Trump, the West Bank and annexation: Israel in the driver's seat
Trump, the West Bank and annexation: Israel in the driver's seat
The Trump administration has been greenlighting a slow rolling, de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank as Israel goes on attack in more visible arenas like Gaza, Syria and recently Qatar.
Now, as European countries supported by Saudi Arabia prepare to recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly this month, the US faces a test of its unparalleled support for Israel in the occupied territories: whether to acquiesce to, and recognise officially, Israeli annexation.
One US and one western official briefed on recent discussions who spoke with Middle East Eye said Israel could officially annex the Jordan Valley, a wide swath of territory bordering Jordan, in response to the moves at the UN.
The US official told MEE that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specific areas in the occupied West Bank that Israel might officially annex this week, but didn’t say what the US attitude was.
“I'd say, anything that was on the table in the 'Deal of the Century' for annexation by Israel is fair game,” the western official told MEE. “Whether the US shrugs at that or recognises [Israeli] sovereignty is another matter.”
The Deal of the Century was a failed plan drafted by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during the first Trump term, and billed as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It earmarked vast swaths of the occupied West Bank - including the Jordan Valley - as sovereign Israeli land and envisioned an indefensible rump of the territory into a demilitarised pseudo-Palestinian statelet.
Rubio publicly refused to comment on how the US would respond to an Israeli move to annex the occupied territory, where about three million Palestinians live.
Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, told MEE that it is in keeping with how the US has put Israel in the driver's seat across the Middle East, with a few exceptions.
“The answer to how does the administration view ‘X’ issue is almost always how the Israeli government views 'X.’ The policy being pursued in the West Bank is identical to what the Israeli government wants them (the Trump administration) to pursue,” Elgindy said.
The Palestinian Authority, settlements and Trump
In the 1970s and 1980s, some US administrations flirted with parts of the territory combining with Jordan to become a Palestinian state. But those plans were abandoned in the early 1990s after King Hussein of Jordan - the father of King Abdullah II - formally renounced any claim to the territory.
Israel captured and occupied the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt after the 1967 war.
Subsequent US administrations then promoted a two-state solution that envisioned the occupied West Bank as the future cradle of a Palestinian state. The Oslo Accords gave them a partner to work with. They established the Palestinian Authority out of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), which waged a decades-long violent struggle against Israel.
In return for limited self-government in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the PLO recognised Israel and renounced armed resistance. The occupied West Bank was then divided into zones called Areas A, B, and C, where the PA was supposed to exercise various levels of self-governance until a Palestinian state was created.
Now, Israel is launching attacks across the occupied West Bank, in part, to snuff out younger armed resistance groups that chaff at the PA. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements are expanding.
Israel’s construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem soared after Oslo. When the accords were signed, roughly 250,000 settlers lived in the territory. Today, that number is almost 700,000.
The PA has been widely discredited among Palestinians as a corrupt vehicle of the Israeli occupation.
'The administration is opposed to anything political, but the PA has a role..to keep Palestinians in check'
- Khaled Elgindy, Georgetown University
The Trump administration’s approach today is in many ways a continuation of its first term.
Although Trump’s Republican and Democratic predecessors never took Israel to task on the settlement building, Trump provided unprecedented support for expansionist Israeli policies.
In 2019, he recognised Israel’s annexation of the contested Golan Heights - a strategic territory that Israel used as a launchpad in 2024 to invade southern Syria after the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad.
Kushner loathed the PA and attempted to stifle any US cooperation with the body, according to former US officials in government at the time. Trump also signed a law that indirectly led to the severing of US security assistance to the PA. Trump capped those policies by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, a move that is contested under international law.
Some analysts say Trump has been softer to the PA this time around.
“They (the administration) are not doing what they did in Trump 1.0 - which was declared political and economic war on the PA, but they have also taken away from Abbas a premier performance in New York,” Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator, told MEE.
The Trump administration has imposed a full visa ban on officials in the PA, including blocking President Mahmoud Abbas from attending the UN General Assembly this month.
'If we were on the cusp of a big Israeli annexation with US support, you’d hear more from the Jordanians'
- Arab official
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, met this summer with Abbas’s deputy and likely successor, Hussein al-Sheikh.
The visit caught some by surprise because Huckabee is an evangelical Christian Zionist who has denied the existence of a Palestinian identity and advocated for annexation in the past.
Huckabee later told Axios he was concerned about the “collapse” of the Palestinian economy.
“It won't be a winning deal for anyone. It would lead to an escalation and further desperation,” he said.
Experts say the meeting and comments reflected the Israeli intelligence services' long-time view of the PA as a guarantor of their country's security.
“There is a recognition that even if Israel annexes the West Bank, you still need the PA there as long as there are pockets of Palestinians,” Tahini Mustafa, an expert on the PA and Palestinian politics, told MEE.
“Someone needs to police the people Israel doesn’t want to.”
That description places the PA as a local actor to enforce what a growing chorus of human rights experts and scholars say is a two-tiered system of justice in the occupied West Bank, like apartheid-era South Africa.
“The administration is opposed to anything political, but the PA has a role. It is to keep Palestinians in check and pacify the population in the service to Israel. That’s their sole value to the Trump administration,” Elgindy said.
The West Bank and 'America First'
Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank have soared to record levels since the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel. The settlers are protected by the Israeli military during their raids on Palestinian villages and homes. Since the start of this year, at least 11 Palestinians have been killed in settler attacks, with over 696 wounded.
The Trump administration’s acquiescence to Israel’s de facto takeover of the occupied West Bank has at times flown in the face of its declared "America First" approach to foreign policy. In July, settlers beat and shot to death Saif al-Din Musalat, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American man.
'If the aim is to see an expansion of the Abraham Accords at some point, annexation will rule that out'
- Dennis Ross, Former US official
Huckabee condemned the killing, but there has been no effort to penalise Israel either with sanctions, an investigation or the withholding of arms transfers.
If the Trump administration does take notice of the West Bank, experts say it will not be because of American citizens under attack there or the Palestinians, but oil-rich Gulf states.
Analysts and US officials say the Trump administration is still deeply committed to expanding the Abraham Accords - the 2020 agreements Trump brokered through which the UAE, Morocco and Bahrain normalised ties with Israel.
Trump asked Saudi Arabia in public to join the accords, but Riyadh launched a stiff diplomatic effort to prevent any serious discussions of the deal. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says that he will not normalise until Israel ends its genocide in Gaza and there is a viable pathway to a Palestinian state.
“If the aim is to see an expansion of the Abraham Accords at some point, annexation will rule that out,” Dennis Ross, who served as a senior official on the Middle East for Democratic and Republican administrations, told MEE.
The UAE - Israel’s closest Arab partner - warned earlier this month that annexation of the West Bank would be a “red line” for the Abraham Accords.
But in practice, experts briefed by Emirati officials say Abu Dhabi left itself broad leeway to maintain ties.
Miller, now an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and the UAE had used the “guise of annexation” to seal the Abraham Accords.
The UAE, at the time, said it had normalised ties with Israel to prevent annexation, but the UAE’s powerful ambassador to the US, Yosef Otaiba, walked back that commitment just before 7 October 2023.
'Wide latitude'
In Gaza, where Israel is pressing ahead with a devastating assault on Gaza City, and the occupied West Bank, Miller said Trump “has given the Israelis the time and space to control the tactics and strategy”.
Some Arab and US officials tracking Israel’s threat to annex the occupied West Bank say that because Trump has lifted all barriers, it might be in Israel’s interest to just continue with a rapid expansion of settlements and not provoke more controversy by officially annexing the territory. That could suit Trump well, as he looks to salvage ties with the Gulf in the wake of Israel’s unprecedented attack on Hamas in Qatar last week.
“If we were on the cusp of a big Israeli annexation with US support, you’d hear more from the Jordanians. They would start bringing up passports,” one Arab official told MEE. The Hashemite Monarchy has long feared Israel could expel Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to their impoverished kingdom, where Palestinians are already a majority.
So the de facto annexation moves ahead with Trump’s acquiescence. Last week, Netanyahu approved the sweeping E1 plan, which will allow for a massive expansion of settlements through the heart of the occupied West Bank.
The expansion will isolate occupied East Jerusalem and cut off Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank from one another, fragmenting and separating Palestinian cities into what have been compared to “bantustans”, the Black-only ghettos in apartheid South Africa.
Elgindy said even the oil-rich Gulf may not rattle the administration into action. “The US greenlit an Israeli attack on one of its closest Arab allies,” he said, referring to Qatar.
“The Trump administration’s assessment of damaging US relations with the Arab world is not the same as most people. They afford Israel very wide latitude.”
