Nothing new is happening in the West Bank. What's new is that it's hardly being disguised anymore.
While international attention is focused on Gaza (and that's if we're lucky!), the map of the West Bank continues to transform. Not with massive bombings, but with administrative decisions, property registrations, settlement expansions, and new infrastructure. It's a less spectacular policy, but just as decisive.
The measure to register Palestinian lands as Israeli state property is not a legal technicality. It's a declaration of permanence. International law conceives of occupation as temporary. Registering lands as one's own implies acting as if that temporary period has ended. It implies converting control into sovereignty.
For years, annexation was discussed as a future possibility, as the scenario that would unfold if the far right managed to impose its agenda. But annexation has been happening for some time. de facto, in what many have called a 'state reality' rather than a reality of apartheidThe expansion of settlements, territorial fragmentation, and the creation of a dual legal regime were not anomalies. They were pieces of a coherent project.
Reducing everything to October 7th is a gross oversimplification. The devastation of Gaza does not, in itself, explain what is happening in the West Bank. Rather, it is part of a previous logic, sustained for decades: progressive dispossession, fragmentation of Palestinian territory, and the consolidation of irreversible control over most of the land.
Area C, which represents most of the West Bank by virtue of the Oslo Accords that too many yearn for, has been the key space for this transformation. It is where the settlements and effective Israeli control are concentrated. Turning that control into a legally recognized status is a further step in the same direction. It doesn't change the logic; it formalizes it.
The two-state solution continues to be invoked as the diplomatic horizon. But the material viability of that horizon, if it ever existed, depends on the territory. Without continuity, without access to resources, without effective control, the idea of a state becomes an abstraction. Annexation doesn't need to be officially proclaimed if the land has already been irreversibly reorganized.
The international community reacts with predictable condemnations. Without real consequences, these condemnations function almost as part of the scenery and have become one of the pillars of the peace process's theater. The implicit message is clear: the cost is acceptable.
The problem was never just Gaza, nor did it begin in October. Thinking this way allows us to treat each escalation as an isolated episode. Looking at the West Bank today forces us to recognize a more uncomfortable historical continuity. We are not facing a rupture, but rather the consolidation of a colonial project that long ago ceased to be provisional. If nothing changes, it will not be for lack of information, but because of a political decision to observe how a reality on the ground is transformed without altering the relationships that make it possible.
