The United States announced a fifth round of sanctions against Israeli settlers, settler organizations, and their enablers on July 11, indicating a growing recognition in Western capitals that the current Israeli government is fixated on annexing the West Bank. This strategy has only expanded since the start of the Gaza war, severely threatening any future two-state solution realizing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. World leaders are doing the minimum to meet this challenge, risking any sustainable peace and an expanded Israel-Palestine conflict as a result — outcomes that deserve rejection on moral, legal, and strategic grounds.
Yet while actions like sanctions — similarly introduced by the European Union on July 15 — are welcome with respect to checking the Israeli settler movement, they come far too late in the game. In the shadow of Israel’s illegal 76-year occupation of Palestinian lands, Tel Aviv’s actions since current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government took power in January 2023 epitomize the accelerated speed of the settler movement’s efforts to claim the West Bank.
Far-right Finance Minister, Defense Ministry official, and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, who was transferred substantial powers governing the occupied West Bank from the military to civilian rule, continues to use his position to establish de facto annexation over increasingly large portions of the territory. Israel’s appropriation of 2,965 acres of land in the Jordan Valley on June 25 epitomizes this reality.
One day later, Tel Aviv announced 5,295 new housing units across multiple illegal settlements in the West Bank, legalizing several settlement outposts in the process. Similarly, Israel legalized five West Bank settlements on June 28 that it previously considered illegal. According to Smotrich, the move responds to Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia’s unilateral recognition of Palestine as an independent state just weeks prior.
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