What the most recent calls for annexation mean when situated against the 8 decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and Apartheid.

Bezalel Smotrich said the quiet part out loud. Israel’s far-right finance minister wants to annex 82 percent of the occupied West Bank, home to three million Palestinians. His reasoning? “The main goal is to remove, once and for all, this idea of a Palestinian state.”

There it is. After two years of genocide in Gaza that has killed over 60,000 Palestinians, after 77 years of dispossession that began with the Nakba, an Israeli government minister has finally admitted what Palestinians have always known: this was never about security. It was always about erasure.

“I have no interest in allowing them to enjoy everything that the State of Israel has to offer,” Smotrich told reporters. “We did not establish this country to make our enemies prosper.” He’s talking about Palestinians living on their own land. Palestinians whose families have tended olive groves for generations. Palestinians whose only crime was being born Palestinian.

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What Occupation Actually Means

People throw around the word “occupation” without understanding what it means in practice. For Palestinians in the West Bank, occupation means waking up every day under Israeli military rule. We have no right to vote in Israel’s elections, yet Israeli soldiers control every aspect of our lives. We are tried in Israeli military courts where the conviction rate is over 99 percent. Our freedom of movement is controlled by a network of over 500 checkpoints and roadblocks.

The drive from my mother’s city of Al-Bireh to Jerusalem should take 20 minutes. The checkpoints often make it take two to three times as long, and there’s the constant possibility that she can be turned away merely for being Palestinian. Israeli soldiers, many of them teenagers, decide whether Palestinians can visit family, go to work, or seek medical care. This is what military occupation looks like.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 – that’s 57 years of military rule over a civilian population. Under international law, this is illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention is crystal clear: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Every Israeli settlement is a war crime. Every settler home built on stolen Palestinian land violates international humanitarian law.

But Israel doesn’t just violate international law – it has created a two-tiered legal system that even apartheid South Africa would envy. In the same territory, Jewish settlers enjoy civilian law, due process, and full civil rights. Palestinians live under military law with no protections. Israeli settlers can move freely between settlements on roads Palestinians are banned from using. They have swimming pools while Palestinian villages have their water cut off. They expand their settlements while Palestinian homes are demolished for lacking permits that are impossible to obtain.

The Settlement Machine

When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, there were around 250,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today there are over 700,000 living in more than 250 settlements. That’s not an accident or an unfortunate side effect – it’s the systematic colonization of Palestinian land under the cover of a “peace process.”

I have watched this colonization my entire life. What I remembered as a child as clusters of illegal houses grew into whole cities besieging Palestinian towns from all sides. Settlers came from Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war and annexed Palestinian land. During Covid-19, settlement construction continued. Nothing stops the settlement machine.

These settlements don’t just steal land – they fragment Palestinian territory into isolated islands. The West Bank has been carved into zones A, B, and C under Oslo. Zone C, under full Israeli control, makes up 60 percent of the West Bank. Palestinians cannot build there, cannot access their agricultural land, cannot develop their communities. Meanwhile, settlements expand daily, eating away at any remaining land where a Palestinian state could exist.

Every settlement is connected by “settler-only” roads that Palestinians cannot use. The separation wall cuts deep into Palestinian land, not following the 1967 border but snaking around settlements to steal more territory. Entire communities are cut off from hospitals, schools, and their own agricultural land. This isn’t security – it’s systematic dispossession.

Legal Fiction and War Crimes

Israel’s entire settlement project violates international law. This isn’t a matter of opinion – it’s established legal fact. The International Court of Justice, the UN Security Council, and every major human rights organization agree: settlements are illegal under international law and constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population into occupied territory. It also prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.” Israel has violated this law systematically for over 50 years.

Settlements are created with the sole purpose of permanently establishing Israeli civilians on occupied land. This is not temporary military presence – it’s permanent colonization. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in Palestinian territory. Building settlements, displacing Palestinians, and transferring Israeli population into occupied territory are all war crimes that can be prosecuted.

But international law means nothing without enforcement. For decades, countries have issued meaningless condemnations while continuing to trade with settlements and provide military aid to Israel. The result is predictable: Israel acts with complete impunity because it faces no consequences for breaking the law.

Annexation: Making the Illegal Legal

Smotrich’s annexation plan wouldn’t change the facts on the ground – it would simply formalize what already exists. Under international law, annexation is acquiring territory by force, which is illegal regardless of whether it’s formally declared. As Amnesty International makes clear: “Annexation is unlawful under international law and is therefore ‘null and void and without international legal effect.'”

Even if Israel annexes the West Bank tomorrow, it would not change the legal status of the territory under international law as occupied, nor remove Israel’s responsibilities as the occupying power. According to Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived of their rights as the result of the occupation nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by any annexation by the Occupying Power of the whole or part of the occupied territory.”

What annexation would do is remove the last pretense that Israel intends to end the occupation. Palestinians would “continue to run their own affairs” on a local level, Smotrich explained, but “the territory would be ours.” Think about that: Palestinians reduced to managing garbage collection while Israel controls everything that matters.

The plan has already received international condemnation. Dozens of UN experts warned that annexation would create “21st century apartheid.” Even Israel’s Arab allies are alarmed. The UAE, which normalized relations with Israel five years ago, called annexation a “red line” that would undermine the Abraham Accords.

The Lie of Oslo

Thirty years ago, the Oslo Accords promised Palestinians a state in exchange for recognizing Israel and abandoning armed resistance. What did we get? The Palestinian Authority became exactly what Israel wanted: a subcontractor for the occupation that coordinates with Israeli forces while providing municipal services and maintaining the fiction of self-governance.

Oslo divided Palestine into three zones and gave limited sovereignty to the PA, but ultimate power remained in Israel’s hands. The West Bank remains under military occupation. Palestinians still face indefinite detention without charge, home demolitions, land confiscation, and settler violence. A drive between Palestinian cities requires navigating checkpoints where teenage soldiers decide our fate.

Far from stopping settlement growth, Oslo enabled Israel to vastly expand its settlement enterprise while the world looked the other way. The “peace process” provided cover for the largest settlement expansion in history. Every settlement built since Oslo is a violation of the agreements Israel signed.

My family was forced to flee during the second intifada. My father watched Israeli soldiers steal his father’s land and turn it into a military checkpoint. My mother was shot at by settlers on her way to work. We didn’t choose to leave Palestine – we fled to survive. That’s what Oslo delivered: more dispossession, more violence, more settlements.

Gaza: The Laboratory

What Israel is doing in Gaza today reveals what it plans for all of Palestine. Gaza is not a state at war with Israel – Gaza is the largest refugee camp on earth. Nearly 250,000 Palestinians expelled during the Nakba in 1948 flooded into Gaza, tripling its population overnight and turning it into a colossal refugee camp.

Israel has waged at least fifteen wars on Gaza since the Nakba. In 1956, Israeli soldiers collected all adult males from Khan Yunis and shot them in the streets, killing at least 520 people. In Rafah, they rounded up men and killed hundreds in cold blood. The Red Cross described it as “scenes of terror.” UN officials warned that Israel’s atrocities amounted to genocide.

The current genocide is the culmination of decades of systematic violence. Israel has killed over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, flattened entire neighborhoods, destroyed hospitals and schools, and displaced over two million people. Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate 84 percent of Gaza and crowded into a shrinking area where survival is impossible.

This is Israel’s vision for Palestinian existence: penned into ever-smaller areas while settlements expand around us, dependent on Israel for basic necessities, living under the constant threat of violence. Gaza shows what “security control” means when Israel has absolute power over a Palestinian population.

International Law Is Dead Without Enforcement

The international community created laws after World War II to prevent exactly what Israel is doing to Palestinians. The Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, the International Court of Justice – all established to ensure that military occupation cannot become permanent colonization, that civilians are protected during conflict, that war crimes are prosecuted.

These laws are meaningless if they’re not enforced. Israel violates international law daily because it faces no consequences. Countries issue statements while continuing to trade with settlements. They provide diplomatic cover while Israel commits war crimes. They fund Israel’s military while it carries out genocide.

Human rights organizations have documented that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid – a crime against humanity. The systematic discrimination, land expropriation, forced displacement, and denial of basic rights all constitute apartheid under international law. Yet the world continues to treat Israel as a normal democratic state rather than an apartheid regime.

Why We Stay

People ask why Palestinians won’t leave. Why don’t we just move somewhere else in the Arab world and start over? The question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what this land means to us.

I was born in Nablus but grew up in the diaspora. Even thousands of miles away, I never stopped feeling connected to Palestinian land. Over the past two decades, I’ve returned regularly, watching settlers steadily encroach on Palestinian land while Israeli soldiers provide protection for theft and violence.

But I also witnessed resistance and defiance. Palestinians setting up water tanks to survive Israeli water cut-offs. Rebuilding homes at night after demolitions. Rushing to help communities when settler raids take place. Growing food in destroyed soil. Teaching children their history in bombed schools.

This is sumud – Palestinian steadfastness. The more Israel tries to make Palestinian life impossible, the more Palestinians find ways to make it possible. We stay because this is our land. The olive trees in our groves are older than most countries. When Israeli settlers burn our trees, they’re not just attacking our livelihood – they’re attacking our identity.

From 1967 to 2013, Israel uprooted about 800,000 Palestinian olive trees. Each destroyed tree represents a family’s history, a connection to land that goes back centuries. Leaving would mean allowing the erasure of our history, our culture, our collective soul.

The Moment of Truth

Smotrich’s annexation plan is not new policy – it’s the logical endpoint of 77 years of systematic dispossession that began with the Nakba. The international community now faces a choice that will define whether international law means anything at all.

The Knesset has already approved a symbolic motion calling for annexation, with lawmakers voting 71-13 in favor. While non-binding, it places annexation on the agenda of future debates. The Palestinian Authority called it “a direct assault on the rights of the Palestinian people” that “undermines the prospects for peace, stability and the two-state solution.”

But the two-state solution is already dead. It was always a fiction designed to manage rather than resolve the Palestinian question. What remains is a choice between equality and apartheid, between justice and erasure.

Even Israel’s allies understand the stakes. The UAE called annexation a “red line.” European countries are recognizing Palestinian statehood. But recognition without action is meaningless. The question is whether the world will finally enforce its own laws or watch them collapse under Israeli impunity.

For Palestinians, the choice is simple. We will not leave. We will not disappear. We are the land, and the land is us. The refugees being slaughtered in Gaza today were created by Israel 77 years ago. We have survived the Nakba, decades of occupation, repeated wars, siege, and now genocide. We will survive this too.

The Nakba’s final chapter is being written before our eyes. But Palestinian sumud is eternal. Israel can annex our land, but it cannot annex our souls. It can destroy our homes, but it cannot destroy our resistance. It can kill our bodies, but it cannot kill our cause.

The olive trees will outlive the settlements built on their roots. The stones of Jerusalem remember every Palestinian child who played in its streets. And the world will remember who stood with justice when it mattered most.

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