Netanyahu eyes chunks of West Bank
Israeli premier courts right-wing voters with expansionist promise
Benjamin Netanyahu has announced he will annex a large swathe of the occupied West Bank if he wins next week’s Israeli election, a move that could shatter any lingering hopes of creating a future Palestinian state.
The Israeli prime minister said if he is re-elected on Tuesday he would move quickly to annex part of the Jordan Valley, which forms a strategic strip of land bordering Jordan and constitutes about a third of the West Bank.
The move, if it goes ahead, would force the international community to ask whether there was any possibility of a two-state solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
“I believe we have a unique one-off opportunity to do something for which there is wide consensus to finally create secure, permanent borders for the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said.
“We haven’t had such an opportunity since the Six-Day War [in 1967] and I doubt we will have another opportunity in the next 50 years.”
Netanyahu’s announcement was widely seen within Israel as a pre-election stunt to win over right-wing voters, but many people are left wondering wheThe ther he would seriously follow through with it.
He made promises about annexing parts of the West Bank ahead of the last Israeli election in April and did not follow through. However, those pledges were not as detailed as his plan to take the Lower Jordan Valley.
Netanyahu hinted that US President Donald Trump had given him the green light for the annexation but did not say so explicitly. He said merely that “diplomatic conditions have ripened” for announcing the move.
Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, said that if Netanyahu went ahead “he will have buried any chance for peace for the next 100 years”.
He wants the international community to condemn what he called “the insanity” of the proposal.
There was no immediate comment from the White
House.
Trump has been a strong supporter of Netanyahu and handed him a pre-election gift in March by recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau captured from Syria in 1967.
However, Netanyahu has appeared rattled in the past week by Trump’s apparent willingness to meet Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran.
The US president has said several times that he is open to such a meeting – which would be the first since the 1979 Iranian Revolution – despite Netanyahu’s repeated warnings against negotiating with Iran.
The Israeli premier’s proposed annexation of the Lower Jordan Valley does not include annexing the city of Jericho, and Palestinians in the area already live under Israeli security control when they move between towns.
But at a diplomatic level, the move could cause the relatively moderate Palestinian Authority to give up its hopes of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and empower more extreme factions such as Hamas, which advocates the destruction of Israel.
A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that less than half of Israelis support annexing the Jordan Valley even if such a plan was supported by Trump.