Bezalel Smotrich spoke with intent: to kill the idea of Palestine. Standing alongside the Yesha Council, Maale Adumim’s mayor and the messianic settler lobby, Israel’s far-right finance minister declared that building more than 3,000 new homes in the E1 corridor would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” That phrase, taken literally, strips away decades of diplomatic theatre. There is no peace process to sabotage, no Oslo framework left to hollow out – only the open-air grave of a future that Israel’s political establishment has already pronounced dead.
The E1 strip between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim has been the doomsday clause in any two-state map for thirty years. Pushing concrete into that corridor doesn’t just obstruct Palestinian territorial contiguity; it strangles it. A Ramallah cut off from Bethlehem by an Israeli security archipelago is not a state; it’s a collection of disconnected Bantustans, surveilled, blockaded and at the mercy of armed colonial militias. The polite term “settlement” (repeated by the BBC with its standard balance of false equivalence) smooths over the fact that this is annexation. It is designed to make Palestinian sovereignty geographically impossible and politically irrelevant.
“There is no peace process to sabotage—only the open-air grave of a future Israel’s political establishment has already pronounced dead.”
God as final military order
Smotrich was explicit: this is “Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.” That sovereignty, he says, comes not from international law but from God. The religious claim is no accident; it elevates the theft of land to a divine mandate, pre-empting any diplomatic argument with an article of faith. In the dialectic of occupation, God becomes the final military order: the legitimising force behind bulldozers, roadblocks and armed raids. The E1 plan is the theological arm of the same project Gaza is suffering under military siege. We see, one land, one strategy, two speeds of erasure.
“In the dialectic of occupation, God becomes the final military order: the legitimising force behind bulldozers, roadblocks and armed raids.”
Occupation without euphemism
International law is clear: transferring an occupier’s population into occupied territory is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. That makes these “settlers” many of them armed and operating with military escort, not benign pioneers but an illegal occupying force. The BBC, like much of the Western press, frames this as “one of the most contentious issues” between Israel and the Palestinians, as if it were a contractual dispute. But the reality is starker: this is state-backed colonisation, designed and executed to ensure Palestinians remain a subject people under permanent domination.
The recruitment machinery
The myth is that settlers simply “move in.” In reality, they are recruited, incentivised, and placed through a state-orchestrated system designed to create “facts on the ground.”
- Domestic relocation: Many new settlers already live inside Israel’s 1948 borders. They are drawn east by cheap mortgages, subsidised land, municipal tax breaks, and generous state investment in infrastructure, such as “bypass roads” that connect them directly to Israeli cities while avoiding Palestinian towns altogether. For Jerusalem’s priced-out middle class, E1 will offer larger homes at lower cost, with the political bonus of “strengthening sovereignty.”
- Diaspora recruitment: Organisations like Nefesh B’Nefesh court North American Jews, including from Queens and Brooklyn, with cash grants, tax exemptions and settlement placements. Post-2010 migration from France and the UK has been funnelled into West Bank neighbourhoods, while immigration from Russia and Ukraine (including post-2022 arrivals) has often been channelled into settlements under “absorption” schemes.
- Ideological placement: Religious-nationalist families committed to “redeeming the land” are targeted for frontline settlements like E1. Those moving for economic reasons still serve the same purpose: swelling the settler population, normalising colonisation, and creating a voting bloc opposed to any territorial compromise.
Behind it all stand the Yesha Council, the Amana housing cooperative, and the World Zionist Organisation’s Settlement Division, nominally rural developers, in reality the logistical arm of annexation.
The politics of timing
The announcement comes just as more states (including Britian and France) prepare to recognise a Palestinian state. Smotrich’s reply was blunt: “There will be no state to recognise.” It is a direct challenge not just to Palestinian sovereignty but to any external attempt to impose it.
The freeze on E1 for two decades was a tactical pause, not a change of course. With the fig leaf of the “peace process” gone, Israel no longer even pretends to negotiate. It just removes and builds. Recognition, meanwhile, is a diplomatic gesture without teeth: it does not force Israel to halt construction, dismantle settlements, end the occupation, or grant Palestinians sovereignty in practice. No sanctions, no arms embargoes, no withdrawal of trade preferences, only the symbolic comfort of a flag at the UN.
Israel’s strategy assumes (correctly so far) that Western recognition will stop short of material consequences. The bulldozers can keep working because the price for defying the international community is rhetorical, not structural. And once E1 is built, the geography will speak louder than any foreign parliament: there will be no contiguous Palestinian territory to recognise, no matter how many capitals pass resolutions to say otherwise.
The liberal mirage
Peace Now insists “the only way to defeat Hamas” is to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This liberal formula treats Palestinian sovereignty as an instrument of Israeli security, not a right in itself. It assumes that an occupying power which has repeatedly shown its contempt for international law will be persuaded by “the only solution.” In the dialectic of colonialism, liberalism plays a familiar role: diagnosing the problem correctly (annexation, apartheid, continued bloodshed) but prescribing a remedy that cannot exist without dismantling the very power that sustains the colonial order.
One policy, two temporalities
The Palestinian foreign ministry called the plan “an extension of crimes of genocide, displacement and annexation.” These are not rhetorical flourishes. Annexation without consent, enforced by armed settlers and the military, is displacement. Displacement carried out with intent to destroy the political, social and cultural life of a people meets the threshold of genocidal practice. Gaza is the accelerated form (bombs, famine, and disease). The West Bank is the gradual one, carried out in cement, checkpoints and closed military zones. The same policy, two temporalities.
“Gaza is the accelerated form (bombs, famine, disease). The West Bank is the gradual one, carried out in cement, checkpoints, and closed military zones.”
Making the state listen
Smotrich’s candour is the most dangerous part of his politics. When a senior Israeli minister says “there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise,” he isn’t just burying the two-state solution; he’s issuing a doctrine of permanent occupation. The logic is circular and self-reinforcing: Palestinians are denied sovereignty because they do not have sovereignty, and any attempt to achieve it is proof they must be denied it.
The E1 project is not a misstep in the peace process. It is the process, the slow, deliberate incorporation of Palestinian land into a Greater Israel, underwritten by religious nationalism, enforced by military power, and shielded by Western diplomatic cover.
If the international community wished to stop it, the means are there: suspend trade preferences, end military aid and arms sales, impose targeted (and continued) sanctions on settler leaders and construction firms, ban goods produced in settlements, and back cases at the International Criminal Court. Such measures would make annexation carry a tangible cost. But until that happens, the settlers will keep coming (from West Jerusalem, from Queens, from Paris, from Moscow) and E1 will be the burial marker for the Palestinian state that might have been.
