The future of the West Bank: Settler takeover and annexation
People march to the evacuated outpost of Eviatar in the West Bank in April 2023
Fathi Nimer writes in The New Arab on 29 July 2026:
“We’re all going to end up in Jordan,” remarked a young man from Al-Jiftlik, a Palestinian village in the Jordan Valley. His comment reflects growing despair in the West Bank countryside, where Israeli settler-colonial expansion has intensified to unprecedented levels.
This is particularly true in the Jordan Valley, the agricultural heartland along the West Bank’s eastern frontier with Jordan. Once known among Palestinians as the “bride of the Jordan Valley,” Al-Jiftlik now illustrates the gravity of Israeli state-sponsored settler expansion on Palestinian land, having transformed from a prosperous agricultural community into one under siege and facing sustained displacement pressure.
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, land seizure in the West Bank has shifted from creeping settler encroachment to a vicious military-backed campaign of territorial theft.
This commentary shows how the Israeli regime’s land appropriation policy in the West Bank, once justified through bureaucratic-legal land seizure orders, has now increasingly shifted toward direct settler takeovers.
This shift does not indicate a change in objectives but rather an escalation of existing settlement expansion mechanisms, signalling the growing power and influence of the settler movement over Israeli policy.
The rise of settler regional councils
In the aftermath of the 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of the remainder of Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights, former Israeli minister Yigal Allon drafted a plan for the colonisation of the West Bank.
The plan proposed constructing settlements to enable the annexation of Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley while fragmenting the West Bank into enclaves under Jordanian rule or limited Palestinian autonomy. Although never formally adopted, the plan has nonetheless served as a guiding framework for the placement and expansion of settlements.
Between 1967 and 1979, the Israeli regime established 79 settlements in the West Bank. As the settler population grew to nearly 100,000, governing bodies were created to oversee and administer these illegal communities. These took the form of local, municipal, and regional councils responsible for managing settlers’ “civil” affairs, including planning and administrative functions within settlement areas.
The Israeli military established the first settler regional council in the Jordan Valley in early 1979, followed later that year by the Mateh Binyamin council. Soon after, the Yesha Council was formed as an umbrella organisation coordinating the activities of settler councils.