Even as it is enmeshed in a multi-front war in the Middle East, Israel is busy creating facts on the ground in the West Bank to ensure that a Palestinian state is never established.
Several days ago, an Israeli government agency, the Civil Administration, allotted 148 acres of land for Nahal Heletz, which will be the first Jewish settlement to be built in the West Bank since 2017.
Southwest of Jerusalem and west of Bethlehem, Nahal Heletz still needs to acquire building permits and submit zoning plans before construction can begin. Typically, this bureaucratic process can take years, but what is important here is that a precedent has been set.
For years, the Israeli government has allowed existing settlements to be expanded, but now, in a significant break with the past, it is permitting an entirely new settlement to be constructed.
This development, a sharp slap in the face of a two-state solution, is taking place at a particularly fraught moment.
Israel is fighting a war in the Gaza Strip, conducting a low-intensity conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, fending off missile and drone attacks from the Houthis in Yemen and Islamic forces in Iraq and Syria, and girding for a retaliatory strike by Iran to avenge the assassination of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
Israel, too, is in the midst of trying to negotiate a hostage/prisoner accord with Hamas through the mediation efforts of the United States, Qatar and Egypt.
Although its plate is full, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government is continuing to expand Israel’s presence in the West Bank and thereby undermining the chances of reaching a fair agreement that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to coexist in peace.
Nahal Heletz will be built on land that belongs to Battir, a Palestinian village known for its agricultural stone terraces. In 2014, UNESCO designated Battir as a world heritage site.
Beyond its problematic location, Nahal Heletz is nothing less than a land grab, expressly designed to shatter the Palestinians’ territorial contiguity in this area and thereby obliterate the possibility of Palestinian statehood.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Nahal Heletz’s mastermind, has been candid about his objective. Describing the plan as a “historic moment,” he said it will help connect Jerusalem to the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank.
A West Bank settler himself and an ardent champion of the settlement movement, Smotrich said, “No anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism will stop the continued development of the settlements. We will continue to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state, and establish facts on the ground. This is my life’s mission.”
Smotrich’s scheme, fully supported by Netanyahu’s government, is counter-productive inasmuch as it will doom the prospect of a two-state solution, which is in Israel’s long-range strategic interest. Without one, Israel will be locked into an endless armed struggle with the Palestinians, whose desire for statehood is legitimate. In the absence of a two-state solution, Israel will constantly have to live by the sword and Israelis will be in constant danger.
In the latest example of the Palestinian nationalist violence that periodically erupts in the West Bank, Gidon Peri, a security guard, was killed in a terrorist attack at an industrial park near the settlement of Kedumim on August 18. Peri, 38, was attacked by a Palestinian assailant with a hammer.
Such unsettling incidents have led many Israelis to grow wary of a two-state solution. This is understandable from an emotional point of view. But if Israel is to prosper and survive as a Jewish state in an Arab sea, it will have to make allowances for Palestinian statehood within the framework of an iron-clad deal that ensures Israel’s security.
Nahal Heletz works against that vision.