By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What A Saudi-Israeli Deal Could Mean For The Palestinians

Israelis may be preoccupied with the bitter battle over controversial judicial reforms proposed by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, another radical effort is getting much less attention. Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet members seek nothing less than the de facto annexation of the West Bank. If they get their way, it could have a profound effect on the democratic nature of Israel and the stability of the Middle East.

When Netanyahu brought two extreme, ultranationalist parties—the Religious Zionist Party and the Jewish Home Party—into his ruling coalition, he effectively handed control of his government to two ideologues: Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is the minister of national security and Bezalel Smotrich, who is finance minister but who has also been given a unique role in the defense ministry. For them, curbing the independence of Israel’s judiciary is just one way, albeit an important one, to facilitate their real agenda: the creation of a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea by settling much of the West Bank, snuffing out Palestinian national aspirations, and, in the words of Smotrich, “encouraging” the Palestinians to relocate to other Arab countries, including neighboring Jordan.

Most rational people would be quick to dismiss this idea as delusional. There are 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and 40 percent of the territory is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Destroying the PA and forcing West Bank Palestinians to leave their homes would cause a substantial international furor and a profound crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations. Incorporating the Palestinians into the Jewish state would render Jews a minority ruling over a majority of second-class noncitizens and fuel those critics of Israel who decry it as an “apartheid state.”

Despite efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi to gain control over the senior military leadership, the Brotherhood does not control the military. The Brotherhood is not powerless, but it is the weaker of the two. This dynamic is fundamental to understanding where Egypt is and what domestic and foreign relations decisions its leadership can make.

But Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, is rapidly turning this dark fantasy into reality. Netanyahu has afforded Smotrich a particular title—minister within the Ministry of Defense—under his actual defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and many of the powers needed to initiate the de facto annexation of territory in the West Bank. And wearing his other hat, as finance minister, Smotrich has the means to fund his ambitions while blocking money from flowing to the PA.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, January 2023

Fortunately, there is a way to stop this dangerous plan. U.S. President Joe Biden and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS), now discussing the possible full normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, should condition any deal on setting aside Smotrich’s ambitions in the West Bank. This could be achieved by insisting that in exchange for the establishment of formal relations with Saudi Arabia, Israel should transfer a meaningful percentage of the remaining Israeli-controlled land in the West Bank (known as Area C) to the PA and freeze both the expansion of settlements and the legalization of illegal settlement outposts. Such formal commitments would effectively stymie the extremist push for annexation. But suppose the United States brokers a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that fails to stop Smotrich. In that case, it will inadvertently provide a green light to realize an extremist plan.

 

From The River To The Sea

Smotrich is a progeny of the settler movement that has long dreamed of annexing the West Bank. He was born in 1980 in Haspin, a religious settlement in the Golan Heights, and grew up in the hard-line West Bank settlement of Beit El. He was educated at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva that produced Gush Emunim. This ultranationalist religious group first advocated settling the West Bank after Israel occupied the territory in 1967. Smotrich came to prominence in 2005 during protests against the evacuation of settlers from the Gaza Strip under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan; authorities arrested Smotrich on suspicion that he was planning to blow up the Ayalon expressway, Israel’s main traffic artery. He was jailed for several weeks but never charged.

Smotrich is an avowed homophobe with oft-expressed racist attitudes toward the Palestinians. But he is also an accomplished political operator. In 2015, he entered the Knesset for the Religious Zionist Party, and in 2019, Netanyahu appointed him minister of transport. Building roads and infrastructure for West Bank settlers, he gained a reputation for being an influential minister.

In 2017, while a member of the Knesset, Smotrich published an extended essay entitled “Israel’s Decisive Plan” in Hashiloach, a right-wing journal. It makes chilling reading because Smotrich was quite transparent in arguing for, in effect, eviscerating Palestinian identity.

His proposal envisaged the Israeli seizure of all the West Bank through rapid settlement expansion and the annexation of Palestinian territory to “make it clear that our national ambition for a Jewish State from the river to the sea is an accomplished fact.” The purpose of such moves, he wrote, is to “imprint the understanding upon the consciousness of the Arabs and the world that an Arab state will never arise in this land.”

Those Palestinians who then choose to forego their national aspirations would be welcome to live as individuals “under the wings of the Jewish State.” They would have autonomy and the right to vote in local elections. Rather than equal rights, however, they would enjoy differentiated rights if their loyalty to the Jewish state remained in doubt. They might eventually gain Israeli citizenship and full voting rights, but only if they first declared an oath of allegiance and proved it by serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Smotrich admits that this process will create a “deficit in democracy,” but that is a price he is more than willing to pay.

What if the Palestinians do not accept their secondary place in this system and remain wedded to the dream of an independent Palestine? For Smotrich, the answer is straightforward: they will have to leave. Israel would “encourage” this “organized relocation” to neighboring Arab countries. Smotrich’s goal is clear: the large-scale displacement of the Palestinian people could well amount to a war crime.

This “encouraged emigration” would also pose a severe national security threat to neighboring Jordan. Although the Hashemite Kingdom has for years hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the region’s wars, including many Palestinians, it has never accepted the idea that Israel should solve its demographic challenge by foisting West Bank Palestinians on Jordan. Amman’s resistance would likely be fierce, jeopardizing the peace treaty signed by Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they occupied. In the West Bank, King Abdullah of Jordan moved to erase all traces of Palestinian Arab identity. On April 4, 1950, he formally annexed the territory, and its residents became Jordanian citizens. In Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Palestinians were kept under oppressive military rule. "The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are," President Gamal Abdel Nasser told a Western reporter. "We will always see that they do not become too powerful. Can you imagine yet another nation on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean?"

If the Palestinians dared to resist their fate with arms, Smotrich explains that they would be branded terrorists and killed by the Israeli army. Those who did not take up arms but were unwilling to emigrate or swear loyalty to the Jewish state would not be harmed, according to the plan, but would forego any hope of acquiring equal rights. He claims without elaboration that the new situation would not resemble apartheid in South Africa. But his plan explicitly calls for one group's systematic domination and oppression over another, two of the three qualifying terms in the United Nations’ legal definition of apartheid.  

Moreover, Smotrich’s plan is explicitly designed to eliminate Palestinian identity by crushing any hope for a Palestinian state and forcing the Palestinians to live under Israeli rule with differentiated rights. Depending on how it is implemented, his plan could come close to fulfilling the terms of Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention: “Deliberately inflicting on the [national] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” In sum, Smotrich’s “decisive plan” is a dangerous document, especially now that he has assumed many of the powers necessary to bring it to fruition.

 

Making A Dark Fantasy Real

Smotrich has wasted little time setting his plan into motion. He began his tenure in the Ministry of Defense by instructing the relevant ministries to prepare for adding 500,000 settlers to the West Bank, which would double the Jewish population there. Since then, the Netanyahu government has announced permits to build more than 13,000 settlement units—more units in six months than have been authorized in a calendar year. Eighty percent of these units will be made in settlements deep inside the West Bank, specifically designed to thwart the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

While earlier we looked at the geostrategic problems of Israel, Next we continued with the same for Palestine.

Palestinian nationalism’s first enemy is Israel, but if Israel ceased to exist, the question of an independent Palestinian state would not be settled. All the countries bordering such a state would have serious claims on its lands, not to mention a profound distrust of Palestinian intentions. The end of Israel, thus, would not guarantee a Palestinian state. One of the remarkable things about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was that no Arab state moved quickly to take aggressive steps on the Gazans’ behalf. Apart from ritual condemnation, weeks into the offensive, no Arab state had done anything significant. This was not accidental: The Arab states do not view the creation of a Palestinian state as being in their interests. They do view the destruction of Israel as being in their interests. Still, since they do not expect that to come about anytime soon, it is in their interest to reach some understanding with the Israelis while keeping the Palestinians contained.

The emergence of a Palestinian state in the context of an Israeli state is not something the Arab regimes see as in their interest, and this is not a new phenomenon. They have never acknowledged Palestinian rights beyond the destruction of Israel. In theory, they have backed the Palestinian cause, but in practice, they have ranged from indifferent to hostile toward it. Indeed, the major power now attempting to act on behalf of the Palestinians is Iran, a non-Arab state whose involvement is regarded by the Arab regimes as one more reason to distrust the Palestinians.

Similarly, in February, the security cabinet, which deals with issues about the West Bank, gave formal legal status to nine West Bank outposts that had been established without government permission, many on private Palestinian-owned land, paving the way for the eventual legalization of some 80 outposts in the West Bank that have been established over many years and that are illegal under Israeli law. (Unlike formal settlements, which, although illegal under international law, are planned and authorized by the Israeli government, illegal outposts are small settlements set up without any planning or formal permission by groups of settler youth, often on privately owned Palestinian land.) These outposts, too, are deep inside the West Bank. In August, the Netanyahu government revealed plans to dramatically expand the first two retroactively authorized outposts, turning them into full-fledged settlements.

To abet Smotrich’s ambitions for the entire West Bank, the Knesset in March repealed the 2005 Disengagement Law that had made settling in the northern West Bank illegal and allowed settlers to return to two settlements abandoned there. Both moves directly violated written commitments that the Sharon government had made to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in 2004. 

In July, Smotrich briefed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on his plans to demolish Palestinian buildings deemed “threats to national security” in the 40 percent West Bank controlled by the PA, contravening the Oslo Accords. For good measure, Smotrich also announced that Israel would treat specific PA actions, including the construction of basic infrastructure in particular parts of the West Bank, as “hostile political activity,” a designation that allows the finance minister to confiscate funds from the PA. This is notwithstanding a recent Netanyahu cabinet decision to prevent the collapse of the PA.

Smotrich has also made clear what he had in mind when he wrote about “encouraging” the Palestinians to leave. In March, after settler vigilantes associated with his political party went on a rampage in the West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara, Smotrich declared that the city should be “wiped out.”

Smotrich is complementing these steps with a systematic effort to establish civilian control over the Israelis who reside in the West Bank designed to begin the process of de jure annexation. Until now, the Israeli military and security establishment has exercised sole control over this territory, including the lives of the settlers, maintaining a legal distinction between Israel and its settlements in the West Bank. But Smotrich has subordinated the military governor of the West Bank to himself and appointed a civilian deputy governor responsible for the Israeli settlers. Earlier this year, he also set up a body called the Settlements Administration within the Defense Ministry to find ways to extend civilian control over the West Bank.

This agenda explains Smotrich’s insistence on curbing the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court. The court has previously blocked the legalization of Israeli settlements built on privately owned Palestinian land. Without the interference of the Supreme Court, Smotrich can more easily enact his vision of an Israel that extends unimpeded from river to sea.

 

Riyadh To The Rescue?

Neither Netanyahu nor Biden seem willing or able to slow this determined effort at de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank. Netanyahu claims to have his hands on the steering wheel, but he has surrendered control to his extremist partners, just as in the case of the judicial reform agenda. However, he faces no public backlash because Israelis long ago turned their backs on what occurs in the West Bank.

Israel postpones its move to annex parts of the West Bank. In reality, the plan's promises are nonstarters for the Palestinians and some Israelis, and they amount to the United States pushing both sides toward a one-state solution by prolonging the current status quo.  

Biden witnessed firsthand the Obama administration’s fruitless battle with Netanyahu over settlement activity when a hard-won temporary freeze on settlement expansion in 2009 failed to generate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He is not interested in repeating that exercise. Consequently, the State Department offers little more than expressions of deep disappointment regarding Israeli actions, even when they abrogate formal U.S.-Israeli agreements.

But Biden now has an opportunity to reverse this process and end Smotrich’s revanchist ambitions. The U.S. president and the Saudi crown prince are negotiating with Netanyahu to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia fully. They could condition the deal on the Israeli government changing course in the West Bank by ending settlement expansion and legalizing illegal settlements. They should also demand that Israel hand over territory from the 60 percent of the West Bank that it now wholly controls to the PA, which nominally controls the other 40 percent. That transfer is provided under the 1993 Oslo agreements that Netanyahu’s government recently pledged to uphold. If a significant percentage of Area C were transferred to Palestinian control, Palestinian cities, and towns could grow without impacting Israeli settlements.

In the past, Netanyahu has proved adept at making and observing such promises in the breach. So, the concrete transfer of territory would need to be upfront as part of an Israeli-Saudi peace deal, and that would provide tangible proof of Israel’s commitment to keeping open the path toward a two-state solution. It would give Saudi Arabia an immediate achievement on behalf of the Palestinians that will help Riyadh better justify its peace agreement with Israel in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And such a deal might eventually help breathe new life into the moribund Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. For Netanyahu, peace with Saudi Arabia would be a crowning achievement at a time when he is besieged by protesters and pursued by prosecutors.

Most importantly, a package deal with a significant Palestinian territorial component would block Smotrich’s implementation of his plan and might even cause the collapse of the ruling coalition. Not surprisingly, Smotrich has already tried to preempt the idea by declaring that the agreement with Saudi Arabia “has nothing to do with Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].” He said that he understood: "We will not make any concessions to the Palestinians. It’s a fiction.”

Why would Netanyahu risk the collapse of his government for the sake of a deal with Saudi Arabia? So far, he believes he can avoid such a choice by minimizing his concessions to the Palestinians. But suppose Biden and MBS insist on these territorial gestures in the West Bank. In that case, Netanyahu will be forced to choose between his legacy as a peacemaker with the Arab and Muslim worlds and a future in which Israel is dragged into increasing domestic strife and international conflict by his ultranationalist and ultrareligious partners.

Conversely, suppose Biden and MBS relent and fail in extracting such commitments from Netanyahu. In that case, Smotrich will perceive such an omission as a green light to accelerate the execution of his plan. The chaos and violence that will ensue in the West Bank will render the Israeli-Saudi peace deal unsustainable, just as follow-up meetings of the Abraham Accords, which were struck between Israel and several Arab states in 2020, have already been impeded by violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem.  

Biden and MBS intend to use the peace deal with Israel to extract significant and tangible commitments from each other: a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty, the curtailment of Saudi engagement with China, and full normalization with Israel. Netanyahu should also pay a commensurate price. If he chooses normalization with Saudi Arabia—making the necessary concessions regarding Israeli activity in the West Bank—over his illicit deal with Smotrich, the whole region will benefit even if Israel’s extremists lose. But if Netanyahu chooses Smotrich over peace, then Israel will be the biggest loser.

 

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