Tel Aviv seems emboldened now to fully settle the Palestinian territory, setting off a new refugee crisis, and more.
By Annelle Sheline, Responsible Statecraft
Following Donald Trump’s election victory, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told his staff to prepare to annex the West Bank.
Smotrich stated that he hoped to work with the Trump White House on achieving this key goal of the Israeli far-right, which would extinguish the possibility of a Palestinian state. Smotrich’s optimism that the Trump administration would support annexation appears justified by Trump’s appointments, such as his selection of passionate Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
Meanwhile, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced legislation that would require the U.S. government to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the moniker favored by the Israeli government — building on similar legislation introduced by Rep. Claudia Tenney in the House earlier this year — in a move apparently intended to signal support for Israel’s illegal claim to the territory.
Yet this embrace of a project dear to Israel’s rightwing extremists is not limited to Republicans. During a speech in Dearborn, Michigan on behalf of the Harris campaign, former president Bill Clinton also referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” parroting talking points favored by Christian and Jewish far-right Zionists.
Clinton’s speech, in which he also asserted that Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza were justified, has been widely criticized as actually harming the campaign’s outreach to voters in the country’s largest Arab majority city. Clinton’s statement directly contradicts the official U.S. position — which maintains a nominal commitment to a two-state solution — as well as international law, which holds that a state cannot annex or transfer its population to territory that it has occupied illegally, as the ICJ made clear in its ruling on Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in July.
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