The Israeli Right Is Gleefully Preparing To Annex The West Bank

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.