The Quiet Conquest of the West Bank and the Death of the Oslo Accords | Israel-Palestine conflict

Israel always had a plan to annex more land in the occupied West Bank, and its actions provide that.

This week the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to claim Palestinian land in the West Bank as “state land”. The proposal, pushed by far-right Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Defense Minister Israel Katz, emphasizes Israeli supremacy over Palestinians.

The Israeli government created 35 new jobs and allocated 244.1 million shekels (nearly $79 million) for the land registration project from 2026 to 2030.

The process outlined in the proposal is not in itself new. This is a process that has been frozen since 1967, and the most recent summary is a continuation of Israel’s long-standing plan to take over Palestinian lands. While Israel suspended the land registration process in 1967, it did not suspend its practices of ethnic cleansing, colonial violence and de facto land annexation.

For Palestinians, this decision is not a new escalation, but a strengthening of the Israeli presence in the West Bank. While this may seem like mere paperwork, it is actually a milestone in Israel’s gradual takeover of the West Bank, the last remaining territorial obstacle to the completion of Israel’s colonial project in Palestine.

Bureaucracy as annexation

This shift cannot be understood without reviewing the Oslo Accords. Under the 1993 and 1995 agreements, the West Bank was carved into Areas A, B and C as an “interim” arrangement that was never intended to become permanent. Area C, the largest area containing the most land and resources, remained under full Israeli control while Areas A and B were left as fragmented Palestinian islands with limited Palestinian authority.

This made Area C the true battlefield.

As part of the new policy, land registration in Area C, which makes up more than 62 percent of the West Bank, must be done through the Land Titles Settlement Administration, part of Israel’s Ministry of Justice. What it does, in effect, is move Area C from military administration to direct Israeli civilian rule.

These measures should not be taken lightly. They tell of Israel’s latest annexation strategy: government.

On February 8, a week before the Israeli cabinet’s approval to register West Bank land as state land, Israeli authorities adopted new measures opening up land purchase mechanisms for settlers while reducing oversight. The same day, Israeli authorities also moved to further erode the powers of the Palestinian Authority in Areas A and B, which under international agreements signed by Israel must be under full administrative Palestinian control.

Together, these measures signal a new phase of Zionist territorial conquest in the 21st century—one that relies less on open warfare and more on administrative consolidation.

In 1948, Zionist militias pursued territorial conquest through large-scale warfare, mass displacement, and the redrawing of borders. Today, conquest increasingly works through spiritual mechanisms.

It is no coincidence that a minister as outspokenly racist as Smotrich explained the plan as an attempt to end “current chaos that is bad for everyone – Jews and Arabs alike.” While Israel’s goal of taking over Palestinian lands has remained unchanged, the post-Oslo era and the reputational damage Israel suffered during its genocidal war on Gaza mean that visible and large-scale violence is not sustainable for long-term gains in the West Bank.

So, rather than tanks, bombs and dramatic declarations of territorial conquest, Israel lowers both domestic and international alarm by consolidating land through perceived bureaucracy.

From paperwork to disposal

Israel promotes its West Bank policy as neutral cadastral clearance when in reality these are large-scale land grabs carried out by administrative means. It is an act of state-building that allows Zionist Israelis to determine whose claims to Palestinian lands are legitimate and whose disappear.

This is exactly why land registration matters: Once land is entered into the Israeli registry as “state land,” it becomes a legal reality that is much more difficult to reverse than a temporary military seizure.

For Palestinians, this policy portends grave danger, as we have seen it before. After the large-scale dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands in 1948, approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained in what became Israel.

These Palestinians were placed under military rule until the 1960s despite having Israeli citizenship. This was not done for security; this was done to ensure territorial restructuring. Lands that did not physically have Palestinians on them were absorbed by the Absentee Property Act.

A similar dynamic is unfolding in the West Bank today, where physical displacement and restricted access are once again converted into legal disposition. In the West Bank, the past two years have seen alarming rates of settler violence that have driven thousands of Palestinians from their lands while other areas have been seized and declared closed military zones. It denied Palestinians access to their homes, farmland and properties. Under Israeli law, these can all be considered absent lands, even if their rightful owners are only a few meters away and unable to reach their lands due to Israeli hostilities.

By this, Israel creates a system in which the standard legal outcome causes territorial absorption. The bureaucratic aspect of this means that annexation becomes irreversible. This is no longer a temporary military seizure operation; it is transforming territory into property that functions within a state system, in this case the Israeli legal system.

More dangerously, historical evidence shows that Israel not only absorbed Palestinian lands through bureaucracy, but also forced Palestinians to engage with Israeli legal structures as a last resort.

Still today, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in areas such as Ein Hod are in legal battles over land. Not only have they been displaced from their village, which now serves as a Jewish artists’ colony, but Palestinians are also just a few kilometers away, with Israeli citizenship. Decades later, they remain in legal battles to obtain building permits to live on the nearby lands they were forced to move to.

Why the world enables administrative conquest

It is important to realize that all of this was made possible by the international community’s refusal to address the criminality of the Israeli regime as a whole.

Condemnations of individual Israeli settler attacks in the past two years and refusal to disarm Israel despite committing genocide is precisely what allows Israel to persist in its colonial expansion. For years, Palestinians, as well as international human rights organizations, have warned not only of increasing Israeli settler violence, but also of a clear synchronization of efforts by the army and armed Israeli militias in the West Bank.

Palestinians shared accounts, tried to tell the stories of trees uprooted by the thousands, of water pipelines destroyed by Israelis, of large-scale arson attacks and pogroms across different cities and towns, of settlers armed with military-grade weapons and trained by the army in illegal settlements.

However, the world only defined violence when it came in the form of bullets and bombs, which allowed Israel to shift strategies in the West Bank. As Palestinians in the West Bank are being disarmed, all that remains are cries and calls for media coverage. Violence perpetrated against Palestinians has been reduced to random and exceptional acts of hostility.

Yet Israel in the West Bank did not choose dramatic war; it chose subtlety. In the past two years, the battlefield in the West Bank has spread into everyday life and moved into the nervous system. Violence no longer depends on constant lethal force, but on permanent anticipation of a settler attack, a military raid or a court order. Constant surveillance, overhead drones, incessant home invasions, arrests and checkpoints every few meters keep the body captive.

All these practices paved the way for the continuous displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their lands. More importantly, this is exactly why Israel can push renewed policies to register land as state land and to allow Israelis to buy land with little oversight.

What this should teach us is that sometimes war exists in the subtleties, and the absence of relentless bombing does not mean the absence of war.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial position.