Netanyahu officially approved a settlement plan last week and announced his intentions to greenlight other settlements just like it. Together, these plans would end the West Bank as a geographic and political entity.
“There will be no Palestinian state,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on September 11, attending a ceremony in the heart of the West Bank held at the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim.
Fast forward to the following Tuesday, September 16. Just a few meters away from Maale Adumim’s entrance, Israeli forces installed large metal gates at the entrance of the Palestinian town of al-Aizariyah, just a stone’s throw away from the Israeli settlement. It was a direct result of Netanyahu’s visit last week.
The Israeli PM had come to formally approve the E1 plan, a wide-ranging settlement project that would be built over a strategic tract of land separating the northern half of the West Bank from the south. It would effectively split the West Bank into two.
Last August, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the project would “bury” any prospects for a Palestinian state, calling it “Zionism at its best.” Last week’s ceremony at Maale Adumim made it official. The project will cost 3 billion shekels (nearly $900 million) to build 7,600 housing units in Maale Adumim, 3,400 of which will be in the E1 area.
Although it is only now moving forward, the E1 plan has been at least two decades in the making. The only thing that has stopped its implementation has been diplomatic obstacles that would open up Israel to accusations of preventing a Palestinian state. Those accusations don’t carry any weight anymore, because Israel is already openly embracing them.
The timing of Netanyahu’s approval of the E1 project is no coincidence. It comes as a clear response to the wave of global announcements of the intention to recognize a Palestinian state at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting on September 22.
It also comes on the heels of Smotrich’s publication of a map for the proposed wholesale annexation of the West Bank, intending to leave just a few Palestinian cities as isolated and caged ghettoes under full Israeli control.
After E1: everything
As originally conceived, the plan seeks to link Jerusalem to the Maale Adumim settlement east of the city. It aims to build the settlements on top of 12,000 dunams (1,200 hectares) of Palestinian land, which would be confiscated from the towns of Anata, al-Tour, Issawiyya, Aizariyeh, and Abu Dis.
Speaking at the approval ceremony last week, Netanyahu said that “there will be more cities like Maale Adumim.” Then he dropped another bombshell.
“Israel’s eastern front is not Maale Adumim, but the Jordan Valley,” he said.
In other words, Israel is planning on annexing almost the entire West Bank, crucially including the Jordan Valley as the “breadbasket” of any future Palestinian state and the ultimate guarantor of what the Israeli security establishment calls the state’s “strategic depth.”
Israel’s plans to annex the Jordan Valley date back to the “Allon Plan,” drafted a few months after the 1967 War, when Israel first occupied the West Bank. Netanyahu revived this plan in 2019, which would see the annexation of the entire area east of a north-south route running along the borders of the Jordan Valley, aptly named “the Allon Road.”
If the Allon Plan and the E1 project are both implemented, there will be little left for Palestinians: the E1 settlements would straddle the center of the West Bank, linking up with the settlements in the Jordan Valley and creating an unbroken Israeli continuity from Jerusalem all the way to the border with Jordan. The central hills of Ramallah and Nablus would be encircled, as would the southern regions that include Bethlehem and Hebron. It means the end of the West Bank as a geographic and political unit.
Map idea: Allon Plan of 1967 for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict pic.twitter.com/eQ9WKgyVIA
— Crafting Maps (@maps_crafting) August 6, 2025
Maximum land, minimum Palestinians
The E1 project not only expands Israeli settlements, but also has a demographic component. Tens of thousands of settlers would spill into the region east of Jerusalem, creating a “Greater Jerusalem” area that tramples over neighboring Palestinian communities. It complements previous plans that have isolated those communities and cut them off from Jerusalem, to which they used to serve as the city’s natural and historical extension.
They include the towns of Anata, Aizariyeh, Abu Dis, Issawiyeh, and al-Tour. Maale Adumim is already built on their lands. The gate outside al-Aizariyeh was just installed. Other communities like Shu’fat refugee camp and Kufr Aqab are isolated with checkpoints and concrete walls, excluding tens of thousands of Palestinians from Jerusalem. And infrastructure projects meant to redirect Palestinian traffic away from E1 through a network of tunnels and roads have already been approved. Israel calls these road projects “the Fabric of Life” and “the Sovereignty Road.”
This segregation, coupled with the E1 plan, would change the demographic composition of Jerusalem in favor of an Israeli Jewish majority. It is the embodiment of the old Zionist adage: “maximum land, minimum Arabs.”
It is also, in the words of Smotrich, “Zionism at its best,” because it reflects the settlements’ historic role: as a tool for erasing Palestine and Palestinians as a unified geographic and demographic continuity.
As European countries announce that they intend to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN next week, Israel is making sure that those endorsements will be largely symbolic. The irony is that those same countries have enabled the unchecked expansion of settlements for the past several decades — the E1 plan wouldn’t have been possible without them. That is why Europe’s expected recognition of Palestine at the UN really is just rhetoric to make up for its lack of intervention to end the genocide in Gaza.
Qassam Muaddi is a reporter for Mondoweiss.
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