The Israeli Knesset passed a motion supporting the annexation of the West Bank. Here’s what that means.
Qassam MuaddiJuly 25, 2025
The Israeli Knesset passed a resolution on Wednesday supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. The motion, which passed with 71 votes out of 170 in favor, is a non-binding resolution that is considered more of a “declaration of intent” that supports the Israeli government’s ongoing actions to further annexation. The actual authority to carry out the political and legal annexation of the West Bank, however, remains an executive power in the hands of the government.
The vote came a few weeks before the Knesset left for summer recess and a few days before an international conference at the UN to discuss the two-state solution. It also comes a year after the Knesset passed a resolution rejecting a Palestinian state anywhere in historic Palestine.
The annexation of the West Bank has been on the Israeli Knesset and government’s table for years. In 2015, current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich proposed his so-called “decisive plan” for “ending the conflict” by preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state once and for all through the extension of “Israeli sovereignty” over the West Bank.
Smotrich’s plan relies on expanding Israeli illegal settlements and their infrastructure to accommodate one million more Israelis in the West Bank. It also relies on previous Israeli plans for controlling broad swathes of the West Bank, such as the 1971 Allon Plan, the 1983 Drobles Plan, and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2002 separation plan.
The “decisive plan” is based on the same strategy as all previous Israeli settlement and colonization plans — the expansion of settlements in rural and non-urbanized areas, limiting Palestinian urban growth, segregation, and interrupting Palestinian geographic and demographic continuity. The Jordan Valley has a central part in Smotrich’s vision: it wants to lay claim to the entirety of the territory in line with the geographic demarcations the 1971 Allon Plan had placed to ensure a “security” buffer between Israel proper and the border with Jordan.
It’s also based on a plan articulated by Netanyahu in 2019, who proposed to annex the Jordan Valley, also following the Allon demarcations.
All this makes one thing clear: the project of annexing the West Bank is not the product of one government or ideological trend in Israeli politics — it is the product of a decades-long settler colonization policy that has been consistently advocated for by different Israeli governments.
Annexation is already happening
While annexation has not yet been enshrined into Israeli law, Israeli policy on the ground has led to what amounts to a de fact annexation of the West Bank. After October 7, 2023, Israel accelerated its settlement expansion in the West Bank at unprecedented rates, approving in July 2024 the largest land grab for Israeli colonization in three decades. It later approved 22 settlements, many of them new, while legalizing settler outposts. Israeli settler violence also skyrocketed, displacing dozens of Palestinian rural communities and imposing de facto Israeli control over large parts of the West Bank, especially in the Jordan Valley’s strategic areas.
Palestinian cartographer and expert on settlements Khalil Tafakji says that “annexation is already happening.
“The vote in the Knesset doesn’t change much on the ground,” Tafakji told Mondoweiss. “The end-game of annexation on the ground would not include the Palestinian population, but a maximum amount of land with a minimum number of Palestinians on it.”
Also read: Israel is changing the legal system governing the West Bank to accelerate annexation: report.
Tafakji explains that what Israeli annexation will probably look like is that the main demographic concentrations of Palestinians would be isolated to the West Bank’s major cities, turning them into crowded reserves with no space for growth or geographic contiguity. The rest of the Palestinian land in the West Bank — such as rural areas and Area C, which comprises over 60 percent of the territory — would be taken over by Israel. “This means emptying and destroying the Palestinian countryside,” Tafakji says.
According to Tafakji, this policy “is already being implemented on a daily basis and at an accelerated rate.”
“What the vote at the Knesset is meant to be, in my opinion, is a way of gauging the international reaction, as advance preparation for advancing annexation up to the point that it is made official by the Israeli government,” Tafakji adds.
Tafakji believes that the West Bank is “central in the Zionist ideological paradigm,” which remains consistent across the Israeli political spectrum. “It is true for the right, the center, and the so-called left,” he says. “This is evident in the fact that the motion received 71 votes in favor, while the right-wing coalition only has 61, which means that ten votes came from the other parties.”
Jamal Jumaa, the coordinator of the grassroots Stop the Wall campaign against Israeli settlements, believes Israel doesn’t need to gauge the international community’s reactions. “If the international community is allowing mass starvation in Gaza, there is no reason to believe that it would oppose an annexation vote in the Knesset,” Jumaa says. “This is another step in the gradual consecration of the idea of annexation in the minds of Palestinians.”
Jumaa explains that Israel wants annexation to normalize the reality of annexation for Palestinians. “They want Palestinians to get gradually accustomed to it, and maybe to instill defeatism and resignation among Palestinians due to the lack of an international response.”
“Annexation is a daily process that is violent and aggressive,” Jumaa adds. “It is happening before the eyes of the entire world. Palestinians know it, yet they resist and remain on their land to the last breath.”
“Palestinians do everything they can, but it is upon the rest of the world to respond and take a concrete stand to reject and stop Israeli annexation,” Jumaa stresses.