Ariel Schalit/AP
Netanyahu shows a map of Israel and the occupied territories signed by Donald Trump during a May 2019 press conference. The word ‘nice’ signaled Trump’s approval for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.
At the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem last week, Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz met with U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman to discuss the U.S.-Israeli plan to unilaterally and illegally annex Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu’s recently formed governing coalition declared plans to begin the annexation process on July 1. Even as both countries battle the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. is swept by Black Lives Matter protests against police violence and racial inequality, both American and Israeli governments appear determined to push Israel to formally apply sovereignty to up to 30 percent of the West Bank ahead of the United States’ November election. Though many have become inured to the Trump administration’s maximalist, messianic, pro-Israel policies, this latest shift represents a U.S. foreign policy so seamlessly aligned with the Israeli government that it’s hard to tell the difference.
Since the release in January of the Trump administration’s so-called peace plan at a celebratory White House event with Netanyahu that not a single Palestinian attended, Friedman has been leading a joint U.S.-Israel committee to map out the areas where Israel will apply sovereignty.
Friedman, a longtime patron of the settlement enterprise whom the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has dubbed “the annexation ambassador,” seems to be pushing the hardest for this move. “His position is more extreme than that of either the Americans or the Israeli government and is boycotted by the Palestinians,” the paper’s editorial page recently stated. Sounding more like a settler leader than a U.S. diplomat, Friedman said in an interview last month that it is unreasonable to ask Israel to give up any settlement. “It’s like asking the U.S. to give up the Statue of Liberty,” he said.
The annexation plan has been condemned by the United Nations, European Union, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates as, first and foremost, a threat to regional stability, and also a gross violation of international law, citing both the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the acquisition of territory by force or war.
That the Trump administration is actively assisting a foreign country in violating international law in a break from previous policy has even the most pro-Israel quarters of the Democratic establishment up in arms.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has stated his opposition to annexation, and his foreign-policy adviser Nicholas Burns recently said that annexation “is the one issue that could most harm the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Democrats in the House and Senate have written resolutions and letters issuing boilerplate warnings to Israel that annexation would harm a two-state solution and constitute a diplomatic blunder. The word “occupation,” however, is notably absent from these texts, as it has been from the State Department’s annual human rights report since 2018, highlighting how complicit U.S. policymakers are with the Trump administration’s break from U.S. policy as it’s been established since the Carter administration.
“The U.S. is helping Israel break the law and steal Palestinian land,” says Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Palestinian official. “What I find extremely racist and alarming is that people are saying it’s bad for Israel, for Israeli democracy, as though Israel will be contaminated by having Palestinians,” referring to critics of annexation whose concern is that it would undermine Israel’s Jewish demographic majority. “Very few talk about how bad it is for the Palestinians, whose land is being stolen. It’s incredible,” Ashrawi told me.
This is a logical progression for the Trump administration, which has bolstered Israel’s expansionist policies by recognizing Israel’s past annexations of East Jerusalem in 2018 and the Golan Heights in March last year, removing even the veneer of American attempts to broker peace.
That the Trump administration is actively assisting a foreign country in violating international law in a break from previous policy has even the most pro-Israel quarters of the Democratic establishment—like Sens. Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin—up in arms. “The traditional U.S. role is to sponsor negotiations between two parties and discourage unilateral acts by either party,” said Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Obama, who is now based in Israel as a fellow at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies. “That doesn’t seem to be what is happening here.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spokesperson, as well as American officials on the annexation committee, declined requests for interviews. U.S. Embassy in Israel spokeswoman Valerie O’Brien said she “cannot comment on ongoing diplomatic discussions.”
Obama and predecessors in Democratic and Republican administrations formally opposed settlements but did little to stop them. As human rights attorney Noura Erekat wrote describing the Trump plan last month, it “unilaterally consolidates all of Israel’s territorial takings over the past five decades,” which constitute 130 settlements spanning 463 square miles, about 21 percent of the West Bank, home to nearly half a million settlers. “Formal annexation is the predictable outcome of decades of unequivocal support for Israeli policies.”
While an increasing number of Democrats and American Jewish organizations, among them the liberal advocacy group J Street and the Reform Movement, have spoken out against annexation, few are willing to say out loud that de facto annexation has already taken place. Indeed, only conservative observers seem willing to recognize the reality. “Israel already enjoys complete security control over the entire West Bank, its civil law already governs its citizens living there, and … it has largely succeeded in normalizing the international community to continued growth in settlement activity,” wrote Robert Satloff, head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank.
The main difference between the status quo and formal annexation would be Israel’s ability to legally appropriate private Palestinian lands en masse. Israel is currently barred under international law from appropriating Palestinian land unless for military necessity, but upon annexation, it is free to apply its own laws, such as the Absentees’ Property Law, which it has used in East Jerusalem to expropriate land and property of Palestinians who were expelled or fled during the war.
With just days until the set deadline for beginning the annexation process, no map, timetable, or plan have been released, largely due to competing approaches within the Israeli government. Netanyahu faces opposition not only from his coalition partners in the Blue and White Party, who stress that any step has to work within a regional framework, and the far-right settler movement, which opposes the plan because it nominally includes the stipulation of future negotiations toward some kind of Palestinian entity that anyone would be hard-pressed to call a state.
With no Palestinians in the picture, Ambassador Friedman’s job involves mediating between Israelis, trying to assuage fears among settlers of the establishment of a Palestinian state anytime soon. But even this came to a halt last week as the U.S. grew tired of Israeli infighting and Friedman reportedly told Israelis to call him when they reach an agreement.
“If this plan was submitted to me by a university student, they would get an F,” said Shaul Arieli, who was involved in the negotiations and mapping toward a permanent status agreement in 2003. A retired colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and an expert on the geography of Israel and Palestine, Arieli told me that this is a team of amateurs who are not equipped to address the implications of annexation on transport, territorial contiguity, and borders. He adds that the same goes for the Trump team, which does not include a single national-security expert.
For example, Israel’s current plan to annex the Jordan Valley is unrealistic, as Arieli says it wouldn’t even be prepared to defend this proposed eastern border with Jordan. “It would be an impossible border spanning 1,800 kilometers, triple the length of Israel’s borders with all four of its surrounding countries,” he says.
Arieli says the push for annexation without any realistic plan is a populist move that is about one thing: killing the viability of a Palestinian state once and for all. “Through annexation they want, in one fell swoop, to rule out the two-state solution,” Arieli added.
Friedman is reportedly back in Washington this week to hold talks with Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House envoy Avi Berkowitz, and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien on how to proceed, with the possibility that any Israeli declaration of annexation beginning next month will be minimal and gradual. But as Ashrawi told me, the timing and scale is irrelevant. “You cannot be a little bit pregnant,” she says. “The essence of the issue is that annexation is wrong, and occupation is wrong.”
For years, proponents of a two-state solution talked about the window of opportunity imminently closing as Israeli settlements expanded. Today, the only window being talked about is the one for normalizing the reality on the ground of one apartheid-like Israeli state, while Trump is still in the White House.
