The West Bank in the Imagination of the Israeli Right: Control, Settlement, and the Management of Long-Term Conflict

The Israeli Right views the West Bank not as a disputed geographical area awaiting a political settlement, but as a land whose fate has been historically and ideologically decided. What is happening today is merely an advanced stage in solidifying this decision on the ground. In the political imagination of this Right, the West Bank is not understood as “post-occupation,” but rather as “pre-completion,” where settlement becomes not a bargaining chip, but a means to reshape both place and people. This transforms any subsequent talk of a Palestinian state into something closer to political fantasy than a realistic, achievable project.

After waves of extensive settlement, the Israeli Right does not speak of an end to the conflict or a comprehensive settlement, but rather of a quiet transition from a phase of expansion to a phase of normalizing a new reality. A reality in which Israel exercises near-complete control over the land, while Palestinians are left with limited administration of civilian affairs. The land is effectively annexed, even if not legally, and borders are erased on the ground, even if they remain present in international discourse. What matters to this current is not official declaration as much as it is for the world to wake up years later and find that a Palestinian state has become unviable, geographically, economically, and securely.

In this vision, the West Bank is reconfigured as a mosaic of large settlement blocs, bypass roads, and military zones, interspersed with besieged Palestinian cities and towns, isolated from each other, and lacking any real sovereign connection. The Palestinian here is not seen as a political partner, but as “residents” who must be managed at the lowest possible security cost. There is no place for the idea of Palestinian national rights, nor recognition of the right to self-determination. Instead, these concepts are replaced by soft administrative language that speaks of improving living standards, facilitating conditional movement, and granting expanded municipal powers, without touching the core of Israeli control.

The Israeli Right, especially in its national-religious version, treats time as a strategic ally. Every year that passes with expanding settlement and the erosion of Palestinian geography is an additional year that weakens the possibility of imposing a comprehensive political solution. The gamble is not only on military superiority, but on slow exhaustion, on Palestinians getting used to a reality without a horizon, and on the world becoming accustomed to the scene of control as a permanent state, not an emergency. In this context, the Palestinian Authority transforms into a functional tool rather than a political entity, allowed to exist as long as it plays its role in controlling Palestinian society and preventing a comprehensive explosion, without being allowed to transform into a sovereign project.

As for the Palestinian in the Right's conception, there are two options, not clearly stated: accepting a life of diminished sovereignty and rights within besieged population enclaves, or individually seeking salvation outside the place, through emigration or withdrawal from the public sphere. These options are not officially presented, but they are embodied in daily policies that tighten the noose on land, economy, and movement, turning life into a series of small concessions that appear non-political on the surface, but are eminently political in their outcomes.

Although the public discourse of a part of the Right, especially the pragmatic Right, avoids the language of explicit annexation to avoid international confrontation, the practice on the ground does not fundamentally differ from the discourse of the more extreme Right. The difference is not in the goal but in the method. The goal is one: land under permanent Israeli control, with the fewest possible Palestinians and the least possible rights for them. A Palestinian state is rejected here not only because it is portrayed as a security threat, but because it threatens the ideological narrative that sees the West Bank as an integral part of the Zionist project.

This perception is also based on a deep demographic obsession that is almost existential in the mind of the Israeli Right. From its perspective, Palestinians do not constitute merely a security or political challenge, but a cumulative numerical threat that endangers Israel's definition as a Jewish state in the long run. This fear is not always explicitly stated, but it is strongly present in policies related to land, planning, housing, and borders. Land is desired, while Palestinian residents are viewed as a problem that must be neutralized, contained, or pushed to the geographical and political margins, without being incorporated into the political body of the state.

From this standpoint, the Israeli Right sees itself today in a phase of reaping the fruits of long-term policies pursued by successive Netanyahu governments. Netanyahu was not an ideologically confrontational politician in his rhetoric, but he was an architect of a new reality that slowly and quietly took shape. During his years in power, the idea of partnership with Palestinians was gradually dismantled, not by declaring its end, but by emptying it of its content. Negotiations turned into an empty ritual, and the two-state solution remained present in external discourse while being practically undermined on the ground, and settlement continued as a state policy, not an exception.

In this context, Palestinians, and specifically the Palestinian Authority, were redefined in the Israeli political mind from “potential partner” to “managed enemy.” The Authority was no longer an entity supposed to lead to a state, but a functional apparatus used to control Palestinian society and prevent its complete collapse, without being granted any real political horizon. This shift was not surprising, but a cumulative result of discourse and policies that entrenched the idea that Palestinians only respond to pressure, and that any political concession is read as weakness, not a gesture of peace.

Added to this picture is an equally important security dimension, represented by the way the growing Palestinian military formations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been dealt with. In the West Bank, during the years preceding the war on Gaza, a kind of calculated tolerance was observed with the emergence of local armed groups, and they were not dealt with the decisiveness that was prevalent in previous stages. This leniency was not an intelligence oversight, but part of a political reading that sees these phenomena as a future justification for tightening security control, and deepening the narrative that portrays the Palestinian as a permanent threat, not a political partner.

As for Gaza, the Strip was left for years to grow militarily within the framework of a policy of conflict management, not resolution. The increasing capabilities of armed factions were treated as a containable or postponable danger, not a threat requiring a radical change in strategy. Partial economic facilitations, controlling the pace of confrontations, and allowing the entrenchment of a de facto rule, all contributed to creating a postponed explosive environment, which later exploded violently, and was re-employed to justify more force and reshape the political and security reality.

In contrast, the Israeli Right does not imagine the future of the West Bank as an endless state of permanent alert. Alertness, in its view, is a temporary tool used to establish control, not a long-term way of life. After achieving the minimum it deems necessary in terms of land, infrastructure, and the dismantling of Palestinian geography, the goal becomes to lower the level of explosion, not to end the conflict. Calming the population here is neither reconciliation nor partnership, but a functional calming that allows settlements to live, expand, and transform from an ideological project into an overwhelming natural reality in the public sphere.

In this framework, security itself is redefined: from an open state of emergency to routine, highly controlled security, based on surveillance, intelligence, and localized interventions, with a permanent but less noisy military presence. This model serves settlement more than open confrontation, because it provides an environment of relative stability that allows settlements to grow, invest, and impose themselves as a reality, not an exception, while the Palestinian remains in a state of permanent control, without a political horizon and without the ability to change the rules of the game.

Thus, all these threads converge into one coherent vision: demographic fear, rejection of political partnership, accelerated settlement, a Palestinian Authority stripped of its horizon, hotspots that are managed not resolved, and alertness used when needed then eased for functional calm that serves the long-term control project. What is happening in the West Bank, and what happened in Gaza, is not a series of isolated errors, but an expression of a logic that sees conflict as a permanent state that can be controlled and exploited, and explosion sometimes as a tool to rearrange reality, not a failure to be avoided.