Smotrich isn’t bluffing: Israeli minister’s plan to annex 82% of the West Bank is a road map

Smotrich presenting his sovereignty plan, early September 2025

Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 4 September 2025:

In some 20 years of political activity, Bezalel Smotrich has proven himself to be goal-oriented and highly capable of executing his intentions. From his opposition to the Gaza disengagement, to leading the right-wing organization Regavim, and now as the minister responsible for settlements – he was also the first to openly say that the release of hostages is not the top priority – many of his positions have become government policy.

That’s why Smotrich’s announcement earlier this week, at a press conference alongside senior figures from the settlement establishment, must be taken seriously: the formal annexation of 82% of the West Bank.-

This is not a campaign stunt or concern over polling numbers. It’s a coherent ideological program. According to Smotrich, he and the Settlement Administration, an agency created within the Defense Ministry at his demand – have spent the past few months drafting sovereignty maps.

The annexation will be of territory, not people. According to the map, six yellow-colored enclaves are allocated to the Palestinians – detached from one another (the cities of Hebron, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin). These are the living areas where Palestinians will be allowed to manage their own affairs. In this way, Smotrich said without blinking, a “clear Jewish majority in a Jewish and democratic State of Israel” will be preserved.

With characteristic candor, Smotrich explained: “We have no desire to apply our sovereignty over a population that seeks our destruction. Enemies must be fought, not allowed a comfortable life. Therefore, the overriding principle for applying sovereignty is: maximum land with minimum population.”

Yet, for all his candor, Smotrich did not disclose what fate he envisions for the Palestinians living in the 82% of the territory – that is, outside the yellow-colored, non-annexed enclaves on the map. Only in response to a question from Haaretz’s Matan Golan did he say that about 80,000 Palestinians live in the territories that are expected to be annexed, and their status will be the same as that of East Jerusalem residents.

But what about the hundreds of thousands living in Bethlehem, Salfit, Qalqilyah, Tubas, Abu Dis, the towns and villages in between, and the herding communities – what about their residents? Were these areas left off the map, as enclaves that will not be annexed, merely for graphic convenience?

No one should assume such an omission was accidental. The mockery directed at Smotrich – for being a failed finance minister, for not speaking English, or for polling poorly – misses the broader truth: he has successfully advanced the agenda of the settler–religious–nationalist sector he so faithfully represents.

As early as late 2016, in an interview with Ravit Hecht in Haaretz, Smotrich laid out his goal: to extinguish Palestinian hopes for a state between the river and the sea. He described three options for the Palestinians: voluntary mass emigration (his preferred choice); remaining in the land as subjects without rights or national aspirations; or full-scale war against those who refuse to accept the decree.

“When Joshua ben Nun [the biblical prophet] entered the land, he sent three messages to its inhabitants: those who want to accept [our rule] will accept; those who want to leave, will leave; those who want to fight, will fight. The basis of his strategy was: We are here, we have come, this is ours. Now too, three doors will be open, there is no fourth door. Those who want to leave – and there will be those who leave – I will help them. When they have no hope and no vision, they will go. As they did in 1948.”

By September 2017, he had laid out his vision in an article in the journal “Hashiloach,” calling it “The Decisive Plan.” From his statements about the temporary status of Palestinian citizens of Israel (“Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now at least, and they have representatives at the Knesset, for now at least,”) in 2021 to the need to “wipe out” the village of Hawara in 2023, we can reasonably infer that he harbors far-reaching plans for those Palestinians who fall outside the yellow enclaves – those not among the 80,000 “fortunate” expected to be annexed.

Perhaps this includes promoting eviction and removal laws – modeled after those passed in apartheid South Africa – that would concentrate and compress some three million Palestinians and their descendants into those 1,000 disconnected square kilometers?

Smotrich is no superman: he has succeeded because the sector he represents is highly organized and relentlessly goal-oriented. But also because many Jewish Israelis have discovered that they benefit – or stand to benefit – from the continued occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians: through access to affordable, high-quality housing (relative to areas inside Israel proper), through government subsidies, through socioeconomic mobility, and through careers in the defense and high-tech sectors, which depend on maintaining control over another people.

Smotrich did not invent the wheel. The aim of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories occupied in 1967 has long been shared by many in the so-called “opposing camp.” Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres opposed a Palestinian state, as did Ehud Barak. The separation of Gaza’s population from that of the West Bank – an essential step toward sabotaging Palestinian statehood – began in the 1990s.

The guiding principle of “maximum land, minimum Arabs” is not new either. Sometimes through winks and nods, sometimes openly, it has long guided the Labor-Zionist movement, before and after 1948, even as it formulated various “demographic engineering” plans for Gaza and the West Bank.

The Oslo Accords, from the outset, were structured to leave large parts of the West Bank in Israeli hands, with minimal Palestinian population. Since the mid-1990s, the settler sector – and its growing ranks within the Israeli establishment – have focused on preventing the return of some 61% of the West Bank to Palestinian administration. Their tools include: the proliferation of outposts; the escalating violence they generate without any deterrence or punishment; immense political pressure on the Civil Administration to block all Palestinian construction; and the steady promotion of annexation legislation.

In the Gaza Strip, Israel has for nearly two years been carrying out the third option Smotrich laid out for the Palestinians: a campaign of destruction and annihilation aimed at achieving “decisive victory,” in the words of IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir. In January 2024, the U.S. administration distanced itself from Smotrich’s proposal for “voluntary expulsion aka emigration” from Gaza. But now, he has an ideological ally in the White House – one for whom relocating non-white populations in service of a mega-capitalist, real estate-driven vision, as if they were Lego blocks, seems entirely natural.

In the West Bank, too, policy now reflects the spirit of the third option advocated by the biblical prophet Joshua Ben Nun and Smotrich – though with less lethal tools. In Jenin and Tulkarm, the army has shown that evacuation, displacement, and destruction are the model.

Across the West Bank, Israel has launched an economic war designed to impoverish the population: by denying Palestinians work permits in Israel; by expelling shepherds and farmers from their land; by withholding Palestinian Authority funds so the public sector survives on half salaries; by seizing personal assets; and by erecting checkpoints at the exits of towns and villages, effectively severing them from one another. As a result, movement for work, education and trade is becoming prohibitively expensive and increasingly unviable.

When it comes to anti-Palestinian policy, Smotrich is not a fringe figure. He is in the mainstream. That’s why his annexation plan is not a fantastical delusion.

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