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.




opinion
What I Learned Lecturing on
Israel and the Middle East at
Columbia and Yale
By Dr. Eric R. Mandel
A professional in the pro-Israel world read that
I had lectured at his and his son’s alma mater,
Columbia University. He wanted to know what
kind of reception I received, what I spoke about
and what questions I was asked.

Then other readers reached out who were con-
cerned with the atmosphere on American cam-
puses and asked me to write an article about my
experience. When I spoke, I began by saying that my goal
is to share information in context, with analysis
based on my first-hand experiences. I asked the
students to challenge their preconceived notions
and form their own judgments, knowing that 91%
of Middle East “scholars” favor boycotting Israel.

Unfortunately, today’s college educators are more
political activists than educators.

My talk was entitled, “Israel Challenges 2023:
Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas/P.A., Antisemitism, the
Israeli Election and U.S.-Israel Relations.”
The most prominent concern for the students
was the new Israeli government. Like many
Americans, they were concerned about two far-
right candidates and whether they would harm
Israel’s democracy and judiciary, straining its rela-
tionship with the U.S.

They knew that soon-to-be ministers Itamar
Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are lightning rods
for a nationalist agenda and had disparaged Arabs
and liberal Diaspora Jews. The students were con-
cerned about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s power over
the police, their ability to legalize illegal settle-
ments and their demand to override the Supreme
Court with a simple majority vote of the Knesset.

I told them Israeli politics has always been a
fractious, tumultuous tug-of-war melee with no
one party ever receiving a majority vote. However,
there is a big difference between harshly criti-
cizing Israel for policies they disagree with and
using politicians like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as a
weapon to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

I pointed out that when we strongly disagree
with what’s being done in other countries, we
object to the language or the actions, but no one
denies that China, Russia or Iran has a right to
exist. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said,
we will judge the new Israeli government by its
policies, not by its coalition members.

Walter Russell Mead, writing in The Wall Street
Journal, said, “To argue that the Jewish state must
continually earn the right to exist by satisfying its
moral critics and political opponents is absurd.

People criticize Chinese actions in Xinjiang and
Tibet without saying that those misdeeds deprive
the Chinese people of the right to a state of their
own. The Palestinian plight is real, and criticism of
Israel is not unwarranted … but Israel’s legitimacy
doesn’t need to be earned. The new anti-Zionism,
however, is becoming entrenched among many
American progressives … on-campus individual
American Jews are being challenged to earn their
way into progressive respectability by dissociating
themselves from the Jewish state and the Jewish
national movement.”
I told the students that Prime Minister-designate
Benjamin Netanyahu will be the most left-wing
member of his government. He is likely to be a
moderating voice compared to his problematic
partners, albeit a right-wing one. Netanyahu is
also thinking about his legacy.

There is little doubt that Netanyahu’s gov-
ernment will do and say many things that will
upset students on U.S. university campuses, many
American Jews, the Reform and Conservative
movements and members of the Democratic
Party, even those in the party’s mainstream.

However, those who care about Israel need
to realize that, if they relegate Israel to the
status of a pariah state, its enemies in Iran,
Russia, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and
Hamas will be dangerously encouraged. Daylight
between the U.S. and Israel will be perceived as
weakness. It must be clear that Israel’s swing to
the right isn’t the chance these enemies have
been waiting for to annihilate Israel while its erst-
while allies look the other way.

The students seemed surprised when I showed
them the following:
How deep and sophisticated Hezbollah’s tun-
nels constructed under Israel’s northern border
really were.

How enormous Iran’s underground missile and
nuclear tunnels are in Natanz.

My pictures of the displacement of the Yazidis
because of Iran’s control of Iraqi militias in Sinjar
province. Evidence of the potential for the resurrection of
the Islamic State.

Evidence that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement
was never going to end Iran’s ability to have
nuclear weapons in the future, despite the prom-
ises of former President Barack Obama.

I spent a good amount of time talking about
today’s Iranian protesters and how we abandoned
them in the Green Revolution in 2009. I explained
why we need to be more supportive of their
efforts for peaceful regime change. As a Kennedy
School of Government researcher discovered, the
most successful regime changes are non-violent
and only 3.5% of the population needs to be
actively involved in order to reach critical mass
and effect change.

I also asked the students to put aside precon-
ceived notions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
when I discussed a non-politicized analysis of
international law. I explained why the West Bank
is more appropriately defined as the occupation of
a disputed territory, whether or not one considers
it unwise for Israel to hold on to it.

I presented graphic evidence of how the
Palestinians preach hatred and incite their
young people against Israel, and showed them
that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud
Abbas says point-blank that he cannot accept a
Jewish state.

When I showed former Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert’s map that offered the Palestinians 100%
of the West Bank with land swaps and eastern
Jerusalem as their capital — which Abbas rejected
— as well as numerous P.A. maps that erased
Israel completely, it seemed to make a strong
impression. At Columbia, I also showed evidence
that the BDS movement on their campuses is not
about two states for two peoples but rather about
destroying the Jewish state.

To help the students understand Iran’s grand
scheme, I shared a map showing how the Islamic
republic encircles Israel through proxies in Syria,
Lebanon and Gaza. I explained that keeping
control of the Jordan River valley is essential
for Israel’s security if Jordan is the next domino
to fall. I next showed photos of Hezbollah and
Hamas military structures embedded in civilian
areas, setting the scene for cries from the inter-
national community of alleged Israeli war crimes
in the inevitable next war.

At both Yale and Columbia, students stayed
well after the Q&A session, wanting to discuss the
topics and share their viewpoints. Given what has
recently happened to some non-woke speakers
on campus, I was relieved that there were no dis-
ruptions and that only a few students left during
my talk. I was also pleased to receive inquiries by
email in the days that followed.

What I learned at Columbia and Yale was that
as bad as cancel culture is on many campuses,
there are still opportunities to present facts and
analysis in context and to respectfully discuss
complex issues with a receptive audience of very
impressive young adults. JE
Dr. Eric R. Mandel is director of the Middle East
Political Information Network.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 15