opinion
Annexation by Any Other Name
By Michael J. Koplow
W hen the previous Binyamin Netanyahu-
led Israeli government was moving toward
annexing parts of the West Bank in 2019 and the first
part of 2020, it was easy for everyone to see what was
transpiring. The proposals floating around were straightfor-
ward and simple to comprehend, whether it was talk
of annexing specific spots such as the Jordan Valley
or the Etzion settlement bloc, or absorbing all of
Area C, or incorporating 30% of the West Bank into
Israel based on the map in President Trump’s Peace
to Prosperity plan, or applying sovereignty and Israeli
civilian law to all 127 recognized Israeli settlements.

Any of these measures would have immediately
transformed the legal status of parts of the West
Bank and made them indistinguishable in Israeli
law from Israel inside the Green Line, and this made
these plans and their potential impacts easy to
understand and evaluate.

The Netanyahu government that is about to be
formed is proceeding in a different manner. Unlike
the blunt force of previous annexation attempts, the
new approach is much smarter by being more tacti-
cal. Moving to annex parts of the West Bank in one
fell swoop created an easy target for annexation’s
opponents and also caused a stir outside of Israel, as
demonstrated by the public Emirati concern over the
policy that led to annexation being shelved in favor
of normalization with the UAE and eventually to the
Abraham Accords.

Having learned from their previous mistakes, Israeli
proponents of annexation — led by Bezalel Smotrich
— are now taking a piecemeal approach that gives
them cover to argue that they are not actually moving
to change the West Bank’s legal designation, but are
only implementing administrative changes to make
life easier for the West Bank’s Israeli residents.

As these efforts unfold, it will be vital to recognize
them for precisely what they are. They are not an
attempt to build settlements at a more rapid pace or
make it easier to get approval for West Bank infra-
structure. They are also not creeping annexation, a
catch-all category that has come to describe Israel’s
growing presence inside the West Bank. They are the
first stages of actual annexation, designed to remove
authority over and control of the West Bank from the
military — which is the proper address for a military
occupation — to civilian bodies, effectively annexing
the West Bank in every way short of doing it in name.

The plan laid out by Smotrich and incorporated
into the coalition agreement signed between his
Religious Zionism party and Netanyahu’s Likud has
a number of elements that accomplish this. The first
14 DECEMBER 15, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
is legalizing illegal settlement outposts, which are
illegal under Israeli law because they have been
constructed without authorization and outside of
the established approval and permitting process,
and in many cases because they have also been built
not on state land but on private Palestinian land.

Retroactively legalizing about 70 of these illegal
outposts is the first step in normalizing them by
putting them beyond the reach of IDF bulldozers
or the Israeli Supreme Court and treating them like
established settlements. Doing so will make it so that
there is no longer a category of construction inside
the West Bank that is deemed to be illegal under
Israeli law, and in the process weakening the rule
that settlements cannot be constructed on private
Palestinian land. The term that the right uses for
these illegal outposts is “young settlements,” which
itself is designed to erase any distinction between
what is deemed legal and legitimate, and what is not.

Standardizing the status of all West Bank settle-
ments, including previously illegal ones, is a precur-
sor to the next step, which is shifting the West Bank
from a territory governed by the IDF to one gov-
erned by Israel’s civilian government. The Religious
Zionism-Likud agreement stipulates that Religious
Zionism will receive a new minister in the Defense
Ministry — likely to be Smotrich himself — who will
oversee all issues related to territory, construction,
demolition and civilian life. In addition to creating
what is effectively a settlements minister apart
from the defense minister, the agreement dictates
that the legal department that oversees the West
Bank will be moved out of the IDF Judge Advocate
General’s office and into the Defense Ministry under
the authority of the new Religious Zionism minister.

While this will be explained as nothing more
than a bureaucratic reorganization, it is in reality
a momentously significant step, since it officially
removes the authority to sanction things in the West
Bank as legal or illegal out of the military and to a
civilian body. The only proper way to describe this
is as an extension of civil governmental authority
to the West Bank, which functionally means annex-
ation, even if it is intentionally not described as such.

In addition to shifting some responsibilities over
settlements out of the IDF to the purview of this new
minister, Smotrich has also ensured that the power
to shape facts on the ground will lie with him. The
new minister will be in charge of the permitting and
planning process for both Jewish and Palestinian
construction in Area C by overseeing the Supreme
Planning Committee, dictating how often it meets
and what is on its agenda. The new minister will
also be able to influence what illegal construction is
subject to demolition by ratifying the appointment
made by the IDF chief of staff of the head of the
Civil Administration, which is the body charged with
overseeing construction and demolition.

Given Smotrich’s frequent contentions that Israel
is engaged in a “war for Area C” with the Palestinian
Authority, it should not surprise anyone when Jewish
construction spikes while the pace of demolitions of
unpermitted Palestinian structures is supercharged.

Smotrich will also have the power to ramp up the
land survey process in Area C, which is critical
to designating more land as state land and thus
available for future settlement construction. The
legal aspect to this also is not confined to moving
the legal department for the West Bank into the
Defense Ministry, as the agreement also grants
the new minister the power to approve the state’s
responses to Supreme Court petitions challenging
settlement construction, meaning that Smotrich will
oversee the legal strategy for settlement expansion.

These moves have a twofold purpose. The first is
to make Israel’s hold on the West Bank even more
boundless and impervious to being limited or rolled
back. The second is to do so in a manner designed
to be maximally opaque, tied up in bureaucratic
language and administrative maneuvering that will
tangle the U.S. and European governments in knots
the more they try to understand and object to what
is unfolding. It is much easier to protest building
new settlements than it is to protest providing
water and electricity on the state’s dime to settle-
ments that already exist, albeit illegally.

It is much easier to condemn applying sover-
eignty to settlements on occupied territory than it
is to condemn moving the office of legal counsel
overseeing those settlements out of the military
and into the Defense Ministry. It is much easier to
fight against not granting construction permits to
Palestinians than it is to fight against land surveys
that limit the amount of land that is available for
those construction permits. This is all meant to
usher in a new era of annexation under the noses of
those who are on the lookout for annexation.

The Biden administration and Democratic mem-
bers of Congress are likely going to maintain their
previously stated red line of formal annexation as
the one that must not be crossed. What cannot get
lost in the shuffle is the fact that the moves that the
incoming Israeli government will make are all either
right on or over that red line, even if they are harder
to recognize. When they arrive, they should not be
mistaken for anything other than the annexation
that they are designed to implement. JE
Michael J. Koplow is chief policy officer at Israel Policy
Forum.