment of a Palestinian State

Some opponents of the current Israeli policy towards the West Bank, which is rightly described as an annexation of the West Bank even without a formal declaration, in order to bring about the final frustration of what is known as the two-state solution—entailing the establishment of a Palestinian state—adopt an approach suggesting that at least since the current Israeli government took office in late 2022, the Religious Zionism party, despite being a minority not expected to surpass the decisive threshold in the upcoming elections according to the latest public opinion polls, imposes its ideological vision on the entire state.

This vision has previously been articulated by this writer, who has noted several times that it aims to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, considering that part of a plan "to change the DNA of the West Bank (under the radar)," according to the description of one observer, and to reach a "point of no return" that would prevent both the separation of the two peoples and the establishment of a Palestinian state. It should be reiterated that the leader of the "Religious Zionism," Minister Bezalel Smotrich, recently presented a detailed action plan to achieve this vision, aligning with the "decisive plan" he published in 2017, which includes the annexation of 82% of the West Bank territory including Qalqilya and Bethlehem, and creating Palestinian enclaves reminiscent of the artificial entities established by the apartheid system in South Africa (the bantustans).

The contradiction of this perspective is evident in the political stances, not to mention the facts, which prove that the objective of frustrating the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories occupied in 1967 is not limited to the ruling Israeli right, but has been shared by many in the camp presumed to be opposition. As often pointed out, even after the Oslo Accords, the heads of the Labor Party governments—Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak—opposed its establishment. Moreover, the resort to the goal of separating the residents of Gaza from those of the West Bank, as a necessary condition to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state, began in the 1990s. The displacement according to the principle of "more land and fewer Arabs" had been a reference and guide in the Zionist movement prior to 1948, when demographic plans for Gaza and the West Bank were laid out.

Specifically regarding the West Bank, the governments of Benjamin Netanyahu have been acting since at least June 2012 based on the conclusions of what was then known as the "Levy Committee Report on Settlement Construction in the West Bank," chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, which stated that there is no occupation in the West Bank, and that the state should not deal with the plundering of Palestinian land and the establishment of illegal outposts upon it, as this falls under the jurisdiction of Israeli courts on the grounds that these are disputed lands. The conclusion of this committee that "there is no occupation" was based on the premise that Israel occupied the West Bank when it was under Jordanian control, and that there was a dispute regarding Jordanian sovereignty over it from the beginning. The committee’s report also pointed out that in 1988, Jordan announced its disengagement from the West Bank and relinquished any territorial and geographical claims. Additionally, the report considered that Israel has grounds to claim that the West Bank belongs to it, according to the Balfour Declaration, and because the Arabs did not agree to the partition resolution.

At the time, it was clear that this report was living on the legacy or on the open impact of the Oslo Accords, which stipulated keeping a vast area of the West Bank (more than 60%) in Israeli hands with the fewest number of Palestinians, and since the mid-1990s, settlers and their increasing supporters in the Israeli establishment have taken on the task of preventing the return of this area from the West Bank to the Palestinians, through the establishment of increasing settlement outposts, the rising violence they practice without any penalty or deterrent, the immense political pressure on the civil administration to prevent any Palestinian building, and currently through the official annexation laws submitted to the legislative authority.