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Israel’s approval of a long-delayed and controversial settlement plan on Wednesday intends to end any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state, say analysts, local human rights groups and Palestinian communities likely to be affected.
Known as East1 or E1, the plan would link thousands of illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – which is already illegally annexed by Israel – to the expanding Maale Adumim settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank.
This would fully sever East Jerusalem – which Palestinians have long considered the capital of their own future state – from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
European states have long warned that the E1 plan is a red line, said Tahani Musafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Some of these states, such as Ireland, France, Norway and Spain, have recently announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in the face of mounting pressure to take action against Israel for its war in Gaza.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, warned last year that a new settlement would be established for every country that recognises Palestine.
More recently, Smotrich, who himself lives in an illegal settlement on Palestinian land, said last week that the E1 plan would “bury” hopes for a Palestinian state.
Israeli politicians, including Smotrich, have long been open in remarking that the establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank creates “facts on the ground” and regard the territory as an integral part of the “land of Israel”.
Mustafa said that Israel calculated long ago that the global community would take no meaningful action to stop Israel from killing the two-state solution.
“There won’t be anything left to recognise if these states keep allowing Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza,” she told Al Jazeera.
Opportune
The E1 plan was first drummed up in 1994 under then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, just a year after he inked the United States-backed Oslo Accords, which ostensibly aimed to bring about a Palestinian state before the new millennium
In 2004, Israel began building a police station and constructing new roads in that area of Palestinian land. Since then, construction and further planning have been mostly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that building thousands of new housing units there would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Yet since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US and Europe have allowed Israel to violate every previous “red line” in the name of “self-defence”, said analysts and human rights monitors.
Over the last two years, Israel has carried out its war on Gaza – killing more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroying the territory – and has violently attacked large swaths of the West Bank, forcing out tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have also ramped up their violence against Palestinians, killing more than 1,000 people without repercussions.
Israel is now betting on its strong support from US President Donald Trump to accelerate the E1 plan, which would put the final “bullet” in the coffin of a Palestinian state and uproot Palestinian Bedouin communities, said Murad Jadallah, a researcher with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.
“Israel knows that now is the time [to go through with the E1 plan] because it has US support in Washington to do so,” Mustafa, from the ICG, told Al Jazeera.
Along with severing East Jerusalem, the controversial plan would physically split the north of the West Bank from the south, further confining Palestinians to ever smaller and isolated pockets of land.
On top of that, several thousand people live in 18 Palestinian shepherd communities in the area encompassing the E1 settlement plan.
The United Nations and Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have said this plan would uproot Palestinian communities and likely constitute a “forced transfer of a population”, which is a crime against humanity under international law.
“It is very strategic for Israel to push these communities [off their land],” said Al-Haq’s Jadallah.
Fighting to stay
For decades, shepherd communities in the Jordan Valley have protected the possibility of a Palestinian state by refusing to leave their land, despite facing repeated settler attacks and demolition orders.
Most of these communities migrated to Khan al-Ahmar – an area in the central West Bank between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement – after they were driven out of the Naqeb (Negev) desert by Israel in the 1950s.
The expulsions were part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands by Zionist militias to make way for the state of Israel – an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
Imad al-Jahalin, the leader of a shepherd community in Bir al-Maskub, one of many villages in the E1 zone, says his community has managed to protect itself from expulsion for years.
Last year, the community hired an Israeli Jewish lawyer to file a lawsuit against settlers who occupied some of their homes. The rights group Amnesty has previously accused the Israeli court system of serving to “rubber stamp” Israel’s occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Still, al-Jahalin said his village managed to win a court order to kick out the settlers from their homes. That order was implemented, but he worries they may not win another legal battle if the state begins implementing the E1 plan.
“There is fear and panic because we don’t know if this [settlement] is going to cut through our village and houses,” he told Al Jazeera.
But Jadallah is quite certain that the E1 plan will uproot Bedouin communities in and around Khan al-Ahmar, adding that they will be forced to migrate to large cities in the West Bank.
Their forced displacement to urban centres would require them to leave their livelihoods as shepherds behind.
“Palestinian history and society is losing one layer – or component – from its identity [because of Israeli attacks against Bedouins],” he told Al Jazeera.
Irreversible changes
The E1 plan should be understood as the culmination of Israeli attempts to change the spatial reality of the West Bank, so that a Palestinian state will never come to fruition, said Mustafa from the ICG.
She added that this is a strategy Israel has deployed since signing the Oslo Accords.
Israel, for instance, has long uprooted entire Palestinian villages and dispersed communities, bulldozed bustling refugee camps and erected dozens of barricades to impede the movement of Palestinians.
“The fact Israel is able … to reshape the urban landscape of the West Bank and make [those changes] so irreversible is indicative that Israel has no intention of committing to a two-state solution,” she said.
Alon Cohen, the head of the West Bank area for Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation advocating for an end to the occupation, added that there is no economic or housing rationale for implementing E1.
He stressed that the logic behind E1 was to simply encroach and irreversibly fragment Palestinian territory.
“Israel always uses settlement planning as a weapon,” he told Al Jazeera.
Both Mustafa and Cohen believe the implementation of E1 will make life for Palestinians in the West Bank even more unbearable, stressing that the ultimate plan is to push more Palestinians to consider leaving the West Bank.
However, al-Jahalin said that’s not an option for him and his community in Bir al-Maskub.
“Nobody here has any idea where they will end up in the future [if we are forcefully displaced],” he told Al Jazeera.
“[Our] people for now … are not thinking of going anywhere.”
