Owen Jones: Genocidal Israel has its sights set on West Bank

The National

17 hours ago

Normally, states – like individuals – which commit terrible crimes go to great lengths to suppress their real motives: after all, doing otherwise represents a confession.
But having rationally decided that its Western benefactors have granted it immunity, Israel's leaders and officials simply said, in public, over and over again, what their criminal and indeed genocidal intentions are.
Which brings us to two Israeli ministers. One is Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's financial minister and the de facto governor of the illegally occupied and colonised West Bank. In a speech, he has declared: 'We will bury the Palestinian state, Europe will have nothing left to recognise.'
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Here, he is openly taunting the empty posturing of European states, like Britain. Keir Starmer has declared that his government will recognise Palestinian nationhood next month unless certain conditions, like Israel accepting a ceasefire, are met – using an inalienable right as a bargaining chip. But in doing so, Starmer had opted for the most symbolic option, rather than, say, ending all arms sales, imposing sanctions and ending trade.
Smotrich knows this, which is why he is openly mocking the likes of Starmer. He knows Western leaders are not actually interested in putting pressure on Israel, that all this rhetoric is meant purely for domestic consumption, to try to dupe Western citizens into doing something.
The 'two-state solution' exists, in practice, as a crutch for Western leaders to get through interviews without having to answer questions about meaningful action.
What Smotrich is planning here are construction plans which cut the West Bank's north off from its south in order to – in his words – create a 'reality that buries the idea of a Palestinian state – because there's nothing to recognise and no one to recognise it'.
Housing units for thousands of illegal Israeli settlers will be built. For those who believe that Smotrich is a fringe figure, despite all his genocidal aspirations in Gaza having been granted: he boasted in this speech of how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had 'supported and enabled me to carry out this revolution' in the West Bank.
The West Bank has long been the site of Israel's murderous suffocation. There are hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers there, living with the privileges afforded to them under a system of apartheid.
The indigenous Palestinians, on the other hand, are deprived of basic rights and are systematically driven from their homes. Hundreds were slaughtered in the years running up to October 7, and hundreds more since. Since January, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank, the largest forced displacement since Israel's occupation began in 1967. This is a slow-motion Gaza.
One of Smotrich's colleagues, Israel's national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, also underlined that Israel's genocidal intent is not simply confined to Gaza.
A hideous video has been posted of him confronting Marwan Barghouti, who is frequently described as the Palestinian Nelson Mandela. Hailing from Ramallah in the West Bank, this unifying leader has been imprisoned for more than two decades, languishing in solitary confinement: looking shockingly frail, the video clearly intended to emphasise how much he'd suffered.
'You will not defeat us. Whoever harms the people of Israel, whoever kills children, whoever kills women … we will erase them,' says Ben-Gvir.
This is nakedly genocidal. There is, as ever, no pretence. The Israeli state is telling the world that it intends to erase the Palestinian people, because it quite rationally understands there will be no consequences. Has it not wiped Gaza from the world map, exterminated tens of thousands of its people, deliberately starved its entire population, buried its hospitals in rubble, butchered medics and aid workers, presided over industrialised torture and rape – and only suffered Western handwringing as a result?
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And that is why the Israeli state knows that it won't just eliminate Palestinian Gaza, but successfully annex the West Bank and remove its Palestinian population there, too. Indeed, the West Bank was always the jewel in its crown.
But given the impunity, Israel has given notice about its real plans. This week, Netanyahu made his expansionist ambitions clear. He was asked by a TV interviewer if he felt connected to a vision of a 'Greater Israel', and replied: 'Very much.'
This 'Greater Israel' includes parts of Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Imagine the leader of a state hostile to the West openly made clear their desire to annex the land of multiple neighbours, in order to expand an ethno state. It would lead news bulletins, be splashed on newspaper front pages, be denounced by Western leaders – all as damning evidence of naked, unhinged aggression. But not so here.
Over and over again, Israel's leaders simply state their criminal intent, and yet the vast majority of Western media outlets act as though it's not really happening, or as though it's some parallel universe. But there's no subtlety, no secrecy. Here is a crime confessed to over and over again: no one can say they were not warned.