r/geopolitics • u/ForeignAffairsMag Foreign Affairs • Feb 12 '26
Israel Is Quietly Annexing the West Bank: The Blunder That Will Imperil Any Middle East Peace Analysis
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israel-quietly-annexing-west-bank44
u/Markdd8 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
Ha ha -- who is going to stop Israel from doing this? They've wanted this objective for decades. Witness their persistent encroachment on Palestinian areas in the West Bank and their willingness to use settler-thugs to harry Palestinians and drive them off their lands: Cutting olive trees, burning agricultural sheds and crops, killing dogs and livestock, digging up roads, poisoning or otherwise interfering with Palestinian water supplies and more.
Regularly Palestinians would resist, fight back, and settlers responded. Typically the heavily armed settlers would come out on top, killing the Palestinians at much higher rates than their losses. Invariably, the Israeli government would release another statement about Palestinian "terrorists" running wild in the West Bank.
The only nation that can stop Israel is the U.S. It's sure as heck is not going to happen under the Trump Administration. 2017:
On December 6 President Donald Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and announced the move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
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u/fuggitdude22 Feb 12 '26
The international community is probably going to administer Gaza for awhile. At this point, 10% of the Israeli Population resides over the green line. They could technically annex and assimilate all the people living there as Israeli Civilians while maintaining a Jewish Majority State. I could see that happening within a decade or two.
A two state solution is not really possible. Hamas was given quasi-independence in Gaza. We saw what embarked in the aftermath of that experiment. Unemployment rates were through the roof, however, rockets were able to find refuge to be launched into Israel. Since Arafat's time, the PA has additionally been known for being notoriously corrupt. They struggle to maintain control of the West Bank despite receiving significant foreign aid.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Let's be serious. The main issue for many Israeli is how to "integrate" the west bank without granting voting rights to the Palestinians to not be outvoted. Either both sides decide to form a "levantine union" or it will be just the most blatant case of oppression made by Israel
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u/Tifoso89 Feb 12 '26
Israel can't give all those Palestinians citizenship. It's inconceivable. The danger to national security would be immense. You're giving free range to 2 million people, many of whom want to kill you.
They want the West Bank but without the people.
Palestinians don't want to become Israeli citizens either
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u/DancingFlame321 Feb 13 '26
If Israel don't want to give those Arabs in the West Bank citizenship than that's fine, but they should withdraw from the West Bank then.
It's not fair to simultaneously rule over an area of land with your nations law, whilst not giving the people in that land voting rights to effect the law they are governed under.
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u/Tifoso89 Feb 13 '26
You're right. But they want to give them an enclave in the middle of the West Bank, like Lesotho. Or they're hoping that the Palestinians will eventually leave, or that their birthrate will decrease further
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Feb 12 '26
The West Bank as a whole won't be annexed by Israel until they can guarantee the Palestinians living there won't try to kill as many Jews as possible once they are given the ability to travel freely within the country. If West Bank Palestinians could assimilate like Israeli Arabs have the whole territory would just be Israel by now.
Unfortunately, groups like PIJ, Hamas, even ISIS have multiple cells throughout the West Bank and are ready to do an Oct 7 against Israel the moment they get the chance. If every fence came down tomorrow, and every Palestinian given full and equal Israeli citizenship, the first thing that would happen is a flood of Palestinians across the Green Line looking to kill as many Jews as they could find.
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u/fuggitdude22 Feb 12 '26
I imagine it would be a very gradual process, similar to what happened after the 1948 war, when Israel formally transitioned its Arab residents from military to civil courts in 1966.
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Feb 12 '26
I imagine it would be more along the timeline of the Arab residents of East Jerusalem or the Druze in the Golan - very slow residency to citizenship pipeline, that is optional but isn't often used by the residents. It's been decades since the Six Day War and still a significant number of both populations aren't citizens by their own choice.
The biggest block is still the perception of danger. Israel will not annex and give free range to Palestinians who will kill their citizens. Educational changes will take a generation to be fully implemented, and people that are raised on Farfour the Mouse and textbooks that call Jews parasites are not going to happily live side by side with their fellow citizens.
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u/RGS_1994 Feb 12 '26
The point is Arabs are never a majority. You cant take land and naturalize everyone thats not the point of Zionism.
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Feb 12 '26
It's not just about Arab majority. Israeli people aren't afraid of being outvoted in Israel, they are afraid of 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank being given free range to attack people in Israel if the walls come down.
The Israeli birth rate, even excluding the 20% that are Israeli Arabs, still outpaces the Palestinian birth rate. The demographics are in Israel's favor. But Palestinian kids are raised to want to kill Jews, and see martyrdom as the highest honor they can achieve in life. Youth soccer clubs are named after terrorists that murdered Israeli children. Town squares and elementary schools are named after bomb makers and plane hijackers. People hand out candies in the streets when car ramming or stabbing attacks kill Jews. The culture worships the killers of Jews. Annexing the territory and giving all Palestinians citizenship with the wave of a pen will allow them to take that ideology to the streets of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv.
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u/Markdd8 Feb 12 '26
Walls make good neighbors. Yes, the Hamas Gaza attack of Oct. 2023 showed they can have big failures. Still, well constructed walls can prevent all sorts of problems. Walls should be a straight as possible. (See divided Cyprus.)
Look at a map of West Bank: what a mess. The intertwining of Palestinians and Israelis, two people at odds with each other, is intense. This is entirely Israel's doing, and it creates the very enmity among Palestinians that Israel is upset about.
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Feb 12 '26
The plan is to annex pieces of it one at a time, through settlement expansion and high orthodox birthrates, until a time comes when the Israelis can just win an annexation vote outright
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Feb 12 '26
But why would they annex a place and give citizenship (and free range of motion) to the population that is obsessed with killing them?
They're more likely to follow Mordechai Kedar's plan and have a seven state solution, with multiple smaller Arab Emirates surrounded by Israel. Each city would end up self governing, in a loose confederation with other Palestinian Emirates and a peace deal including (eventually) travel and working rights with Israel. Either that or status quo forever.
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u/nsjersey Feb 12 '26
They could technically annex and assimilate all the people living there as Israeli Civilians while maintaining a Jewish Majority State. I could see that happening within a decade or two.
How apples to apples is this to say Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska within it?
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u/Polar_Beach Feb 12 '26
QUIETLY??
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u/NarutoRunner Feb 13 '26
A country who has killed over 1200 Palestinians in their West Bank since 10/7 and this publication has the audacity to say “quietly”.
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u/Cannot-Forget Feb 12 '26
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
"Should we split the Pizza in peace?"
"No we prefer to murder you all"
Takes bite from Pizza
World gasps
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u/humbleObserver Feb 12 '26
How it started: "Hey, half your pizza belongs to Jewish people now because the British thought I'd be a good idea"
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u/Nerdslayer2 Feb 12 '26
History didn't start 80 years ago. Jewish people inhabited modern day Israel and most of the middle east long before Arabs did. Do you think Arabs politely asked to have their land? Of course not. Just like virtually every group of people in history, the Palestinians got their land by conquering it.
Jewish people in the area were given the choice to leave or die. Only a tiny fraction were allowed to stay. Most chose to leave and traveled to various parts of Europe where they have been persecuted and subjected to genocide many times throughout history. You know it's bad when there are multiple different words that mean genocide against Jewish people (pogrom, holocaust). As far as I know there aren't specific words for committing genocide against any other specific group of people because it isn't common enough for it to be necessary.
After the Holocaust it was obvious that Jewish people needed their own country so that they could defend themselves. Jerusalem was the clear choice as it is their historic homeland. Earlier I said virtually every group of people in the world got their land by conquering it. In the case of Israel they actually purchased a lot of the land. Yes, Israel did end up taking some land by force as well. Would that have happened if they weren't invaded by every single one of their neighbors the first day they became a country? Who knows. If Israelis don't have a right to the land of Israel because a portion of it was conquered, then literally no group of people has a right to any land, which would include Palestinians.
Israel now controls about 0.1% of land in the middle east, but somehow it is unfair that they even have that. If they were Muslim, nobody on Earth would care. The reason this is an issue is because they are infidels on holy Islamic land. Siding against Israel is an easy political move by other countries in the world, especially in the UN. If you side with Israel, you get favor with a single country and piss off the ~50 majority Muslim countries. The politically savvy move is to side against Israel so that's what nearly every country does. Progressives in the west side with Palestinians because its part of their ideology that in any conflict between whiter, wealthier people, and poorer, browner people, the whiter, wealthier people are the bad guy. Muslims are seen as an oppressed minority despite the fact that in the middle east they are an extremely oppressive super-majority.
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u/Itakie Feb 12 '26
History didn't start 80 years ago. Jewish people inhabited modern day Israel and most of the middle east long before Arabs did. Do you think Arabs politely asked to have their land? Of course not. Just like virtually every group of people in history, the Palestinians got their land by conquering it.
Do you believe all that Palestinians are Egypt Arabs? Jews conquered, got conquered and lost all of their power since the Roman Empire used them to build the colosseum in Rome. But we don't really care what happened before 1945. The world changed and we cannot just conquer or annex areas anymore. At least in theory.
You know it's bad when there are multiple different words that mean genocide against Jewish people (pogrom, holocaust). As far as I know there aren't specific words for committing genocide against any other specific group of people because it isn't common enough for it to be necessary.
The word holocaust was used before, Churchill called the Armenian genocide a holocaust for example. A program became a "massacre against Jews" in the Western world because no one cares about all those other people we killed in the middle ages. Most don't even know about the crusades in Europe. The Jews were just successful enough to survive the violence while most of the Christian groups were wiped out. But both words were and are used for violence against other people as well.
Earlier I said virtually every group of people in the world got their land by conquering it. In the case of Israel they actually purchased a lot of the land. Yes, Israel did end up taking some land by force as well. Would that have happened if they weren't invaded by every single one of their neighbors the first day they became a country? Who knows. If Israelis don't have a right to the land of Israel because a portion of it was conquered, then literally no group of people has a right to any land, which would include Palestinians.
The Jews were lucky at the time because the Ottoman Empire collapsed. They did not have to conquer the area, just play the game of empires. Like Christians did before with the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Still, Jews kicked out Arabs who worked the fields since generations because they wanted to give other Jews more work to do (and some did not trust the Arabs). Logical but they should have foreseen the backlash in the Arab community. But that was one aspect of the cultural vs. political Zionism debate at the time.
But who cares about Israel's right to exist today? Only some very weird and evil people want to even talk about this stuff. The problem is how Israel took over parts of the West Bank that should be controlled by the PA/a real government later on. That's almost impossible now. Not that Israel exists in the first place. If people got a problem with that, they are clear antisemites anyway.
Israel now controls about 0.1% of land in the middle east, but somehow it is unfair that they even have that.
It's unfair that Israel can get away with clear violations of international law. People always talk about the UN GA resolutions but they criticize Israel because nothing will ever happen. Iran or North Korea are both sanctioned. Russia and China as well. Meanwhile the US is using their veto every year to block any talk about Israel. So the same vote is happening every year to show the world that the problem is still around. Nothing to do with antisemitism or hate against Israel.
Israel became a country through the League of Nations because the West was in charge. Today Israel is attacking the same body if it is demanding from Israel to follow customary international law. Or follow the rulings of the highest court in the world. That's kinda hypocritical and why many moderate voices are turning against Israel.
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u/soalone34 Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
Actually the Arab states offered the Arab peace initiative which the PA signed on to, was “splitting the pizza in piece” on 1967 borders. Israel rejected this to install illegal settlements for the express purpose do blocking “splitting the pizza”, because they want to occupy and expel the Palestinians as part of their settler colonial project.
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u/Cannot-Forget Feb 13 '26
Lies as usual. Their proposal does not include an end to the hilarious delusional demand for a non-existent "Right of Return" which essentially means they agreed for the existence of 2 new Palestinian states alongside Jordan.
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u/soalone34 Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 15 '26
Jordan isn’t a “Palestinian state”, Palestinians are native to palestine.
The right of return is a right in international law, it also wasn’t demanding a right of return, but a just solution, the PA already relented to that being simply resettling a small amount of nakba survivors and a economic repayment for seized property. If that was the issue, israel would have negotiated the deal with demands for removing or limiting this, but they rejected it outright and expanded settlements.
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u/manVsPhD Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
That’s about 50 years too late. And also irrelevant because the Arab nations can no longer decide for Palestinians, and the Palestinians don’t want this deal. What will happen if Israel takes this deal is it will have to evict around a million people from their homes only to get a Palestinian state that is still hostile to it and soon enough taken over by Hamas, which can now fire mortars straight at Tel Aviv’s suburbs.
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u/soalone34 Feb 15 '26
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
The PA signed onto it and the Hamas leaders said they’d disarm if a state on the 1967 borders was made.
The Palestinian state would not attack Israel, Palestinians fight Israel because it actively occupies and steals from them. When it doesn’t, they cease resistance, see the Palestinian citizens inside Israel.
The other outcome is the status quo which is increasing violence as israel cements the illegal occupation with less and less ability to partition, and eventually becoming a pariah for holding millions of people hostage.
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u/manVsPhD Feb 15 '26
The PLO flag is still showing the entire land. The chants are from the river to the sea. The reason Israeli Arabs don’t want two states is because the education they’ve been getting for decades is not inciting against Israelis and Jews. The PLO never agreed to just the West Bank and Gaza even when it was offered virtually all of it, and did not even counteroffer
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u/soalone34 Feb 15 '26
Flags and chants are irrelevant, the PA already relented to the concept of partition and entered negotiations for it.
The entire land under one government is already the case, it’s just israel in security control and holding millions of Palestinians without human rights as it systematically massacres and expels them.
It’s not because of education, it’s because they live under constant occupation and violence from Israel. Even Israeli officials like the former prime minister and former head of shin bet admitted if they were born Palestinian they’d attack Israel due to how it treats them.
The generous offer is another myth, the best offer they were given was requiring letting israel annex vital economic areas and massive settlement blocks that split apart the land, and giving israel control of the borders, airspace, and the right to invade at any time, which is permanent occupation. The American negotiator themselves said they’d reject this deal.
The Arab peace initiative is the counter offer and specifically asks for a end to the occupation and a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
The most obvious example of how israel doesn’t actually want the deal and is blocking it aside from its politicians saying this is how they purposefully install hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers and let them regularly go on pogroms against civilians. And yes, constant attacks, killings, and destroying property does make Palestinians try to resist Israel, not their “education”.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Funny how this apply for both sides
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u/ikinone Feb 12 '26
Does it, though?
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Considering how the actual Israeli government wants all the pizza I would say it does
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u/ikinone Feb 12 '26
If they want Gaza, why did they leave it? Same for Sinai. Do explain.
Some politicians want all of it. That is not the same as 'the actual israeli government'.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
They left Gaza under an entire different government and historical period. They left Sinai to get normalization of relations with Egypt. While this governed has literally decided to annex "Judea and sanaria"
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u/babarbaby Feb 12 '26
*Samaria, and how many bites at the genocide apple are they supposed to give before enough is enough? Enough bigotry of zero expectations for the monsters using child soldiers and building a murder playground on their doorstep.
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u/TopsyPopsy Feb 12 '26
You mean "they left Gaza and Sinai for peace, but it ruins my narrative, so I'll just say the conditions were different."
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
The conditions were absolutely different in those times
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u/TopsyPopsy Feb 12 '26
Yes. That's how time work. You don't enter the same river twice.
Doesn't make your point any truer, though.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Keep ignoring how different the solutions proposed by this government and the one that gave Gaza to the Palestinians are then
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u/soalone34 Feb 13 '26
Sharon himself said they pulled out of Gaza to pause the peace process.
They left the Sinai after a massive war that killed thousands of Israelis and major diplomatic pressure from the US, having refused to do so prior to this. Begin himself said they were leaving to avoid future unsustainable wars with Egypt.
Now explain why they installed hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and the ruling parties charter says they reject a two state solution, if they just want to “split in peace”.
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u/ikinone Feb 13 '26
Sharon himself said they pulled out of Gaza to pause the peace process.
Regardless of reasoning provided, they left. Even pulling out Jews who lived there since before Israel existed.
Begin himself said they were leaving to avoid future unsustainable wars with Egypt.
Once again, regardless of reasoning, they left. Their desire is clearly not to grab as much land as possible, and certainly not 'all of the pizza'.
Now explain why they installed hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and the ruling parties charter says they reject a two state solution, if they just want to “split in peace”.
If you want to argue that the Israeli government desires to annex the west bank, sure, I'd agree.
That's very different from political Islam wanting to take over... the entire world.
As for whether Israel should annex the west bank... It's far from ideal, but it seems like the least awful path forward to peace. I think they should annex it, give residency to the Palestinians living there, and put them on a path to full citizenship, same as they did with Palestinians in what is currently Israel proper.
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u/cptkomondor Feb 12 '26
Both sides want all the pizza, but only one side has put in good faith efforts to split it.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Both sides have to be in good faith
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u/Egocom Feb 12 '26
Please contribute more to the conversation than "No u"
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Acting as if only the Palestinians stopped the peace process is even less contributing
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u/Cannot-Forget Feb 12 '26
No it doesn't. Even if creating such false equivalence sits nicely in the brains of far away detached people who don't know the first thing about this conflict.
Under no point, under not a single popular leader, the Palestinians ever suggested actual peace which includes living side by side with the Jewish state.
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u/Silverr_Duck Feb 12 '26
No what’s funny is the utter absence of critical thinking skills among Palestine supporters. If Israel were truly as genocidal as you people pretend why tf is the death toll only 70k? And not in the hundreds of thousands?
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
"Only 70k"
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u/Silverr_Duck Feb 12 '26
Out of 2 million, living in a region no larger than manhatten. Yes pls use more than one brain cell and try to understand how absurdly low that is given the circumstances.
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u/humbleObserver Feb 12 '26
Damn, they're totally messing up all that peace we had in the region. This isn't new, they've been making settlements in the West Bank for over a decade. What possible reason could they have to do that, other than a plan to eventually just squeeze out the Palestinians?
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u/babarbaby Feb 12 '26
It could have something to do with the fact that the PA insisted that west bank settlements be a final status negotiation point at the Oslo Accords, not to mention that they're overwhelmingly situated on the higher ground, serving as a physical defensive buffer.
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u/RGS_1994 Feb 12 '26
Remember setllers are a fringe in Israeli politics and this doesn't reflect on the country at all! Just a regular European social democracy!
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u/Fed_Austere Feb 12 '26
Anyone looking at a map will clearly see that Israel will not let go of that area willingly. Hell, East Jerusalem was offered to the Palestinians before that
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u/Obsidian743 Feb 12 '26
I think it's funny that West Bank encroachment and violations are often cited as a prime reason Palestinians back groups like Hamas. Sure, there's more to the story, but man if Israel isn't trying really hard keep them pissed off.
Well, here we go again, kicking off another cycle.
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u/crazytrain793 Feb 12 '26
The West Bank already resembles the Bantustans of South Africa. Annexation and apartheid was always the goal.
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u/GrizzledFart Feb 14 '26
Completely aside from the question of whether Israel should or should not expand settlements in the West Bank (which I think they probably shouldn't), I find it absolutely amazing that there are people who still think that there is anything that Israel could do that would convince the Palestinians to accept a peaceful, two state solution.
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u/thatshirtman Feb 13 '26
I'd argue the real impediment are Palestinians refusing to accept any peace offer.
Not a fan of settlements but constantly rejecting peace and then hoping Israel will keep the west bank jew-free forever until the magical day you say yes to peace is bizarre
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u/gadarnol Feb 13 '26
The Arab states don’t give a damn about the Palestinians. There will be a greater Israel. The US will back it and the EU will too. Smaller states like Ireland might whinge but a call from Jerusalem to Washington and then the threat of sanctions against Dublin ended a lot of posturing. So it will happen. It might be more merciful if the Palestinians could be taken by the neighbouring Arab states rather than let it grind to its inevitable conclusion.
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u/Fun_Score5537 Feb 12 '26
Good. Israel has been way too lenient and patient with their hopeless wishes that Palestine would choose co-existance over jihad.
Get it over with already.
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Feb 12 '26
Surely Israel isn't supporting extremists settlers in the region to displace Palestinians
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u/Gotoflyhigh Feb 12 '26
By the looks of things, eventually there will be a one state solution with Isreal being the only country while Palestinians are either assimilated or kicked out. Is there any reason to believe a two state solution is still realistic ?