Lost in the uproar over Donald Trump’s Gaza comments was another bombshell: the White House will soon announce its position on annexation of the West Bank. Signs indicate it will fully support expanding Israeli control over the occupied territory.
By Michael Arria, Reposted from Mondoweiss
Donald Trump’s comments about the United States taking over the Gaza Strip and displacing the Palestinians who live there are understandably generating a lot of attention and concern.
However, those weren’t the only notable comments that the President made after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In response to a reporter’s question about a potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Trump said that he would be making a decision on the issue soon.
“People do like the idea, but we haven’t taken a position on it yet,” said Trump. “We’ll be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”
That wasn’t the only time that Trump referenced the issue this week. “Well, I’m not going to talk about that,” he said about West Bank annexation in the Oval Office on Monday. “It [Israel] certainly is a small country in terms of land.”
After making that comment, Trump picked up a pen and compared it to the size of his desk. He said that this was a good symbol of how small Israel is compared to the surrounding region.
“I use that as an analogy. It’s pretty accurate, actually,” he said. “It’s a pretty small piece of land, and it’s amazing that they’ve been able to do, what they’ve been able to do when you think about it. There’s a lot of good, smart brainpower. But it is a very small piece of land, no question about it.”
Trump made similar comments on the presidential campaign trail.
“When you look at the map, a map of the Middle East, Israel is a tiny little spot compared to these giant landmasses. It’s really a tiny spot. I actually said, ‘Is there any way of getting more?’” he told the crowd at an event in New Jersey in August 2024.
In an interview with Mondoweiss, Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu, a former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesperson, said that the move should have been expected after a ceasefire was secured.
“It was clear that this was coming, that [the ceasefire] was not without reward for Netanyahu,” said Buttu. “That became very apparent the night that Netanyahu appeared on Israeli television and said, we will be getting some very big assets in exchange.
“It probably means West Bank annexation, but I think that’s the least of it,” she continued. “I’ve long advocated and believed that the West Bank has already been annexed. The only thing that remains is just very small things.”
“One is the existence of the Palestinian Authority, and two is that they haven’t yet passed the laws fully expelling Palestinians. That’s all that really hasn’t been done. But everything else, it’s already annexed.”
A return to the ‘Deal of the Century’?
Toward the end of Trump’s first term, the administration released a political plan for Israel and Palestine, which was called “The Deal of the Century” by White House officials.
The proposal, which was developed by Trump’s son-in-law and political adviser Jared Kushner, was viewed as untenable for the Palestinians. It would have redrawn Israel’s borders to include illegal settlements, required Palestine to demilitarize, denied Palestinian refugees the Right to Return, and shut down all legal action against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
It also would have annexed the West Bank, a move that has seemingly gathered more political support since the plan was revealed.
In the fall of last year, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced that 2025 “will be the year of Israeli annexation of the West Bank.” In the U.S. right-wing lawmakers have also embraced the idea.
“As delusional as Trump’s Gaza proposal undoubtedly is, the open endorsement of wholesale ethnic cleansing will, as with other US-Israeli policies, eventually migrate to the West Bank as well,” Jadaliyya co-editor and Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani told Mondoweiss. “Worth recalling that Trump’s 2020 initiative, From Peace to Prosperity, called upon Israel to unilaterally annex upwards of 1/3 of the West Bank.”
“Trump has suggested that he is likely to reconfirm and perhaps expand upon this policy commitment in the next several weeks,” he continued. “Palestinians, Arabs, and advocates of justice worldwide have an opportunity to make such an announcement politically meaningless, but only if they act strategically and mobilize the resources at their disposal in a timely manner.”
U.S. political support for annexation
In recent days, GOP members of the House and Senate introduced bills that would prohibit the term “West Bank” from being used in documents and replace it with the phrase “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the area used by Israel to refer to the occupied territory.
Republican lawmakers have also created the Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus to support the annexation effort.
“I am dedicated to working with President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and Ambassador Huckabee to support communities in the region while opposing the establishment of a hostile state that promotes terrorism in Judea and Samaria,” said Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), who launched the caucus. “I remain committed to defending the integrity of the Jewish state and fully supporting Israel’s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.”
In one of Trump’s first foreign policy moves, he lifted sanctions on violent settler groups in the occupied West Bank. Just hours after he repealed the sanctions, Israeli settlers attacked homes and businesses in the West Bank towns of Jinsafut and Al-Funduq. The Palestinian Red Crescent said 12 men were beaten by the settlers.
For years human rights groups and analysts have pointed out that Israel has extended its control of the West Bank without a formal annexation policy.
“During Donald Trump’s first term, Israel moved the needle further on its path towards annexation, with Benjamin Netanyahu overseeing the rapid expansion of settlements in the Jordan Valley, the long plain of the West Bank’s most fertile farming land along the Jordanian border,” wrote Mondoweiss Palestine staff writer Qassam Muaddi at the site last November. “By the end of Trump’s administration, the U.S. had recognized Israel’s sovereignty over occupied Jerusalem, the occupied Golan Heights, and, critically, over the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”
“Connecting the dots, it becomes clear that over the decades and throughout various Israeli administrations, the Israeli vision has always been working towards annexation, by aiming to: strangle Palestinians in their main urban centers, prevent them from growing, turning their demographic growth advantage against them, all the while swallowing up more land and handing it over to the settlers,” he concluded.
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