The Man Leading Israel’s Not-So-Quiet Annexation of the West Bank

For Bezalel Smotrich, the head of Israel’s far-right Religious Zionism party, these are heady times. While the rest of Israel is preoccupied with the fighting in Gaza, the fate of the hostages held by Hamas, and Hezbollah’s pummeling of the country’s north, Smotrich has been realizing his dream of creating the conditions that will bring about Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Indeed, the war has in many ways facilitated his plans.

The word “annexation” is rarely, if ever, uttered by Smotrich—who serves as a senior member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. Without a shred of doubt about the Jews’ God-given right to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, he regards the West Bank not as territory to be added to the State of Israel but as an inheritance that need only be claimed. As he told the Haaretz newspaper in an interview over seven years ago, a Palestinian state would be tantamount to partitioning Israel; absorbing the West Bank into Israel is “unification.” To talk about Israel annexing the West Bank would be like telling the North it was annexing the South after the Civil War in the United States.

In any case, the legal formalities involved in annexation are less important to Smotrich than creating the conditions that will bring it about. To do that, he is employing a two-pronged strategy that on the one side involves changing laws and creating a settler-friendly bureaucracy and on the other helping to foment violence and anarchy in the West Bank. As Smotrich has indicated many times, the signal event in the process of “unification” will be the collapse of the Palestinian Authority (PA), leaving Israel with no choice but to fill the vacuum and reassert control over the entire West Bank.

Smotrich’s main job in the government is finance minister, a powerful post that he has used to implement his policies. But he has a second and, for his purposes, far more important post as minister in the defense ministry, a job he was promised by Netanyahu when the current government was formed at the end of 2022. Smotrich is in effect minister of settlements with powers that extend, to a degree, over the lives of West Bank Palestinians as well.

Since it captured the territory in 1967, Israel has exerted control of the West Bank through a military occupation. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), through its Civil Administration, has been responsible for the administration of justice and other civilian matters in the 60 percent of the West Bank not under the jurisdiction of the PA. The Civil Administration has long favored settler interests over Palestinians, but officially it remained a part of the military and made at least some effort to consider Palestinian needs. All that changed in February 2023, when a new Settlements Administration was formed with broad powers—including the authority to expropriate Palestinian land, to approve housing construction in settlements, to condemn Palestinian construction as illegal, and to retroactively authorize settlements that were built without government approval, popularly known as “outposts.”

As a civilian body, the Settlements Administration’s job is to promote the interests of Israeli citizens—which means the settlers. And the chief interest of the settlers is speeding up the pace of building and expanding settlements. More than that, the transfer of authority from the military to civilians amounts to a quiet and creeping de facto annexation. “It will be easier to swallow in the international and legal context so that they won’t say that we are doing annexation here,” Smotrich said in leaked remarks from a June 9 meeting with supporters, first published in the New York Times.

In recent weeks, Smotrich has cemented his control further, having Hillel Roth, a resident of the extremist settlement Yitzhar, made deputy head of the Civil Administration with authority over a grab bag of areas ranging from building regulations and water infrastructure to parks and outdoor public bathing locations.

Control over public bathing may seem like a minor business on par with dog catching. But it is not: A big part of the contest for the future of the West Bank is about demographics—increasing the settler population—and control of land. The Settlements Administration is meant to give the settlers the tools to do that more effectively. The natural springs that dot the West Bank serve Palestinian farmers as well as Israeli bathers and constitute one of many battlegrounds for control of the land and its resources.

But Smotrich’s campaign isn’t limited to the niceties of accelerated planning approvals: He has also used his powers to turn a blind eye to construction by settlers. A document obtained by the New York Times summarizing a March meeting of the IDF’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank, warned that enforcement of construction regulations for settlers had all but disappeared since the establishment of the Settlements Administration; even court orders are ignored. Less than one-tenth of the 395 recorded cases of illegal construction last year resulted in a building being taken down, and nearly all of those involved a single case at an illegal outpost, the memo said. And that probably understates the extent of the problem. Because so many inspectors have been called up for reserve duty due to the war in Gaza, suspected violations are not even being investigated. Violators, the memo said, feel free to act knowing that there is no accountability.

The lawlessness among settlers in the West Bank has not been confined to illegal building. The most extreme of the settlers have taken advantage of a government dominated by the far right and the military’s preoccupation with fighting in Gaza to engage in unprecedented vigilantism. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) counted 968 attacks on Palestinians involving serious vandalism and injury in the months since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023. There have been only 10 confirmed cases of Palestinians killed in these incidents (compared with more than 500 in clashes with the military), but the pace if far faster than at any time since OCHA began keeping records in 2008—and the real number is likely higher.

While some of the settler violence has been about vengeance following Palestinian attacks, much of it has been about land. Especially in the Jordan Valley and in the area south of the city of Hebron, extremist settlers have seized control of large swaths of Palestinian pasture land by setting up roadblocks, erecting fences, and harassing shepherds. In many cases, whole communities of Palestinian herders have been forced to abandon their homes.

To be sure, Smotrich is not responsible for policing settler violence. The responsibility for that is shared by his far-right colleague, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who as minister of national security oversees the police—and by the military.

The police have never made much of an effort to investigate settler violence, but under Ben-Gvir all pretense of enforcement has been dropped. Ben-Gvir has been seeking, with a large degree of success, to politicize the Israel Police, pressing it to crack down on anti-government protesters while demanding that it stand aside when right-wing extremists attack trucks carrying aid to Gaza. In the West Bank, Ben-Gvir’s policies have given violent settlers carte blanche. A recent investigation by the New York Times found that of the three dozen cases it had looked into since Oct. 7 involving crimes ranging from theft of livestock to assault, not a single one had led to a suspect being charged.

As for the military, soldiers have been busy fighting in Gaza and on the northern border, as well as cracking down on Palestinian violence in the West Bank. The military says it doesn’t have the manpower to stop vigilante settlers. But the truth is, many of the commanders and soldiers in the regular and reserve military units stationed in the West Bank are sympathetic to the settlers; often they are settlers themselves. Moreover, after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, some 5,500 settlers were called up for reserve duty to protect their own communities. Many have taken advantage of the arms and uniforms they were issued to go beyond their official duties to set up roadblocks and attack Palestinians.

An incident near the Palestinian town of Aqraba in April captures the current state of lawlessness. Following the killing of a 14-year-old Israeli by Palestinians, settlers rampaged through the town and surrounding area, killing two residents (two more were killed later). The military initially said there were no soldiers present, although a Haaretz investigation said troops were there and didn’t intervene. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant later issued warrants putting five settlers into administrative detention—prison without trial—for periods ranging from three to six months. In response, Ben-Gvir railed against “Gallant’s persecution against the settlers.” The police have arrested no one.

For Smotrich, however, the collapse of the PA is his biggest priority. Here, his job as finance minister comes into play because the strategy is to strangle the authority financially. Smotrich has the power to do that because approximately 60 percent of the revenues the PA relies on to pay salaries and provide services come from customs and other taxes Israel collects in the PA’s name, transferring the money to Ramallah every month.

For some time, Israel had been deducting from these “clearance revenue” transfers the money that the PA spent supporting families of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Shortly after the war in Gaza began, Smotrich tripled the monthly deductions to as much as 600 million shekels—about 60 percent of the overall monthly transfer. In protest, the PA refused to accept any money, forcing it to cut civil servants’ wages by as much as 70 percent.

In late February, a face-saving formula was found under which Norway agreed to put the withheld funds in an escrow account, thereby giving the PA an excuse to take the money still available. Last month, however, Smotrich renewed his pressure campaign, calling on Netanyahu to stop all transfers and demanding that Norway return the escrow funds to Israel. More recently, he demanded steps be taken against the PA leaders, including expelling those found not to be living legally in the West Bank, restricting the movements of others and preventing them from traveling abroad—and charging some with incitement or support of terrorism.

Smotrich is no less determined to exacerbate the troubles of an already depressed Palestinian economy. That not only further pressures the PA financially but also may have the added benefit of coaxing Palestinians to emigrate. To that end, he and Ben-Gvir have also been able to block efforts to allow the approximately 150,000 West Bank Palestinians who had been working inside Israel before Oct. 7 to return to their jobs. By Palestinian standards, those jobs pay well, so their sudden disappearance has an outsized effect on household incomes and the economy.

Smotrich is now threatening to deal another blow to the Palestinian economy by halting the issuing of what until now were routine letters of indemnity to Israeli banks. The letters provide a legal shield to Israeli financial institutions working with their Palestinian counterparts in case some money ends up in the hands of terrorist groups. This correspondent banking relationship is critical to the Palestinian economy, enabling the annual flow of $10 billion of Palestinian exports and imports, all of which go through Israel. If Smotrich acts, it will bring the West Bank economy to its knees.

The defense establishment is opposed to most of Smotrich’s measures, worrying he is fanning the flames of another intifada, or Palestinian uprising. But it is largely helpless to prevent them so long as the political echelon doesn’t act. Even if Netanyahu wanted to stop Smotrich, he needs his ongoing support to keep his governing coalition intact. Smotrich’s party accounts for seven seats in the 120-member parliament. If he withdraws from the coalition, Netanyahu’s government would no longer have a majority.

Smotrich thus has a relatively free hand from his boss.

What he doesn’t have is a public mandate to pursue his program. His main annexation constituency is the settler population, which makes up no more than 10 percent of Israel’s total, and even its support for his annexation project is hardly wall to wall. Much of the settler population is made up of people who moved to the West Bank for economic reasons, including many thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews. They are not thought to be wedded to the idea of Greater Israel. Among the overall population, support for annexation is far from overwhelming: A recent survey by Tel Aviv University found only about 38 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the idea (and only 14 percent very strongly); a majority opposed it.

Even far-right voters are seen to be unimpressed by Smotrich—preferring Ben-Gvir’s loud-mouthed thuggery over Smotrich’s careful (and often behind-the-scenes) calculations. If elections were held today, according to the most recent polls, Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party would win nine seats in Israel’s 120-member parliament; Smotrich’s Religious Zionism wouldn’t receive enough votes to enter the Knesset at all. But then again, for him, the only vote that counts is cast in heaven, and Smotrich is confident he has it.