Israel's parliament, however, gave preliminary approval last week to two bills calling for the formal annexation of the West Bank.
Trump's vice president, JD Vance, who was in the country to help the Israelis coordinate the next phase of the Gaza genocide, described the vote as "a very stupid political stunt"—and one to which he "personally [took] some insult."
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
In an attempt to save face with Washington's Arab clients, Trump also dispatched his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to rebuke the Israelis for their ill-timed vote. While en route to Israel, Rubio issued the administration's sternest warning yet, saying: "That's not something we can be supportive of right now"—meaning the Americans would support it later.
A week earlier, Trump struck a similar tone in an interview with Time magazine, insisting that this was not the right time for annexation: "It won't happen. It won't happen. It won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can't do that now… Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened," he said.
The key word in these pronouncements is "now." Any apparent dispute between the Americans and the Israelis concerns timing and method, not the objective itself.
Advancing Expansionism
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
After all, during his first term, Trump's "peace for prosperity" plan, authored by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, endorsed Israel's designs to annex 30% of the West Bank.
Under that proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would move immediately to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements, while generously committing to defer the construction of new settlements in areas left to the Palestinians for at least four years.
Then-US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signaled that Trump had green-lighted immediate annexation, stating that "Israel does not have to wait at all" and that "we will recognize it." Trump reiterated his position last February, when he justified annexation by observing: "It's a small country… it's a small country in terms of land."
It would be ludicrous to think that the Arab regimes truly believe Trump's promises. They only pretend to flatter him and play along for the sake of domestic public relations.
Indeed, and to his credit, Trump had already recognized Israel's illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 2019, just as he recognized the illegal Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem in 2017.
Why, then, would he oppose West Bank annexation rather than simply postpone it to a more auspicious time?
In fact, the Israelis are already planning to expand beyond the West Bank, which, like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, they already consider a done deal. They are now looking to seize more territory from their other Arab neighbors.
Just weeks ago, Netanyahu declared that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" on behalf of the Jewish people, adding that he felt "very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel." This vision extends to the entire country of Jordan, as well as additional Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Iraqi lands.
Arab countries were quick to condemn Netanyahu's vision coveting their territories as future parts of Israel, just as they condemn recent Israeli moves to annex the West Bank. Yet this is little more than a pro forma performance.
The Arab regimes, following European and American orders, have in practice acquiesced de facto in every Israeli annexation since 1948—and some have even embraced them de jure, as Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain did when they recognized Israel's 1949 borders, which already encompassed annexed Palestinian land.
Global legitimization
When Israel was established in 1948, it included half the area allotted by the United Nations for a Palestinian state, as well as West Jerusalem, which was meant to remain under international jurisdiction.
While the UN General Assembly, including the United Kingdom, initially insisted that Israel would only be recognized once it withdrew from these territories in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, between 1949 and 1950, the Security Council and the UK ultimately recognized the country with its new borders—expanded by conquest far beyond those contained in the 1947 UN Partition Plan—intact.
Israel initially agreed to negotiate with its Arab neighbors over the boundaries of the state, but kept the territories it occupied in violation of UN resolutions, especially those concerning its annexation of West Jerusalem in 1949. It moved its government offices there and declared the city its capital.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display.
The UN, the US and all of Europe recognized Israel's annexations de facto, if not de jure, by the early 1950s, and the normalizing Arab countries followed suit in later decades.
After all, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat saw no problem in addressing Israel's parliament in annexed West Jerusalem during his 1977 visit without a word of protest.
While King Hussein never paid an official visit to West Jerusalem, as his 1994 and 1996 visits to Israel were mainly to Tel Aviv and Lake Tiberias, he did visit annexed West Jerusalem in 1995 to attend the funeral of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and again in 1997 to meet Israeli families who had lost children when a Jordanian soldier opened fire on them.
It bears mentioning that even before signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1993, Hussein had already conceded Palestinian and Arab sovereignty not only over West Jerusalem but also over East Jerusalem, when he insisted that "only God has a claim in Jerusalem"—a statement he would reiterate many times thereafter. The Egyptian and Jordanian embassies, like those of most countries that do not recognize West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, remain in Tel Aviv.
This, however, does not mean these countries do not recognize West Jerusalem as part of Israel.
Legacy of Conquest
Lest we think that Netanyahu's recently announced Greater Israel "vision" is a peculiar obsession of his alone, it should be remembered that he has so far conquered few Arab territories and has yet to annex any—unlike his predecessors, from David Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin, who annexed vast Palestinian and Syrian lands.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display. After its 1956 invasion and first occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Israel's founding prime minister, the secular David Ben-Gurion, waxed biblical, claiming that the invasion of Sinai "was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people." The conquest, he added, restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north."
"Yotvat," the name the Israelis bestowed on the Egyptian island of Tiran, had "once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel," Ben-Gurion proclaimed.
In the face of international opposition to Israel's occupation, he insisted: "Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat… which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army." He also declared the Gaza Strip "an integral part of the nation." Invoking the prophecy of Isaiah, Ben-Gurion vowed: "No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai."
When the Israelis were finally forced to withdraw, they bided their time and invaded and occupied these areas again in 1967. Despite Israel's final withdrawal from Sinai—whose demilitarization it demanded—talk of invading and settling the Egyptian peninsula is once again in the air today.
After 1948, the Israelis proceeded with plans to steal all the land in the demilitarzsed zone (DMZ) along the Syrian border near the Golan Heights. By 1967, they had taken over the area before conquering the Golan itself.
In the first 10 months of this year, Israel expanded its illegal acquisition of Syrian territories with the acquiescence of Syria's new US-backed regime, led by the rehabilitated former al-Qaeda and Islamic State member Ahmad al-Sharaa.
The Israelis created yet another "buffer zone" on Syrian territory, and just as they did in the DMZ between 1948 and 1967, Israeli Jewish settlers last month crossed into Syrian territory to lay the cornerstone for a new settlement called Neve Habashan, or "the Oasis of Bashan," on the newly occupied Syrian territories near Jabal al-Shaykh.
They hail from Israel's Uri Tzafon "Awaken the North" movement, which aims to settle Syria and southern Lebanon, asserting religious claims to the "Bashan region"—the biblical name Jewish expansionists apply to these lands. Last year, the movement sent thousands of eviction notices to residents of Lebanese towns using balloons and drones.
While the Israeli military removed the settlers in Jabal al-Shaykh, it is only a matter of time before official Jewish settlements are established—just as they continue to be built across the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981, the year after it annexed East Jerusalem.
Annexation Continues
In 2002, Israel built its illegal apartheid "separation wall" inside the West Bank, de facto annexing 10% of the territory, eliciting only pro forma protests from the "international" community, including the International Criminal Court.
Israel has also insisted since 1967 on annexing the Jordan Valley bordering Jordan—another 10 percent of the West Bank—a move that Trump's 2020 "peace" plan approved.
American and European acceptance, and in some cases sponsorship, of such territorial expansions is no different from their endorsement of Trump's more recent Gaza plan, which foresees Israel directly and indefinitely occupying more than half of Gaza's territory.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide.
The Arab regimes, as much as Europe and the US, know very well that Israel's annexation of the West Bank will proceed apace, even if it is tactically delayed. And this will be done with the actual blessings of the "international community"—albeit accompanied by the usual pro forma protests—with the Arab regimes (save Jordan, for its own national security reasons) at the forefront.
Rubio was explicit on this point: "At this time, it's something that we… think might be counterproductive" and "potentially threatening for the peace deal"—but clearly not at a later time, when it could be "productive" and "potentially" conducive to peace.
Indeed, the UN Human Rights Office just released a report documenting the complicity of dozens of countries—mostly European, but also Arab—in Israel's ongoing genocide. The Washington Post likewise revealed that several Arab states have upgraded their military cooperation with Israel during the genocide, including Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide, just as they have done for the past two years. And as ever, they will do so in the name of "Israel's right to defend itself."
Members of the Gaza Sumud Flotilla return from Israeli prison. (Photo by Bill Lee)