Speaker Johnson Calls Illegally Occupied West Bank 'Integral Part' of Israel
"International law is completely unambiguous on this question," said one critic. "What settlers call 'Judea and Samaria' is the legal property of the Palestinians—Israel has zero legal claim to the land."
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday led a high-level Republican delegation on a visit to the occupied West Bank, where the second-in-line to the U.S. presidency told a rapt audience in an illegal Jewish settler colony that they are the rightful owners of the Palestinian territory.
"The mountains of Judea and Samaria are the rightful property of the Jewish people," Johnson (R-La.) said in Ariel, using the biblical name for the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem. Ariel was built on land stolen from the Palestinian towns of Salfit, Marda, and Iskaka after Israeli forces conquered the West Bank in a 1967 war waged on false pretense of an imminent threat of Egyptian and Syrian attack.
"Judea and Samaria are the front line of the state of Israel and must remain an integral part of it," Johnson added.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned Johnson's visit, calling his endorsement of Israeli annexation a "blatant violation of international law."
"All settlement activity is illegal and void," the ministry stressed, adding that Johnson's stance "undermines Arab and American efforts to stop the war and cycle of violence, while flagrantly contradicting the declared U.S. position on settlements and settler violence."
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at least 1,013 Palestinians, including 214 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 2023. Settlers, often protected and sometimes joined by Israeli troops, have launched numerous deadly pogroms and other attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in what critics say is a bid to finish what Israel started in 1948—the total conquest of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of its Arab population, and Israeli annexation.
Johnson, who is reportedly the highest-ranking American official to visit an Israeli settlement, was accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—who while running for president in 2008 denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—as well as Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), and Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.).
Tenney leads the congressional Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus, which supports Israeli annexation of what it calls the "biblical heartland of Israel."
Last month, all 15 Israeli government ministers from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party urged the prime minister to annex the West Bank. On July 23, members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, voted 71-13 in favor of a symbolic measure declaring "Judea and Samaria" to be "an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people" and asserting that "Israel has the natural, historical, and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel."
Netanyahu has repeatedly displayed maps showing the Middle East without Palestine, all of whose territory is shown as part of Israel. Following U.S President Donald Trump's reelection last November, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist party, said that "the year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
The Israeli government has repeatedly approved construction and expansion of settlements in a bid to establish irreversible "facts on the ground" that will survive developments in international law and moves by an increasing number of nations to formally recognize Palestinian statehood.
Around 150 U.N. member states currently recognize or plan to recognize Palestine. Recently, France became the first Group of Seven member to announce it will officially recognize Palestine. Last week, Canada said it would also do so, with conditions attached, and the United Kingdom threatened recognition of Palestine if Israel does not take "substantive steps" to end its annihilation of Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 200,000 people since October 2023.
Last year, the International Court of Justice—which is also weighing a Gaza genocide case against Israel—found that the occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end as soon as possible. Both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 8(2) the International Criminal Court Rome Statute prohibit settlement activity.
Construction of Ariel began in 1978, the same year the U.S. State Department first adopted the official position that Israeli settlements are "inconsistent with international law." That position stood until then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reversed it during the first Trump administration. Biden-era Secretary of State Antony Blinken restored the long-standing State Department position in 2024.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled support for reverting to the first Trump administration's position, and the State Department has lifted sanctions imposed on some extremist settlers during the Biden administration. Last week, one of those settlers, Yinon Levy, allegedly murdered Palestinian peace activist Awda Hathaleen in Umm al-Kheir after the latter was denied entry into the United States to take part in an interfaith speaking tour.
Approximately 750,000 Israelis currently reside in more than 250 illegal settler colonies in the West Bank. While Israel grants every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, it has refused to allow the approximately five million Palestinian refugees—people ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the foundation of Israel in 1948 and their descendants—to exercise their legal right of return to their homeland.
The Republicans' visit to the West Bank followed last week's tour by Huckabee and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff of a Gaza aid distribution center run by a U.S.-backed group condemned for its role in Israeli forces' massacres of desperate people seeking food and other lifesaving aid—a visit denounced by one critic as a "blatant theatrical display."
