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All Likud Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex Entire West Bank This Month
The 15 ministers said that Israel's "strategic partnership, backing, and support of the U.S. and President Donald Trump" make this a "propitious time" to formally steal most of Palestine.
Jul 02, 2025
All 15 Israeli government members representing Likud on Wednesday urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who leads the right-wing party—to annex the entire West Bank of Palestine before the end of the Knesset's summer session on July 27, citing support from U.S. President Donald Trump.
The ministers, along with Likud Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, sent a letter to Netanyahu asserting that "this is the time to approve in government a decision to apply sovereignty" over Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem.
"Following the state of Israel's historic achievements in the face of Iran's Axis of Evil and its sympathizers, the task must be completed and the existential threat from within must be eliminated, to prevent another massacre in the heart of the country," the letter argues, referring to the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, in which the United States intervened by bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
"The strategic partnership, backing, and support of the U.S. and President Donald Trump have made it a propitious time to move forward with it now, and ensure Israel's security for generations," the ministers said. "The October 7 massacre proved that the doctrine of settlement blocs and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the remaining territory is an existential danger to Israel. It's time for sovereignty."
Asked during a Wednesday press briefing for reaction on the ministers' call to annex the West Bank, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce replied, "I think that is specifically something that the White House would be able to answer for you, but I also know that our position regarding Israel... is that we stand with Israel and its decisions and how it views its own internal security."
Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington, D.C. next week to meet with Trump, despite an International Criminal Court warrant for the Israeli leader's arrest for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and forced starvation.
I asked State Dept spox Bruce about Israeli minister’s call to annex the occupied West Bank — she referred me to the WH, saying the US "stand with Israel and its decisions.”
I followed up asking if the two-state solution remains US policy, she said Trump is “realistic… Gaza is… pic.twitter.com/GdtN0tTDdy
— Rabia İclal Turan (@iclalturan) July 2, 2025
Palestinians and their defenders warned during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle that a victoriousTrump might lift the few guardrails the Biden administration had placed on Israel and unleash Netanyahu to seize all of Palestine. The goal of Israel's far right is expansion of Israeli territory to include what proponents call "Greater Israel," which is based on biblical boundaries that stretched from Africa to Turkey to Mesopotamia.
Netanyahu has repeatedly displayed maps showing the Middle East without Palestine, all of whose territory is shown as part of Israel. However, annexation had previously been most closely associated with far-right figures outside Likud like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of Jewish Power.
Following Trump's reelection last November, Smotrich said that "the year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
"The only way to remove the threat of a Palestinian state from the agenda is to apply Israeli sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria," he continued. "I have no doubt that President Trump, who showed courage and determination in his decisions during his first term, will support the state of Israel in this move."
Smotrich praised Wednesday's letter, declaring he'll be ready to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank as soon as Netanyahu "gives the order," according to The Times of Israel.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin, one of the Likud members who signed the letter, said Wednesday: "I think that this period, beyond the current issues, is a time of historic opportunity that we must not miss. The time for sovereignty has come, the time to apply sovereignty. My position on this matter is firm, it is clear."
Israel occupied the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai but unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in 1980 while keeping control of the rest of the West Bank and Golan Heights. Although Israel dismantled settlements and withdrew troops from Gaza in 2005, it is still considered an occupier under international law and its conduct during the current invasion, bombardment, and siege of the coastal enclave is the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case.
Since 1967, Israel has steadily seized more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank while building and expanding Jewish-only settlements there. Settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to around 770,000 today. Settlers often attack Palestinians and their property, including in deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into leaving so their land can be stolen. In recent weeks, Israeli settlers have attacked Israel Defense Forces soldiers they view as standing in their way and Palestinians alike in the West Bank.
From 1978 until new guidelines were announced by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the first Trump administration, the U.S. State Department also considered Israel's settlements to be "inconsistent with international law."
In July 2024, the ICJ found Israel's occupation of Palestine to be an illegal form of apartheid that must be ended as soon as possible. The tribunal also said that Israeli settler colonization of the West Bank amounts to annexation, also a crime under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
As the world's attention is focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed upward of 950 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 2023, including at least 200 children, while wounding thousands more, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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Palestine And Its Metaphors
Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Jun 06, 2025
Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.
Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.
So too with nations. So too with Palestine.
Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.
Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.
Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.
We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.
It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.
Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.
The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.
But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.
Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.
They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.
But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.
Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.
Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.
Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.
The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.
It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.
The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.
Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.
Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.
This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.
Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.
To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.
Palestine remembers.
The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.
To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.
Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.
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Outrage After Israeli Occupation Forces Shoot Live Rounds at Foreign Diplomats in West Bank
Among those shot at were representatives of three nations that threatened "concrete actions" if Israel doesn't end its assault and siege on Gaza and others that support a genocide case against the country.
May 21, 2025
Israeli occupation forces fired what they called "warning shots" at a large delegation of international diplomats visiting the besieged Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Wednesday, an incident many critics said was an attempt to intimidate countries that just two days earlier issued an ultimatum to stop annihilating Gaza and others that have joined a genocide case against Israel.
Palestinian officials were briefing a group of more than 20 diplomats about the crisis in the illegally occupied West Bank—where Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians including hundreds of children since October 2023 while pushing ahead with massive land theft and colonization—when they came under fire.
According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the delegation "deviated" from the route approved by Israeli occupation authorities "and entered an area where they were not authorized to be," prompting Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to fire "warning shots to distance them away."
"The IDF regrets the inconvenience caused," the ministry added.
Israeli soldiers intentionally fired at a delegation of about 30 Arab & EU diplomats, ambassadors and consuls, visiting Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank. Israel claims "it was an accident" and that they fired "warning shots" because they "felt in danger". Israel was trying to intimidate them.
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— Anonymous ( @youranoncentral.bsky.social) May 21, 2025 at 6:06 AM
Israeli media reported IDF troops fired shots in the air. However, video footage of the incident appears to show soldiers aiming their guns and firing straight ahead in the direction of the diplomats as they scrambled for cover. Israeli officials have often been caught lying about the actions of IDF troops in Palestine.
The delegation included diplomats from the European Union and countries including Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, India, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
On Monday, three of those countries—France, the United Kingdom, and Canada—issued a rare joint statement condemning Operation Gideon's Chariots, the ongoing Israeli campaign to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population.
On Tuesday, the U.K. announced it is suspending negotiations with Israel on a free trade agreement, explaining that "it is not possible to advance discussions on a new, upgraded FTA" with a government "that is pursuing egregious policies in the West Bank and Gaza."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza including extermination and forced starvation.
The U.K. additionally sanctioned three far-right Israeli extremists, including settler leader Daniella Weiss, as well as three illegal settlement outposts and two groups "that have supported, incited, and promoted violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank."
Also on Tuesday, European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas—who is the E.U.'s foreign policy chief—said the 27-nation bloc would review its political and economic agreement with Israel in light of the "catastrophic" situation in Gaza.
Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, and Turkey have either joined or expressed support for the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice—which last year found that Israel's 58-year occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must be ended as soon as possible.
Israel's 592-day assault and siege on Gaza has left more than 189,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and over 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned what it called Wednesday's "heinous crime" against the diplomats.
"The delegation was undertaking an official mission to observe and assess the humanitarian situation and document the ongoing violations perpetrated by the occupying forces against the Palestinian people," the ministry said. "This deliberate and unlawful act constitutes a blatant and grave breach of international law and of the fundamental principles of diplomatic relations as enshrined in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations."
Kallas said Wednesday that "any threats on diplomats' lives are unacceptable."
"Israel is also a signatory to the Vienna Convention, I mean the obligation to guarantee the security of all foreign diplomats," Kallas noted. "We definitely call on Israel to investigate this incident and also hold accountable [those] who are responsible for this."
The governments of other countries whose diplomats were targeted on Wednesday condemned the incident, with some, including France and Italy, summoning their Israeli ambassadors.
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