Analysis: Israel E1 settlement plan makes Palestinian state further away

Israel’s approval of a long-delayed and controversial settlement plan on Wednesday intends to end any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state, say analysts, local human rights groups and Palestinian communities likely to be affected.

Known as East1 or E1, the plan would link thousands of illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – which is already illegally annexed by Israel – to the expanding Maale Adumim settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank.This would fully sever East Jerusalem – which Palestinians have long considered the capital of their own future state – from the rest of the occupied West Bank.

European states have long warned that the E1 plan is a red line, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Some of these states, such as Ireland, France, Norway and Spain, have recently announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in the face of mounting pressure to take action against Israel for its war in Gaza.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, warned last year that a new settlement would be established for every country that recognises Palestine.

More recently, Smotrich, who himself lives in an illegal settlement on Palestinian land, said last week that the E1 plan would “bury” hopes for a Palestinian state.

Israeli politicians, including Smotrich, have long been open in remarking that the establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank creates “facts on the ground” and regard the territory as an integral part of the “land of Israel”.Mustafa said that Israel calculated long ago that the global community would take no meaningful action to stop Israel from killing the two-state solution.

“There won’t be anything left to recognise if these states keep allowing Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza,” she told Al Jazeera.

In 2004, Israel began building a police station and constructing new roads in that area of Palestinian land. Since then, construction and further planning have been mostly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that building thousands of new housing units there would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Yet since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US and Europe have allowed Israel to violate every previous “red line” in the name of “self-defence”, said analysts and human rights monitors.

Over the last two years, Israel has carried out its war on Gaza – killing more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroying the territory – and has violently attacked large swaths of the West Bank, forcing out tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

Israeli soldiers and settlers have also ramped up their violence against Palestinians, killing more than 1,000 people without repercussions.

Israel is now betting on its strong support from US President Donald Trump to accelerate the E1 plan, which would put the final “bullet” in the coffin of a Palestinian state and uproot Palestinian Bedouin communities, said Murad Jadallah, a researcher with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.