The Annexation of the West Bank Is Complete
With eyes on Gaza, Israel has quietly annexed the West Bank [Published in The Baffler]
Hi all — wanted to share my latest piece, published Tuesday in The Baffler: The Annexation of the West Bank Is Complete. In it, I detail the remarkable bureaucratic coup pulled off by Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to annex the West Bank under the cover of the war in Gaza.
If you won’t take it from me, take it from Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha:
I also discussed it on The Majority Report—21:56 on YouTube, or 21:00 on the podcast. I think it’s a solid crash course on what’s unfolded in the West Bank over the past 2.5 years.
“If Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide livestreamed to the world,” I write, “its project in the West Bank is an extraordinarily efficient campaign of ethnic cleansing executed through the hidden levers of civil governance.”
To me, this is the most important story no one’s talking about—a world-historic land theft on the scale of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and it’s barely made a dent in the press. Amid the horrors Israel is unleashing in Gaza and Iran, we can’t afford to forget the people of the West Bank. I hope you’ll read and share.
Back Sunday with the regular newsletter.
Best,
Jasper
And here we are in the west, expected to go to war to defend Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza, and has now annexed the West Bank, and has illegally invaded Iran. It makes me sick.
As always, Jasper, a fascinating and in-depth and lucid account of the absorption by stealth and blatant land-grabbing happening in the West Bank. The ‘Zionists’ walking hand-in-hand with Netanyahu and the IDF are becoming like Stormtroopers, cutting a swathe through historical lands in order to finally establish Israel as the contemporary version of a Fascist State.
Chilling and quite monstrous. Even if there were a viable opposition to these machinations within Israel, the very sad truth is that activists would be reviled and rendered powerless.
Netanyahu himself has the mad self-satisfied look of a satyr, and wreaks uncontrolled havoc, knowing that, even if he is ever brought to justice, his legacy will be of death and destruction, and his name will be indelibly etched in the history books.
Please continue to write in your unbiased and very intelligent way.