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, but another radical effort is getting much less attention. Members of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet 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 on 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 minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is finance minister but who has also been given a special 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 huge 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 provide fuel to those critics of Israel who decry it as an “apartheid state.”

But Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, is rapidly turning this dark fantasy into reality. Netanyahu has afforded Smotrich a special title—minister within the Ministry of Defense—under his actual defense minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as 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.

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), who are now in talks over 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 if the United States brokers a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that fails to stop Smotrich, it will inadvertently provide a green light for the realization of an extremist plan.

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA

Smotrich is a progeny of the settler movement that has long dreamed of the annexation of 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, the ultranationalist religious group that first advocated the settling of 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 effective minister.

In 2017, while a member of the Knesset, Smotrich published a long 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 a mixture of 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.”

Israel’s far-right ministers seek nothing less than the annexation of the West Bank.

Those Palestinians who then choose to forgo 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 for as long as their individual 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 loyalty 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, which could well amount to a war crime.

This “encouraged emigration” would also pose a serious 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.

If the Palestinians themselves 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 forgo any hope of acquiring equal rights. Here, he claims without elaboration that the new situation would not be akin to apartheid in South Africa. But his plan explicitly calls for the systematic domination and oppression of one group 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 itself 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 most 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 the addition of 500,000 settlers in 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—that is, more units in six months than have ever been authorized before in a calendar year. Eighty percent of these units will be built in settlements deep inside the West Bank, a move specifically designed to thwart the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

Similarly, in February, the security cabinet, which deals with issues pertaining to 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. (In contrast to 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 that had been 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. 

Netanyahu’s extremist allies want to snuff out Palestinian national aspirations.

In July, Smotrich briefed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on his plans to demolish Palestinian buildings deemed to be “threats to national security” in the 40 percent of the West Bank controlled by the PA, contravening the Oslo accords. For good measure, Smotrich also announced that Israel will treat certain 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 really 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 town 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 that is 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 over the lives of the settlers, in practice 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 that aims 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 in the past 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 seems 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, just as in the case of the judicial reform agenda, he has surrendered control to his extremist partners. He faces no public backlash, however, because Israelis long ago turned their backs on what takes place in the West Bank.     

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 put an end to Smotrich’s revanchist ambitions. The U.S. president and the Saudi crown prince are in negotiations with Netanyahu for the full normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. They could condition the deal on the Israeli government changing course in the West Bank, first by ending settlement expansion and the legalization of illegal settlements. They should also demand that Israel hand over territory from the 60 percent of the West Bank that it now completely controls to the PA, which nominally controls the other 40 percent. That transfer is provided for 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 affecting Israeli settlements.

In the past, Netanyahu has proved adept at making such promises and then observing them in the breach. So the concrete transfer of territory would need to be up front 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.

An Israeli-Saudi deal should be conditioned on Israel changing course in the West Bank.

Most important, 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].” To be sure he was understood, he declared, “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 seems to believe that he can avoid such a choice by minimizing the concessions he makes to the Palestinians. But if Biden and MBS insist on these territorial gestures in the West Bank, Netanyahu will be forced to choose between his legacy as 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, if Biden and MBS relent and do not succeed in extracting such commitments from Netanyahu, Smotrich will perceive such an omission as a green light to accelerate the execution of his plan. And 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 are intending 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 when it comes to 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.