The New Yorker:

The Netanyahu government is pushing expansionist policies, while America looks the other way.

By Isaac Chotiner

In the past several years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has entrenched Israeli control of the West Bank, vastly increasing the number of “authorized” settlements and unauthorized outposts there. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has also increased, and more than a thousand people have been killed since October 7th, per the United Nations. President Donald Trump has half-heartedly warned the Netanyahu government against formally annexing the territory, but Netanyahu appears to believe that he can continue his expansionist policies without American sanction. Indeed, just over two weeks ago, the Trump Administration announced—via its Embassy in Jerusalem—that it would offer temporary passport services at two Israeli settlements in the West Bank to any U.S. citizens there.

To understand what is happening in the West Bank, I recently spoke by phone with Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Ofek: the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem; Shaul also co-founded Breaking the Silence, an organization of former Israeli soldiers which aims to spotlight life in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli government exerts control over the West Bank, the merging of the settler movement and the military, and how October 7th and the war in Gaza accelerated settlement expansion in the West Bank.

Do you think that what’s been happening in the West Bank in the past several months is noticeably different from the past several decades?

I think a lot of what we see now is a continuation and an evolution of what we’ve seen for decades. But there are also parts of what we see now that are more revolutionary than evolutionary. The bottom line is that what we’ve been seeing is an acceleration of annexation at a significant pace, in a context where it is openly stated that the purpose is to bury the possibility of a future Palestinian state beside Israel.

We see the massive acceleration of the policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank that goes beyond the forcible transfer of Palestinian communities to Israeli settlers. The goal in the West Bank is to create a homogenous ethnicity in a space that is being cleansed of Palestinians, and to expand the Israeli footprint there. That’s why I call it ethnic cleansing, and I don’t use this term lightly.

We see an attempt at confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land. About fifteen years ago, Israelis launched this campaign called the Battle for Area C. They’re trying to take over the roughly sixty per cent of the West Bank that is designated Area C under the Oslo Accords, and squeeze Palestinians into a hundred and sixty-five enclaves of Area A and B. I think, at this point, we have gone way beyond that. And it’s not just about cleansing Area C; it’s about taking over the entire open space and squeezing Palestinians not just to A and B but to the built-up areas of A and B, to the urban centers. So we’re kind of undoing Oslo.

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