Should Israel Now Annex Parts, or All, of Judea and Samaria?

The Israelis have been furiously protesting against the Western countries, led by France and its anti-Israel leader, President Emmanuel Macron, that have announced their recognition of a “state of Palestine” in September at the opening of the UN General Assembly. Protests are not enough. Israel must make clear that it will answer this menace with a move of its own — to annex part, or all, of Judea and Samaria. It has a perfect right to do so. Judea and Samaria, not Tel Aviv and Haifa, are the places where Jews have lived and made most of their history over the past 3500 years. That area is the heart of their ancestral homeland. The Arabs arrived more than 2000 years later. That long history is what convinced the League of Nations to include all of Judea and Samaria in the territory assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, which would in time become the Jewish state of Israel.

How few people, especially in politics and the media, any longer remember what the Mandate for Palestine was all about, and why its provisions continued to be applied after the League of Nations itself shut down. Article 80 of the UN Charter commits the UN to completing any work under the mandates system that remained unfinished after the League closed — that meant aiding the Jews of Mandatory Palestine to attain their well-deserved statehood, which was intended to include all the territory from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Finally, Israel has a right, according to UN Security Council Resolution 242, to keep any territory that it won in the Six-Day War that it needed if it was to have “secure and defensible borders.”

In the past, after particularly deadly attacks by Arab terrorists in Judea, Samaria, or Jerusalem, Israeli governments have responded by approving the building of hundreds of new apartments for Jews in those areas. Sometimes an Israeli government has gone further, and approved the creation of a new Jewish town in Judea or Samaria. Now if it annexes territory in Judea and Samaria it will be responding not to Arab terrorism, but to Western countries’ intention to recognize a “state of Palestine” that, the Israelis know, will constitute a mortal threat to the Jewish state. It’s a way to express Israel’s determination to block any attempt to squeeze it back within the 1949 armistice lines, the very lines that Abba Eban once called “the lines of Auschwitz,” and that Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN who was the author of UNSC 242, described as “a rotten line.” Those 1949 lines — armistice lines and never fixed borders — if imposed on Israel would leave it with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. An invasion force from the east starting from Qalqilya could cut Israel in two within a matter of hours.

The Israelis have been poor negotiators with the Arabs in the past, but they have learned from their own mistakes. And after the Hamas atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023, 80% of Israelis are opposed to the so-called “two-state solution.” The Macrons of this world fail to understand the sea change in Israeli attitudes, just as they fail to understand the jihadist impulse of the Arabs that explains why no amount of territorial adjustment — other than the complete disappearance of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state — will satisfy them.

Now Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has been in talks with his counterparts in France and the U.K., letting them know of Israel’s intention to annex territory in Judea and Samaria if those countries, and others, too, such as Canada and Australia, go through with their threat to recognize the “state of Palestine.” It is known that Sa’ar discussed the matter directly with Secretary of State Marco Rubio this past week in Washington; it’s not known what the position of the Trump administration would be on Israeli annexation of most or all of Judea and Samaria, but in the past, Trump has said that Israeli “settlements” are not illegal, and has expressed support for Israeli annexation of some parts of those territories. Will France and the U.K. and other Western countries that have said they will recognize a “state of Palestine” now back down in order to head off that annexation? Or will they recognize that Palestinian state and thereby push Israel to do what it has every right to do — to annex much, or even all, of Judea and Samaria — which many think it ought to have done long ago, in June 1967, while the Arabs were still reeling from their colossal defeat?