During more than 19 months in power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has dramatically expanded Israel’s footprint in the occupied West Bank — accelerating a long-term campaign by the country’s settler movement to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state.
The government has approved strategic land seizures — almost 6,000 acres this year alone — and major settlement construction, escalated demolition of Palestinian property and increased state support for illegally built settler outposts. Together, they mark the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.
While the Biden administration insists that any diplomatic solution to the war in Gaza include a path to an independent Palestinian state, radical Jewish settlers and their far-right political backers, who have ascended to the highest levels of Israel’s government, are redrawing the map in real time — making the two-state solution envisaged in past peace accords effectively impossible.
In interviews across six Palestinian communities, residents described paralyzing constraints on daily life as settlements creep closer, limiting their ability to move freely and to access the farmlands that long sustained them. Settler violence has erased some villages.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, returned to office in December 2022 on the basis of a coalition agreement that promised to “promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel,” including Judea and Samaria, as the West Bank was called in biblical times.
The effort to expand and solidify Israeli control of the area is led by Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime settler activist who now serves as finance minister. Netanyahu also appointed him last year to a post within the Defense Ministry, giving him wide powers over Israeli policy in the West Bank.
Smotrich’s driving ambition is “to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent, for God’s sake, its division … and the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he told his Religious Zionism Party at a conference June 9, according to an audio recording obtained by Peace Now, an Israeli rights group that has spent decades documenting the growth of the settler movement.
To achieve that goal, Smotrich said, he would need to “change the DNA of the system.”
An animal farm was established by settlers in an outpost near the settlement of Itamar. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)
An estimated 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, alongside more than 500,000 settlers, whose numbers have increased by more than 15 percent during the past five years.
The position of Smotrich and his allies at the levers of power has turbocharged their gains. Israel’s Higher Planning Council has fully approved almost 12,000 housing units in settlements in the past 19 months, compared with just over 8,000 in the prior two years, according to Peace Now. A growing number of West Bank outposts — illegal under Israeli law — have been legalized. Large tracts of land have been seized by the state.
Successive American administrations have criticized Israeli settlements as an obstacle to peace. In February, after Smotrich announced plans for 3,000 housing units in the West Bank, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration considered settlements “inconsistent with international law” — a position first codified in 1978, under President Jimmy Carter, and reversed in 2019 by President Donald Trump.
Biden has also imposed sanctions on illegal settler outposts, and on Israeli settlers accused of attacking Palestinians. Yet the executive actions have appeared to have little effect on the expansion of settlements or the explosion of settler violence.
Israeli security forces have failed to halt a rising tide of harassment, assault and murder by extremist settlers, aimed at depopulating the Palestinian communities around them. At least 114 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in those attacks since October, according to the United Nations. While the military has dismantled some illegal outposts, most are quickly rebuilt.
“Any claim that the IDF supports and permits settler violence is false,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The U.N.’s highest court ordered Israel last month to end its occupation of Palestinian territory, evacuate existing settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians who have lost land and property — a symbolically significant ruling, but one with limited practical effect.
Netanyahu was quick to blast the decision. “The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land,” he said.
The government has approved strategic land seizures — almost 6,000 acres this year alone — and major settlement construction, escalated demolition of Palestinian property and increased state support for illegally built settler outposts. Together, they mark the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.
While the Biden administration insists that any diplomatic solution to the war in Gaza include a path to an independent Palestinian state, radical Jewish settlers and their far-right political backers, who have ascended to the highest levels of Israel’s government, are redrawing the map in real time — making the two-state solution envisaged in past peace accords effectively impossible.
In interviews across six Palestinian communities, residents described paralyzing constraints on daily life as settlements creep closer, limiting their ability to move freely and to access the farmlands that long sustained them. Settler violence has erased some villages.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, returned to office in December 2022 on the basis of a coalition agreement that promised to “promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel,” including Judea and Samaria, as the West Bank was called in biblical times.
The effort to expand and solidify Israeli control of the area is led by Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime settler activist who now serves as finance minister. Netanyahu also appointed him last year to a post within the Defense Ministry, giving him wide powers over Israeli policy in the West Bank.
Smotrich’s driving ambition is “to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent, for God’s sake, its division … and the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he told his Religious Zionism Party at a conference June 9, according to an audio recording obtained by Peace Now, an Israeli rights group that has spent decades documenting the growth of the settler movement.
To achieve that goal, Smotrich said, he would need to “change the DNA of the system.”
An animal farm was established by settlers in an outpost near the settlement of Itamar. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)
An estimated 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, alongside more than 500,000 settlers, whose numbers have increased by more than 15 percent during the past five years.
The position of Smotrich and his allies at the levers of power has turbocharged their gains. Israel’s Higher Planning Council has fully approved almost 12,000 housing units in settlements in the past 19 months, compared with just over 8,000 in the prior two years, according to Peace Now. A growing number of West Bank outposts — illegal under Israeli law — have been legalized. Large tracts of land have been seized by the state.
Successive American administrations have criticized Israeli settlements as an obstacle to peace. In February, after Smotrich announced plans for 3,000 housing units in the West Bank, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration considered settlements “inconsistent with international law” — a position first codified in 1978, under President Jimmy Carter, and reversed in 2019 by President Donald Trump.
Biden has also imposed sanctions on illegal settler outposts, and on Israeli settlers accused of attacking Palestinians. Yet the executive actions have appeared to have little effect on the expansion of settlements or the explosion of settler violence.
Israeli security forces have failed to halt a rising tide of harassment, assault and murder by extremist settlers, aimed at depopulating the Palestinian communities around them. At least 114 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in those attacks since October, according to the United Nations. While the military has dismantled some illegal outposts, most are quickly rebuilt.
“Any claim that the IDF supports and permits settler violence is false,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The U.N.’s highest court ordered Israel last month to end its occupation of Palestinian territory, evacuate existing settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians who have lost land and property — a symbolically significant ruling, but one with limited practical effect.
Netanyahu was quick to blast the decision. “The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land,” he said.
