November 15, 2024
By Nasser Kandil
• U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has previously endorsed expanding the boundaries of the territories annexed by the occupying entity from the West Bank, including settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. He has remarked that “Israel” is too small and must extend its borders.
• Trump’s designated ambassador to the entity, Mike Huckabee, has openly denied the existence of something called the “West Bank,” aligning with the settlers’ extremist terminology, referring to it as “Judea and Samaria”.
• Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, has revived the discussion on imposing sovereignty over the West Bank under Trump’s administration. This debate mirrors articles in the entity’s media during the occupying army’s operations in the West Bank. At that time, it was suggested that any potential withdrawal from Gaza should coincide with establishing complete control over the West Bank and legally incorporating it into the entity. The only acceptable solution, from the settlers’ perspective, is to recognize Gaza as a Palestinian “state” while considering the West Bank an integral part of the entity – a strategic objective of the settler movement and essential for maintaining Netanyahu’s coalition government.
• Annexing the West Bank will not alter the brutality of occupation against Palestinians, yet it signifies a new political, diplomatic, and legal era: the end of the Oslo Accords, the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority and its security apparatus, and the termination of Jordan’s administrative oversight of Jerusalem. This dramatic unravelling of the Oslo framework signals the end of a thirty-year illusion of negotiations and the notion of coexistence with an increasingly brutal entity.
• One unintended outcome of this aggressive shift is a rare opportunity to achieve Palestinian unity under the banner of inevitable resistance. With no hope of preserving the Palestinian national identity or realising a Palestinian state without resistance, a unified stance is essential. All Palestinian factions must rally under this cause to ensure even the minimum rights. Will the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank awaken to this reality?
