Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, declared on Thursday that he will proceed with the highly controversial E1 settlement project that “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.
The announcement appears to be a direct response to France, Britain, Canada and Australia announcing their intentions to recognise a Palestinian state at a United Nations summit next month.
Smotrich said on Wednesday that he planned to approve tenders to build more than 3,000 housing units for Israeli settlers, in an area that aims to connect existing settlements in Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank with occupied East Jerusalem.
“Approval of construction plans in E1 buries the idea of a Palestinian state and continues the many steps we are taking on the ground as part of the de facto sovereignty plan that we began implementing with the establishment of the government,” the finance minister said.
“After decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Maale Adumim to Jerusalem. This is Zionism at its best – building, settling, and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”
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Although the E1 construction plan dates back to the late 1990s, its implementation has repeatedly been delayed due to international opposition.
Both the United States and the European Union have warned successive Israeli governments against advancing the project, citing its devastating impact on a prospective two-state solution.
“Since 1999 until now, whenever Israel tried to activate this project, all the American administrations would block it and stop it,” Jamal Juma, coordinator for Stop the Wall campaign, told Middle East Eye.
“Because they know this is one of the most dangerous settlement projects that would totally separate the south of the West Bank from the middle and the north.”
The E1 project seeks to cut off Palestinian communities between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, which includes a historic area known as al-Bariyah, or “the Wilderness of Jerusalem”, which Palestine submitted to Unesco’s tentative list of heritage sites.
“This also means that the main historical route that has existed for more than 3,000 years existed – the road Jesus took from Jericho to Jerusalem – is going to be totally closed for the Palestinians,” said Juma.
The isolation of East Jerusalem from parts of the West Bank will force Palestinians to take lengthy detours to travel between several cities and towns.
The plan has been likened to fragmenting occupied Palestine into “Bantustans”, a reference to Black-only ghettos created across apartheid South Africa.
“Hebron and Bethlehem will become another Gaza – a strip isolated from the West Bank. Ramallah will be the same,” said Juma.
Israel, Juma added, “started putting the framework for this when they started building the wall. It has been shaping the apartheid system, by isolating the Palestinians from each other, from their lands.”
‘Openly announcing apartheid’
In March, Israel’s political-security cabinet approved a separate road for Palestinians south of the E1 area, linking the northern and southern West Bank.
The road was viewed as a preparatory step to expanding settlement construction in the area.
Under the plan, Palestinian traffic would be rerouted away from Route 1 – the main highway connecting Jerusalem to Maale Adumim – reserving it primarily for Israeli use.
“The Israeli government is openly announcing apartheid,” said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Israeli rights group Ir Amim.
“It explicitly states that the E1 plans were approved to ‘bury’ the two-state solution and to entrench de facto sovereignty. An immediate consequence could be the uprooting of more than a dozen Palestinian communities living in the E1 area.”
‘One of the quietest yet most chilling forms of Israeli violence is institutionalised planning violence’
– Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, architect at Bimkom
Tatarsky called on states working to recognise a Palestinian state to “understand that Israel is undeterred by diplomatic gestures or condemnations”, and to therefore take “concrete action”.
“Israel repeatedly uses planning and construction as weapons to seize land and displace villages,” said Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, an architect at Bimkom, an Israeli human rights group bringing together planners and architects.
“In the E1 area, one of the quietest yet most chilling forms of Israeli violence is institutionalised planning violence.”
Around 700,000 Israeli settlers live in roughly 300 illegal settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, all of which have been built since Israel seized the territories in the 1967 Middle East war.
Under international law, settlement construction in an occupied territory is illegal.
Smotrich and other Israeli figures have repeatedly spoken of the “sovereignty plan”, referring to the formal annexation of parts of the West Bank through changing the reality on the ground.
Juma said that all of this forms part of Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
“Part of this plan is ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip totally, and that’s what the genocide is doing,” he said. “In the West Bank, the settlers are spearheading these plans,” he added.
“This year, for example, for the olive season, we expect it’s going to be a bloody season. People will rarely be able to go to their fields in the middle of these fascist, terrorist settler gangs shooting at the farmers.”
