ASA’EL, West Bank (AP) – With attention focused on its controversial legal overhaul, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has quietly taken unprecedented steps to cement Israel’s control over the occupied West Bank – perhaps permanently.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a leader of the settlement movement, assumed new powers over the occupied territories in his coalition agreement with Netanyahu. Smotrich moved quickly to approve thousands of new settlement homes, legalise previously unauthorised wildcat outposts and make it harder for Palestinians to build homes and move around.
As the first government minister to oversee civilian life in the West Bank, his role amounts to a recognition that Israel’s 56-year military occupation is not temporary but permanent, observers say.
“If Smotrich keeps this position for four years, we will be at a point of no return,” said Ilan Paz, former head of Israel’s Civil Administration, a military body that oversees civilian affairs in the West Bank.
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Hoping to return to power while facing a corruption trial, Netanyahu offered sweeping concessions to pro-settler lawmakers like Smotrich to form his coalition government last year. The coalition agreement created a new Israeli settler agency, headed by Smotrich, within the defence ministry to manage Jewish and Palestinian construction in the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls.
“It’s a kind of revolution, transferring power from the military, with its legal obligation to consider the welfare of the occupied people, to those who are committed only to Israeli interests,” said human rights lawyer Michael Sfard.
Smotrich has said he wants to double the settler population, build roads and neighbourhoods, and erase any remaining differences between the lives of Israelis in the West Bank and in Israel proper. In the process, he hopes to destroy any Palestinian hopes of independence.
As finance minister, Smotrich can funnel taxpayers’ money into infrastructure projects in the West Bank. Israel’s 2024 budget earmarks a record $960 million – a quarter of the Transportation Ministry’s entire budget – for a highway network to better connect Israel with the West Bank. Settlers make up just over 5% of Israel’s population.
Israel considers the West Bank to be the biblical heartland of the Jewish people. Smotrich and his supporters envision a single state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in which Palestinians can live quietly with second-class status or leave.
“We felt that the state never prioritised us because of where we lived. Smotrich is changing that,” said Smotrich’s spokesman, Eitan Fuld.
While Smotrich’s new settler agency will now handle the territory’s land-use issues, COGAT, the military body that oversees the Civil Administration, will retain specific responsibilities for more than 2 million Palestinians. Rights groups and others have likened the division along ethnic lines to ‘apartheid’.
About half a million settlers live in the West Bank, which Israel captured along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. The international community overwhelmingly considers the settlements illegal.
Experts and officials say Smotrich’s policies have already added to Palestinian misery, emboldened violent settlers and caused turmoil within Israel’s military establishment. The recent settlement expansion has also strained the Netanyahu government’s relations with the White House.
“Smotrich has taken over the civil administration, the only tool Israel has to calm things down,” said former West Bank military commander Gadi Shamni. “The West Bank is going to explode.”
Monthly settler attacks have jumped by more than 30 per cent this year compared with 2022, UN figures show. The government has approved 13,000 settlement housing units and legalised 20 outposts built without permits, according to anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now, the highest level since the group began counting in 2012.
Under Smotrich, the Israeli authorities have continued to demolish Palestinian structures built without permits. COGAT admitted in July that it rejects over 95% of Palestinian applications for permits.
This year’s demolitions are slightly higher than last year, which saw the most demolitions since at least 2006, according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities have scaled back efforts to evacuate unauthorised Jewish outposts, settlers say.
“This is the best government we’ve ever had,” said 32-year-old Shulamit Ben Yashar from the Asa’el outpost in the arid hills south of Hebron. The outpost – home to 90 families, including Smotrich’s brother Tuvia – was given legal approval on 6 September.
Renovation fever ran high in the Asa’el playground as mothers gushed about their plans to swap rickety caravans and wheezing generators for concrete and Israel’s national electricity grid.
Their Palestinian neighbours – herders on the dusty slopes known as Masafer Yatta – face eviction by the Israeli authorities and increased attacks by settlers. Residents of the rural area the Israeli military plans to seize say Smotrich and his allies are sucking the life out of their communities.
“We can barely breathe,” said 38-year-old Sameer Hammdeh, whose two camels were killed last month after they stumbled over trip wires he says were planted by settlers. Residents say settler provocations – damaging Palestinian cars and injuring livestock – reflect a sense of impunity instilled by the government.
Smotrich and his allies have also vowed to accelerate the pace of settlement construction. In July, the government reduced the six stages of approval required for settlement expansion to two: Smotrich and a planning committee.
“This makes it possible to build much more,” said Zvi Yedidia Sukkot, a lawmaker from Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party.
The party has proposed allocating $180 million to renovate settlement housing and build new hospitals and schools. The authorities are building two new multi-million dollar bypass roads to take Israeli settlers around Palestinian towns.
One of the roads bypasses Hawara, a flashpoint town where settlers went on a rampage earlier this year, burning dozens of homes and cars after two settlers were shot dead. At the time, Smotrich said the town should be “wiped out”.
“Our government has finally understood that withdrawing from the land is a prize for terror,” said Rabbi Menachem Ben Shachar, a teacher at a newly built yeshiva seminary in Homesh, one of four outposts Israel evacuated in 2005.
Lawmakers this year repealed legislation that had banned settlers from visiting the site. On a recent visit, more than 50 students swayed in prayer at the yeshiva.
Such decisions have unsettled Israel’s defence establishment. Settlers said that in May Israeli forces tried to stop them from moving heavy construction equipment to build a new yeshiva. But when Smotrich pushed back, the government abruptly ordered troops to allow the settlers to build.
“The political echelon ordered the military echelon not to obey the law,” said Nitzan Alon, a retired general who once commanded the West Bank.
The military and COGAT declined to comment on the incident. But a security official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, said Smotrich’s intervention had halted several planned demolitions in unauthorised outposts.
Last month, the tug-of-war between Smotrich’s supporters and security-oriented military officers erupted into the open when Israeli authorities were filmed pumping cement into wells south of Hebron, permanently sealing off Palestinian water sources in the summer heat. Palestinians had dug the wells without permits, which Israel rarely grants.
The footage went viral on social media and COGAT was caught off guard, the security official said. The agency promised that any future demolitions of water cisterns would be “examined on their merits”.
Smotrich’s men “cross all the lines,” said Paz, the former general. “They don’t care.”
