For the current Israeli government, the West Bank and Gaza are part of the same plan. The West Bank is Gaza happening again, but more slowly. The goal is the same. This time, Israel is moving slowly on purpose. The fast destruction in Gaza — in places like Rafah and Khan Younis — shocked people around the world.
Gaza was destroyed in just a few months. The West Bank is being taken step by step instead: a new housing project here, a demolished home there, control of land records moved quietly from the army to government officials. The final result will be the same. Only the speed is different.
Ask the government why this is happening, and the answer is always the same: October 7. It has been almost three years. But every bulldozer, every gun given to a settler, every destroyed village is still called “revenge” for that one day. This story is convenient for the government. But it is not true. This plan is now in its final stage. It did not start after October 7. It started within months of the 1967 war, when Israel first occupied the West Bank.
Every Israeli government since then — from the political left to the right — added to this plan. October 7 did not start this process. It only gave Israel an excuse to stop hiding it. We have known about this plan for more than 40 years. In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, decided to study the facts instead of just arguing about politics. He counted houses, roads, and land taken from Palestinians. In 1984, when there were only 35,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, he said it was already too late to stop Israel from taking over the territory completely.
People laughed at him and called him too negative. But every government since then — no matter their politics — has proven he was right. In fact, he was too cautious: there are more than 700,000 settlers today. The plan has not changed. What has changed is that Israeli leaders are no longer afraid to use the word “annexation” in public.
That confidence has now arrived. This is the final stage: forcing Palestinians to leave their land. Israel no longer tries to hide this. About 60 percent of the West Bank has no official land ownership papers. The power to decide who owns this land was recently moved from the army to Israel’s civilian Ministry of Justice. In the past, soldiers took the land.
Now, government paperwork finishes the job. East of Jerusalem, a new area of housing has been approved. This area would cut the West Bank into two separate pieces. One government minister said openly that this plan “buries” any hope of a Palestinian state. Last year alone, settlers forced people out of 21 Palestinian communities, completely or partly.
Armed groups
These settlers are not just acting alone anymore. They are acting like an official armed group. This became official when Israel’s national security minister turned his gun-licence office into the fastest-growing weapons program in the country’s history.
He has given weapons to several hundred thousand civilians. About half of them had never used a gun before. He also gave guns specifically to settler “response teams” across the West Bank. More than 3mn Palestinians live under this system. This is not just conflict between neighbours. It is a plan to make Palestinians leave — carried out by people who believe no one will stop them.
The people planning this no longer try to hide what it really is. It is not just a policy. It is an organized campaign to remove people — and Israeli officials now celebrate it instead of hiding it. Ministers pose for photos next to guns being given out. A government minister calls the end of Palestinian statehood a success. This is done through official paperwork and announced at press conferences. What used to be called “occupation” has become something closer to a mass pogrom — carried out village by village, with pride.
No one should be more worried about this than Jewish people themselves — in Israel and around the world. This is a mass campaign to force people from their homes. It is carried out by armed civilians, approved by a government minister. This kind of campaign does not stay limited to the people it targets. It becomes connected to everyone who shares an identity with the people doing it, if they stay silent.
For generations, Jewish communities built moral respect from the memory of their own suffering. That respect cannot survive silence in the face of this. People who do nothing while this happens will not be remembered as innocent bystanders. They will be remembered as people who watched and allowed it.
This is not the first time the Bible has been used to justify politics like this. When the modern Zionist movement began, one of its main arguments was religious: God promised this land to the Jewish people, and now they were reclaiming it. But not all Zionists agreed on how literally to take this promise. In 1903, a violent attack on Jews in the city of Kishinev (now in Moldova) shocked the Jewish world. This event pushed a young writer named Vladimir Jabotinsky toward aggressive, military-style nationalism. But Jabotinsky was part of the same intellectual group in Odessa as another thinker, Ahad Ha’am.
Ahad Ha’am wanted a spiritual and cultural Jewish homeland — not a state built on taking as much land as possible. This disagreement was never really solved. Over many decades, Jabotinsky’s more aggressive approach simply won.
That same political tradition is in power in Israel today. And it uses the same kind of religious texts. In the Bible, the Book of Deuteronomy tells the Israelites to destroy the cities of Canaan and leave “nothing that breathes” (20:16–17). Another passage, about the ancient enemy Amalek, promises to “blot out the memory of Amalek” (Exodus 17:14). These are not just words found in small settler pamphlets.
On 28 October 2023, when Israel announced its ground invasion of Gaza, the Israeli prime minister told his soldiers to “remember what Amalek did to you.” His own government’s official statement said this quote came from Deuteronomy 25:17. Later, South Africa used this same speech as evidence at the International Court of Justice, arguing it showed intent to commit genocide.
Just like in Jabotinsky’s time, not everyone in the Jewish world accepts this reading of scripture. Centuries ago, Jewish religious law already cancelled the command about Amalek. Rabbis ruled that no one today can be identified as belonging to that ancient group. Many Israeli rabbis and Jewish writers publicly criticized the prime minister’s speech for exactly this reason.
Religious extremism
This same disagreement — about how much religious extremism should control the government — is now part of the campaign against his coalition in this October’s election. We have seen a similar pattern recently in Islamist extremism. Groups like Daesh (ISIS) used their own religious texts to justify enslaving Yazidi women and killing Shia and Christian minorities. The large majority of Muslim religious scholars condemned these actions. They said this was a corruption of Islam, not a true expression of it. Every religious tradition has a small extreme group willing to use its holiest texts to justify violence. And every tradition also has a majority that rejects this. What matters most is which group is allowed to control the government.
Even if we accept these Bible verses exactly as written, the logic still fails. History shows us why. The Palestinians farming this land today are not the ancient nations condemned in Deuteronomy. Hundreds of generations of conquest, religious conversion, and mixing between peoples separate them from any group named in that text.
And the Jewish settlers quoting this same promise today are not the ancient Israelites who first received it either. Two thousand years of exile, movement, and return have changed the Jewish people just as much as they changed the land itself. None of this history will stop religious extremists from using these texts anyway.
But it shows clearly what this kind of thinking really leads to: not one final, settled claim to land, but an invitation to endless war. This is because the same logic works in every direction. If an ancient religious text can justify removing people from their land today, then the Muslims and Christians of this region have just as much history to point to in response — the killings of the Crusades, the expulsions of the Inquisition, a long, unbroken history of suffering that can match anyone’s.
For now, there is still a way out — but it closes on October 27. That is when Israel holds its first election since October 7. Early polls show something important: Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist coalition is losing support. However, no single opposition group has yet won enough support to clearly replace him. Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief, leads a centrist party called Yashar that is competing seriously against Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid have also reunited their political alliance, offering another path back to a government based on law, not land seizure. In less than three months, Israeli voters face a real choice. One option is a government that treats settler expansion as a religious duty. The other option, at minimum, offers an end to rule based on religious extremism. Voting is the only real tool left for Israelis who want to avoid this moral responsibility — for themselves, and for Jewish people everywhere.
This October, Israelis have a chance to finally settle an old argument at the ballot box — an argument their own movement never finished back in Odessa in 1903. Will their state follow the spirit of Ahad Ha’am, who wanted a moral and cultural homeland? Or will it follow the path of Jabotinsky’s modern followers, who chose land and force instead? For the sake of the West Bank, and for their own sake, Israelis should choose wisely.
- Jamil K Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.