Should Israel Annex the West Bank?
IN THE COMING MONTHS, ISRAEL IS expected to apply its civilian law and administration to the 30 percent of Judea and Samaria (or the “West Bank”) that President Donald Trump’s recently unveiled peace plan anticipates remaining with Israel after a final peace agreement.
One might expect that Israel’s plan would be hailed for advancing peace and the equal rights of Israelis and Palestinians alike. But the more common response of many so-called experts has been to distort the facts and preemptively condemn Israel. Across platforms, “experts” fret over what they call “Israeli annexation.”
As I explained in my 2014 book The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, Israel cannot “annex” any part of Judea and Samaria. Annexation is an act under which a state imposes its sovereignty over another state’s territory.
The state of Israel has sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria by force of its declaration of independence issued 72 years ago on May 14, 1948. With its declaration of independence, together with Britain’s surrender of the Mandate it had been granted by the League of Nations to reconstitute the ancient Jewish national home, Israel became the
