While No One’s Looking, Netanyahu Tightens His Grip on the West Bank
Hypocrisy, famously, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Put differently, hypocrites acknowledge that virtue exists and must be paid its due, at least for appearances’ sake.
For decades, Israeli policy in the West Bank has served as an example. After Israel’s unplanned conquest of the territory in 1967, it annexed East Jerusalem in a quick fait accompli. But the rest of the West Bank has officially remained under temporary military occupation. Outright annexation is illegal under international law and would risk greater international isolation than Israel has faced up to now. Domestically, annexation without extending full rights to Palestinian residents would shred Israelis’ own sense that they live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, under the Oslo II Accord of 1995, much of the West Bank is under the civil rule of the autonomous Palestinian Authority, an interim status meant to last until a permanent peace accord.
Instead of officially extending sovereignty, successive governments have pursued a gradualist policy, a ploy both psychological and political, a matter of “Let’s do it, but tell ourselves we’re not.” The state has encouraged Israelis to build settlements in the West Bank. In incremental, often unnoticed steps, it has applied much of Israeli civil law to those settlers—paradoxically, using military decrees, a tool of a temporary occupier. The result is that in occupied territory, settlers enjoy the rights and live under virtually the same legal system as residents of sovereign, pre-1967 Israel. Palestinians do not.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government, however, is done with paying tribute to virtue.
Among the measures approved in recent days by the Cabinet and the powerful ministerial committee for national security: Israeli authorities in the West Bank will gain enforcement powers over environmental and other issues in Areas A and B of the West Bank, which are under Palestinian Authority civil rule. That’s an extension of Israeli control in direct violation of the Oslo Accords. Meanwhile, Israel will launch a new effort to survey land ownership in much of the West Bank. As the Peace Now movement’s Settlement Watch team notes, large areas will likely be registered as state-owned, available for settlement.
Particularly brazen are the changes in Hebron, the one place in the West Bank where settlers have established footholds inside a Palestinian city. Planning and building authority for the settlers will be divested from the Hebron municipality—a Palestinian body—and put under direct Israeli control. So will planning power at the holy site known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. These moves violate the Hebron Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, signed in 1997 under Netanyahu as prime minister. Anyone who has ever visited Hebron knows that tension between settlers and Palestinians there is as sharp in the air as recently fired tear gas. Hebron’s holy place—site of a ghastly massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers by an armed settler in 1994—is second only to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a.k.a. Haram Al Sharif, in its potential to detonate violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis.
These moves aren’t outright annexation, but they are great leaps toward it. They advance the goal of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, who proposed last summer that Israel annex over 80 percent of the West Bank.
So why the move from subtle to flagrant, and why now? Why risk both foreign condemnation and igniting a new uprising in occupied territory?
The short answer is that Netanyahu’s foreign policy is entirely domestic, and his domestic policy is focused on his personal survival and power. And his survival depends in part on a political ally, Smotrich, who is certain he knows God’s plan for the world, an approach that renders immediate dangers inconsequential.
Netanyahu’s overt diplomatic agenda has mostly contracted to managing ties with Donald Trump. On February 10, for instance, he flew to Washington for what was billed as an urgent meeting the next day with the president about Iran. Talking to reporters afterward, Trump launched into a Trumpian tirade at Israeli President Isaac Herzog for not granting a pardon to Netanyahu, who is on trial for bribery and fraud. Back in November, Trump had called on Herzog to issue a mid-trial pardon—unprecedented in Israel—and Netanyahu filed a formal request for the move. And here, over two months later, Herzog hadn’t paid sufficient attention to this matter! “You have a president that refused to give him a pardon,” Trump said, adding that Herzog “should be ashamed of himself.”
It’s not hard to figure out who suggested that Trump raise the subject. But let’s assume that in their meeting, Trump and Netanyahu also talked about Iran, not just pesky prosecutions. Whatever one thinks the United States or Israel should do regarding Iran, the decision will affect the life and safety of every Israeli. In the midst of discussing the matter, Netanyahu asked for a favor and created a personal debt to a foreign autocrat who keeps close track of favors and slights. The prime minister showed his top priority: himself and his own future.
All the more so in his political behavior within Israel: As he came under police investigation, then under indictment, then actually faced trial, Netanyahu’s assault on democratic norms escalated. The central project of his current term in office has been an autocratic revolution, aimed at weakening the courts and bringing them under control of the ruling party. He has tried to fire the attorney general, an independent civil servant who heads the state prosecution. Public protests and court rulings have slowed this self-coup but not stopped it. Defendant Netanyahu’s personal stake in these changes is obvious. A docile Supreme Court could acquit him on appeal if he’s convicted—that is, if a pliant prosecutor doesn’t stop the trial first.
This is context for the latest moves in occupied territory: Aligned with Trump abroad, bulldozing constitutional limits at home, Netanyahu has no reason to pretend he’s maintaining a facade of liberal democracy.
Still, the structure of the parliamentary system remains. To stay in power, Netanyahu has sought to squeeze every possible day out of his current term, which means holding his coalition together until the legal deadline for new elections in October this year. This is a key reason that the war in Gaza lasted so long, even as the death count kept climbing. Smotrich’s party and the equally extreme Jewish Power Party pressed to keep fighting in order to conquer the entire Gaza Strip. In March of last year, Netanyahu ended a ceasefire to keep them from bolting the government. Making down payments on Smotrich’s annexationist program fits the same pattern.
The upcoming election is a greater hurdle: Unreliable as polls may be, they consistently show Netanyahu’s coalition losing to a disparate bloc of opposition parties. Many right-wing voters, it appears, see Netanyahu as corrupt, or as evading responsibility for the catastrophic Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, or both. In a multiparty system, their options include right-wing parties opposed to Netanyahu personally. Steps deepening Israel’s hold on the West Bank are aimed at showing that only Netanyahu can be trusted to carry out the right’s agenda.
They’re also designed to boost Smotrich’s support on the far right. Polls show that his party could fall just short of 3.25 percent of the national vote, the threshold for making it into Parliament. The pro-Netanyahu bloc as a whole would lose seats, potentially deciding a close election. In the current term, 68 out of 120 members of parliament are aligned with the government.
Smotrich stands for a hard-line version of a theology that regards Israel’s conquests in 1967 as part of God’s plan for final redemption, and holding the land as an overriding religious obligation. In the summer of 2024, in the midst of the Gaza war, another Cabinet minister from the party caused a storm by describing the current time as “a period of miracles” because the government was accelerating construction in settlements. Smotrich has publicly asserted that in the long term, Israel should “be run according to the laws of Torah,” as in the days of King David. In that conception, democracy isn’t a concern. Nor is the potential for a violent uprising in the West Bank. It might be part of God’s plan. Smotrich’s party represents only a small number of Israelis. But Netanyahu’s desperation gives it outsize influence.
The critical questions now are how much more damage Netanyahu’s government will do before October and whether the election will finally end his reign. In the meantime, what’s left of the prime minister’s hypocrisy is paying lip service to Israeli security, while worrying mainly about his own.