An influential member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition told settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that the government is engaged in a stealth effort to irreversibly change the way the territory is governed, to consolidate Israel’s control over it without being accused of formally annex it. .
In a recorded recording of the speech, the official, Bezalel Smotrichcould be heard suggesting at a private event earlier this month that the aim was to prevent the West Bank from becoming part of a Palestinian state.
“I’m telling you, it’s megadramatic,” Smotrich told the colonists. “These changes change the DNA of a system.”
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While Smotrich’s opposition to ceding control over the West Bank is no secret, the Israeli government’s official position is that the status of the West Bank remains open to negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Israel’s rule over the territory amounts to a temporary military occupation overseen by army generals, rather than a permanent civil annexation administered by Israeli public officials.
Smotrich’s speech on June 9, at a meeting in the West Bank, could make this stance more difficult to maintain. In it, he outlined a carefully orchestrated program to take authority over the West Bank out of the hands of the Israeli military and hand it over to civilians working for Smotrich in the Ministry of Defense. Parts of the plan have already been phased in over the past 18 months and some authorities have already been transferred to civilians.
“We created a separate civil system,” Smotrich said. To avoid international scrutiny, the government allowed the Defense Ministry to remain involved in the process, he said, so it appears the military is still at the center of West Bank governance.
“It will be easier to swallow in the international and legal context,” Smotrich said. “So they don’t say we’re annexing here.”
Reporters from The New York Times listened to a recording of the roughly half-hour speech given by one of the participants, a researcher with Peace Now, an anti-occupation campaign group. A spokesman for Smotrich, Eytan Fold, confirmed that he gave the speech and said the event was not a secret.
Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker, said Netanyahu was aware of the details of the plan, many of which were foreshadowed in a coalition agreement between his parties that allows the prime minister to remain in power. Netanyahu is “with us full steam ahead,” Smotrich said in the speech.
If the government collapses, a future coalition could reverse the changes, but government measures in the West Bank have in the past generally remained in place through successive administrations.
For many Palestinians, the speech itself will probably be met with less surprise than the fact that Smotrich spoke the words out loud.
“It’s interesting to hear Smotrich, in his own voice, confirm much of what we suspected about his agenda,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political analysis group in Ramallah, West Bank.
Still, Dalalsha said, the approach is not new.
Palestinians have claimed for years that Israeli leaders are trying to annex the West Bank in name only, building settlements in strategic locations in an attempt to prevent contiguous Palestinian control over the entire territory. “This has been going on since 1967,” Dalalsha said. “Since long before Smotrich came on the scene,” she added.
Israel took control of Jordanian territory in 1967, during a war with three Arab states. Since its occupation, Israel has settled more than 500,000 Israeli civilians, who are subject to Israeli civil law, along with the territory’s approximately 3 million Palestinians, who are subject to Israeli military law. Approximately 40% of the territory is administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous body run by Palestinians that depends on Israeli cooperation for much of its funding.
For decades, Israel’s Supreme Court has described Israel’s rule over the territory as a military occupation, overseen by a senior general, that complies with international laws that apply to the occupied territories. The current ruling coalition disputes the term “occupation,” but also publicly denies that the West Bank has been permanently annexed and placed under the sovereign control of Israeli civil authorities.
“The final status of these territories will be determined by the parties in direct negotiations,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement in response to Smotrich’s speech. “This policy has not changed,” the statement added.
Smotrich’s speech suggested otherwise.
In particular, he pointed to a change under which military officials no longer oversee most of the process through which Israeli settlements are expanded, land is expropriated and roads are built in the West Bank. Those functions are now overseen by “a civilian working under the Ministry of Defense” who does not work for military commanders, he said, but in a new directorate overseen by Smotrich.
Even as international pressure mounts to declare a Palestinian state that would encompass the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Smotrich’s comments suggest that Israel is working discreetly to tighten its control over the West Bank and make it more difficult to extricate itself from Israeli control. .
Diplomats have been trying to reach a “grand deal” for the Middle East that would end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and improve Israel’s ties with other nations in the region. Saudi Arabia, for example, says it will recognize Israel – but only if Israel, in turn, allows the creation of a Palestinian state.
Smotrich’s speech suggests how far away that prospect may be as he moves to merge the governance of the occupied West Bank with the governance of the State of Israel.
Smotrich’s speech “fundamentally undermines the State of Israel’s long-standing argument that settlements are legal because they are temporary,” said Talia Sasson, a former senior Israeli Justice Ministry official who led an influential 2005 government inquiry into government support for illegal settlements.
The speech made clear how powerful Israel’s once-marginal settler movement has become.
Smotrich is a longtime settler activist who has worked outside the Israeli establishment to build settlement camps that are considered illegal even under Israeli law. As a religious hard-liner, he believes that the West Bank – which Israelites refer to by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria – was given to the Jews by God.
As a lawmaker over the past decade, Smotrich attracted attention for regularly making extremist comments, including his call for the destruction of a Palestinian town; his support for segregation between Arabs and Jews in maternity wards; and his support for Jewish landowners who will not sell property to Arabs.
Since late 2022, Smotrich has gained extraordinary influence over government policy. It was then that her party joined Netanyahu’s coalition, helping her secure a slim majority in parliament.
Smotrich used this influence to persuade Netanyahu to give him positions in both the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Finance, a role that Smotrich used to block funds for the Palestinian Authority.
“My goal – and I think of everyone here – is, first and foremost, to prevent the establishment of a terrorist state in the heart of the land of Israel,” Smotrich said in the recorded speech.
Smotrich said his main achievement was bringing many of the military functions in the West Bank under civilian control. While the army has often turned a blind eye to settlement expansion and even protected unauthorized settlements from Palestinian attacks, soldiers have also sometimes destroyed settler camps built without government permission and banned Israeli activists from entering the West Bank.
To counteract this influence, Smotrich said, the government:
— Given civilians greater control over settlement construction plans, as well as oversight over lawyers who decide legal issues in settlements.
— Took away from the main army commander in the West Bank the ability to block settlement construction plans.
— Secured nearly $270 million from Israel’s defense budget to protect settlements in 2024-25.
— Moved closer to creating a new security squad that could more quickly demolish Palestinian buildings in the West Bank that were built without Israeli permission.
To some extent, Smotrich’s comments appeared to be an attempt to defuse criticism from his own base about his record in office. Settler activists say the military still frequently blocks them from building new settlement outposts and that Smotrich has not done enough to intervene.
“Fifteen years ago, I was one of those running around the hills, pitching tents,” Smotrich told the settlers in his speech. Now he says his behind-the-scenes work will have far more impact than building any isolated camp.
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