Sovereignty in All but Name: Israel’s Quickening Annexation of the West Bank

Ever since seizing the West Bank in 1967, Israel has asserted increasing control of the territory while contending that its occupation is temporary. It has expanded settlements and the Israeli state’s reach beyond the Green Line, the 1967 armistice line that has become the de facto border separating occupied territory from Israel. But recently the pace and nature of these efforts, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found in 2024 had crossed the line into annexation in significant parts of the West Bank, have changed. Far-right ministers who took up their posts in 2022 have spurred the transfer of greater powers in the West Bank to Israeli civilian authorities and extended more Israeli laws to the territory. Whether or not Israel declares formal sovereignty, as settler leaders are advocating, outside actors need to face what Israel has done and continues to do. To prevent annexation’s entrenchment, and to find a viable way for West Bank Palestinians to live with basic rights and dignity, these actors need to make a commitment to seek change and put muscle – from trade sanctions to arms export restrictions – behind it.

Israel’s settler movement, which has long steered policy in the West Bank, has done so with a much firmer hand since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a government with far-right settler politicians in 2022. Pursuing their goal of realising a Greater Israel, settlers have been explicit about their intent to annex West Bank territory and make it impossible for Palestinians not just to have a state there but also (particularly in the case of those living near Israeli settlements) to subsist. With the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich – an explicit anti-Palestinian annexationist – as finance minister and a minister in the defence ministry, the settlers’ ambitions have increasingly become reality.

Their principal accomplishment has been to institutionally divide civilian from military administration of the occupation, thus removing its veneer of temporariness. Working from inside the defence ministry, but in parallel to the minister of defence, not under him, Smotrich has assumed extensive powers over so-called non-security aspects of daily life in the West Bank. Those powers, covering both Israeli settlers and Palestinians but employing two separate systems of law, have allowed him and his aides to dramatically speed up settlement expansion and to grab ever larger tracts of Palestinian land for future settlement. The effect has been to expel increasing numbers of Palestinians from their homes and lands, pushing them further into enclaves connected by roads that Israeli military checkpoints sever at will.

Owing to the energies of Smotrich and his settler allies now ensconced in the bureaucracy, the creeping annexation of the West Bank has advanced to the point that declaring Israeli sovereignty over the territory, or at least significant parts of it, would be a matter of form more than substance. These moves were the backdrop for the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion on the legal status of the occupied territories, which found that Israel had unlawfully annexed parts of the West Bank.

Yet even though the court treated partial annexation as a fait accompli, the Israeli authorities may hesitate to make this status official. Externally, a formal declaration would, in effect, be an admission by Israel that it has extended its sovereignty to occupied territory and to a Palestinian population that it denies fundamental rights and freedoms. That could only feed growing perceptions that Israel has become an apartheid state, has violated the core international norm against acquiring territory by force and is dispelling what remains of hopes for a two-state solution. But while some Israeli officials may prefer not to put the question of how Israel will, or will not, safeguard Palestinian rights within an expanded state on the front burner, others talk about formal annexation as a way to unequivocally and permanently thwart formation of a Palestinian state or to rebuff the recent wave of recognitions of a state of Palestine.

But even if Israel never formally declares the West Bank’s annexation, the reality is that a substantial and growing number of West Bank Palestinians already live under Israeli sovereignty, though without the rights of Israeli citizens and in a polity that Israel has carved up so as to render a Palestinian state impossible. The question is what world powers that still see a two-state solution as integral to regional peacemaking, which presumably include those countries calling for recognition of a Palestinian state, will do about it. Are they prepared to invest the political capital required to halt and reverse a reality that Israel has been creating on the ground for decades – and with greater industry and ambition since Smotrich received his current mandate? Are they ready to intercede in this way after the 7 October 2023 attacks?

The record to date does not inspire hope. Until very recently, external actors have given Israel virtual carte blanche in its creeping annexation of the occupied West Bank. The U.S., the country with most influence over Israel, has given Israel its full backing, notwithstanding whatever personal animosity might have existed between Netanyahu and the U.S. president of the time. The Trump administration has been no different. Its ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, in a clear departure from longstanding U.S. policy, has gone so far as to suggest that if Palestinians want a state, they should seek one elsewhere in the Muslim world or – in a sarcastic jab at France – that they create a “Franc-en-Stine” on the French Riviera. While European powers may be more critical of Israel, they seem to be responding to Israeli transgressions in the West Bank with wrist-slapping gestures such as sanctions on egregiously violent individual settlers, while holding back on stronger measures pending a formal Israeli announcement of annexation.

Still, the carnage in Gaza has caused some outside actors to re-examine their approach toward Israel, with the Trump administration pushing Netanyahu in September to accept a 20-point plan for ending the war in the enclave – which has culminated in the announcement of a ceasefire deal as this report goes to press. Certain recent steps – including recognition of Palestinian statehood by a number of influential states as well as talk of suspending trade with Israel – suggest that there could be space for a new tack vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large. Any such approach should begin by facing the reality that annexation is not a future threat – it is already under way. It should also be tethered to a long-term strategy, underwritten by a corresponding political commitment, to halt the further consolidation of Israel’s annexation and to begin the difficult work of persuading Israel to reverse course.

The strategy should also have teeth. The EU could use the potential suspension of the bloc’s Association Agreement, and EU member states might use arms shipments. Arab states could do much more to tie their willingness to “normalise” ties with Israel to its behaviour in the West Bank. The United Arab Emirates has held up formal annexation as a “red line” but said little about the reality of creeping annexation. Should Washington ever adopt such an approach – which is hard to imagine absent a sea change in U.S. politics – its political and military support for Israel would give it enormous leverage.

The impediments to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict are longstanding and immense, and a body of informed commentary argues that they are indeed insurmountable. Perhaps they are, but there is no world in which the further progress of annexation will produce a better result for the Palestinian people – or, for that matter, for Israelis. Israel may never alter its posture in the West Bank, but if outside actors play a long game and act concertedly, they will optimise their chances of changing its behaviour. Absent that, the status quo, which denies the Palestinian people not just a state, but also basic rights, will only become further entrenched.

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