The Smotrich Plan: This Is How You Build One State
Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel, August 16
We Israelis know almost nothing about the ideological and tectonic changes unfolding among Palestinians in the West Bank. The Israeli media, preoccupied with security threats and the daily fires of conflict, ignores the subtleties, flattening everything into a single dimension: For us, the residents of the West Bank are one indistinguishable entity—the enemy.
Seven years ago, during a distant peace initiative—yes, there once were such things—I had the chance to meet a group of young Palestinian men and women in Ramallah. What I discovered startled me. I had not realized how profound the disgust was toward Abu Mazen, accused of corruption, cronyism, suppressing freedoms, and clinging to power by illegitimate means. Nor did I know that these young Palestinians, who endure the indignities of occupation every day, had long abandoned any belief in the vision of two states.
Abu Mazen’s unpopularity is not his doing alone; it has been sharpened by the Israeli government, which has offered him little in the way of tangible political or territorial gains. Stripped of achievements, Palestinian youth are channeling their hopes elsewhere: to the right, Islamic and nationalist movements such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the armed factions of Fatah; to the left, secular-Marxist groups like the Popular Front and the Democratic Front.
When I asked Lina, a peace activist from Ramallah, what path young Palestinians should take, she laughed: “We don’t have to do anything. You’re doing the work for us. Keep it up, and soon dividing the land will be impossible. That is my hope, and that is my comfort.”
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This week, the Knesset is expected to approve Bezalel Smotrich’s vision by advancing the long-discussed E1 plan, carving a wedge through the West Bank with over 3,400 housing units, along with commercial and public infrastructure, effectively splitting its northern and southern halves. More such projects will inevitably follow.
“This reality,” Smotrich declared, “finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state.” He is right. But perhaps it buries us as well.
By 2050, demographic forecasts suggest more than 20 million people will live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, over half of them Palestinians. Without partition, Israel is condemned to an eternal future as an occupying power, surviving by the sword. And that is the optimistic scenario. The alternative, darker futures require little imagination—one only needs to take a drone’s view from above and witness the jagged fault line between river and sea.
Yet Lina’s vision, like that of a small but notable number of Palestinians and Jews, is something else entirely: Once separation becomes impossible, she imagines a mass peace movement of both peoples, building together a state for all its citizens. “Good luck,” she says, with equal parts irony and conviction.
We now stand at a paradoxical juncture, where the two extremes dream of the same geography. One envisions a civic state beyond religion and ethnicity, where Jews, Arabs, Christians, and others live side by side in equality, perhaps even sharing hummus as the cliché goes. The other envisions an entrenched apartheid, where survival is predicated on endless conflict, at least until redemption arrives. If it were not so grave, it would almost be comic.
The rest—the overwhelming majority of Israelis—remain suspended in the middle, skeptical of human nature yet yearning for something else: not necessarily a white sail of salvation on the horizon, but at least the trembling possibility that someday it might appear through the waves. They still want to believe that a future exists here that does not revolve around war, killing, and mourning.
For them, and for all of us, the government’s plan to eliminate the vision of separation should be nothing less than shocking. It is not a policy; it is the continuation of disaster and the deliberate destruction of hope.
Daniella London Dekel (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
