U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters yesterday that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, a step that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has considered in response to attempts to recognize a Palestinian state.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told reporters during a press event in the Oval Office, as he signed executive orders on a variety of subjects.
The West Bank, known to Israelis as Judea and Samaria, includes Palestinian Arab towns and farms, as well as Jewish settlements and historic sites. It was seized by Jordan in 1948, as Arab armies attempted to destroy Israel after it declared independence. Jordan expelled Jews from the territory but never created a Palestinian state there. Israel took the territory in the 1967 war, after Jordan — ignoring Israeli pleas — attacked Israel.
Palestinians have since claimed the West Bank as part of what they want to be their state, along with Gaza. But Jews have also settled there, reclaiming old towns and establishing new communities. There is support in Israel for annexing the territory, for security and ideological reasons. If Israel were to annex the West Bank, but not Gaza, it would still have an overwhelmingly Jewish population. But annexation is a red line for the Arab world; the Abraham Accords came about after Netanyahu backed off an annexation threat in 2020.
In recent weeks, after several western nations said they would recognize a Palestinian state, despite the war and despite fact that Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages, Israel began to consider responses. Netanyahu authorized the construction of communities east of Jerusalem that would deny any future Palestinian state territorial contiguity in the West Bank, and also considered annexing the territory to Israel outright, again.
But President Trump told Arab nations on the sidelines of the United Nations this week that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, as a way to win their support for a peace proposal in the war in Gaza. Trump evidently hopes to use annexation as a bargaining chip again, to engineer a further regional accord.
Netanyahu is set to address the United Nations on Friday, and will meet with President Trump in the White House on Monday. He may accept the loss of annexation in return for U.S. support in Gaza, where Israel hopes to finish off Hamas in a final military offensive, given that Hamas has refused to release the hostages.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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