As several of Israel’s Western allies recognise a Palestinian state, Israel has accelerated plans for settlements that it hopes will make the two-state solution impossible.
Home to 2.7 million Palestinians, the Israeli-occupied West Bank has long been at the heart of plans for a future nation existing alongside Israel.
The model is known as the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and would also include Gaza. It is backed by most countries around the world.But the construction of settlements for Israelis has reduced the land left for Palestinians, cutting their towns and cities off from each other.
Approval to build settlements has accelerated rapidly under the current Israeli government, which includes vehemently pro-settler parties that want to annex the West Bank to Israel.
A Reuters review of settlement growth in the West Bank over several decades - mapping out the expansion of areas under Israeli control and exploring data showing the impact on daily life for Palestinians - reveals how deeply settlements and other measures have fragmented the territory and why, unless they are removed, an independent state seems increasingly distant.
The expansion of settlements and the roads and security infrastructure that support them interferes with the daily lives of millions of Palestinians.
The fractured connections between Palestinian communities impede a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank.
“There will never be a Palestinian state,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September.
Netanyahu was signing an expansion plan at a settlement for Israelis called Maale Adumim, where Israel plans to build thousands more houses with the explicit goal of dividing the West Bank.
“This place is ours,” Netanyahu said.
While the world’s attention has been on the war in Gaza, the situation in the West Bank may have a longer-term impact on the future of a decades-long conflict that destabilises the entire Middle East.
Western powers Australia, Britain, Canada and Portugal formally recognised a Palestinian state on September 21, a reaction to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Most of the U.N.’s 193 member states already recognised Palestine and several others now plan to do so, a shift criticized by Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States. Netanyahu says a Palestinian state would be a security threat to Israel.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Varsen Aghabekian Shahin said the countries’ recognition was an irreversible step that brought Palestinian independence and sovereignty closer.
But it will take more than recognition to save the two-state solution.
Israeli settlements have grown in size and number since Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 war. They stretch deep into the territory with a system of roads and other infrastructure under Israeli control, further slicing up the land.
Palestinians want their capital to be East Jerusalem, which Israel also captured in 1967, then annexed. Israel has declared Jerusalem as its own undivided capital, although only a handful of countries recognise it as such.
In July, the United Nations’ highest court said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was illegal and its settlements should be quickly withdrawn, the latest call for an end to the occupation since a U.N. Security Council resolution in 1967.
There is no sign of that happening. By linking up with other Israel-controlled areas, the new settlement block approved by Netanyahu, also known as E1, would go still further, cutting the West Bank in half and severing it from East Jerusalem. Some Israeli ministers are now pressing for formal annexation of the West Bank in response to allies recognising Palestine.
The E1 initiative will displace 2,500 residents of Bedouin communities from the area where the building work will go ahead, according to the Palestinian government. The largely pastoral communities say the construction of a road to the new housing will additionally cut them off from the nearby Palestinian town of Al-Eizariya, where their children go to school.
“If they build that road, it will separate us from Al-Eizariya entirely,” said Mohammad al-Jahalin, a resident of the Bedouin community of Jabal al-Baba.
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