Netanyahu vows to annex all West Bank settlements

Bloomberg

Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, running in an election that could be the fight of his political life, said he hopes to annex all Jewish West Bank settlements.
Israel will build more settlements and won’t uproot settlers, Netanyahu said in a speech in the West Bank settlement of Elkana.
“With God’s help, we will extend Jewish sovereignty to all settlements,” he said. A senior Palestinian official called for international sanctions against Israel.
The annexation of captured West Bank territory, long considered taboo in Israeli politics because of the international outcry it would spark, has become the clarion call of the Israeli right. With polls showing Netanyahu having no easy path to forming a coalition government after the September 17 ballot, backing annexation might help him cement his nationalist credentials with right-wingers who have other options beyond his Likud party. Netanyahu has made such pre-election vows before.
What’s happening right now is he’s focussing his messaging to those in the religious Zionist camp, because he fears he’s losing in the polls to groups like Yamina and Otzma Yehudit,”
Hebrew University lecturer Yonatan Freeman said, referring to other nationalist factions.

Peace Plan
It’s also possible that Netanyahu is hinting that an unseen US plan for a Middle East peace settlement “will leave Israel with sovereignty in certain areas” of the West Bank, which Israel captured along with other territories in the 1967 Middle East war, Freeman added.
David Friedman, the Trump administration’s ambassador to Israel, in a radical departure from decades of US policy, has said the Jewish state has the right to annex some areas of
the West Bank, a move widely regarded as a violation of international law governing occupied territories.
He also backed moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in May 2018, a measure that led to a rupture between the US and Palestinians who view it as compromising their claim to east Jerusalem as a future capital.
But with the issue of annexation so contentious both internationally and domestically, Netanyahu won’t extend Jewish sovereignty anywhere unless it’s part of a peace deal that has broad international backing beyond the Trump administration, Freeman predicted.
“In the end, the US administration changes” and annexation is “a major thing which has major implications for security and relations with the world,” he said. The US has said it won’t unveil the political component of its Middle East peace plan until after the Israeli ballot.
Annexation of land where settlements stand could constitute as much as 60 percent of the West Bank, when taking into account things like roads that service them.
Saeb Erekat, a longtime peace negotiator and now secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called for international penalties against Israel over its actions on seized land. “Israel’s PM is announcing further annexation of occupied territory,” Erekat said on Twitter. “Enough impunity: There’s an international responsibility to impose sanctions on Israel after decades of systematic crimes.”