The Long Brief: Annexation on the Table

The politics, pressure, and peril behind Israel’s sovereignty votes.

Welcome to The Long Brief, our new weekly feature for deeper context and conversation.

Each week, we’ll go beyond the day’s headlines — exploring the people, policies, and places shaping Israel’s story.

This first edition looks at the sovereignty debate that just rocked Jerusalem. As the Knesset advanced two bills to apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria, Washington, Riyadh, and the Israeli right all drew their own red lines. What would annexation really mean — on the ground, in diplomacy, and for Israel’s identity?

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Sovereignty and Strategy: Israel’s Annexation Dilemma

A two-minute press gaggle in Jerusalem told the story. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beside him, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that the Knesset’s surprise move to apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria “might be… threatening to the peace deal” emerging after the Gaza war, a point he repeated as he headed into meetings while in Israel.

Moments later, Vice President JD Vance called the maneuver a “very stupid” political stunt and said he took “some insult” at it, a line he delivered on the airport tarmac before wheels up. (Days before, in an interview with TIME, Donald Trump, usually cast as one of Israel’s most generous patrons, issued an ultimatum: if Israel annexes, it would “lose all support” from the United States.) Washington’s message came through loud and clear.

Hours earlier, Israeli lawmakers had defied their own premier and advanced two sovereignty bills on a preliminary reading.

One sweeping proposal to extend Israeli sovereignty to all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria scraped after a Likud veteran broke ranks. A narrower bill to annex Ma’ale Adumim passed with broader margins the same day.

Likud boycotted the votes and dismissed them as a deliberate provocation aimed at blowing up ties with Washington, then moved to punish the rebel: MK Yuli Edelstein was removed from the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for backing the broader bill.

Israel faces a hard choice that pits Zionist conviction against political reality. The domestic argument for annexing Judea and Samaria runs deep in history, security, and identity. The international veto is louder.

What Sovereignty Would Do on the Ground

Israeli annexation means swapping the current military patchwork in parts of Judea and Samaria for full civilian rule. For more than half a century the territory’s status has been suspended between two realities. Israel captured it from Jordan in 1967 and still governs it, but it never formally absorbed it into the state. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) administer most of it through a web of military orders that overlap with the mixed Israeli–Palestinian system created under the Oslo Accords.

Inside roughly 140 Jewish towns and villages, Israeli residents already live under Israeli law through enclave arrangements. Their Arab neighbors live under Palestinian Authority control and Israeli military jurisdiction. The result is legal chaos: military governors, an IDF Civil Administration, Ottoman land codes, British Mandate rules, Jordanian statutes, and imported Israeli regulations operating side by side.

When advocates of sovereignty speak about “applying Israeli law,” they mean clearing away this clutter and bringing normal governance—courts, ministries, taxation, and infrastructure—under one functional framework. The model they point to is eastern Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, where the Knesset in 1981 extended “the laws, jurisdiction and administration of the State” without ever using the word annexation.

In practice, sovereignty in Judea and Samaria would erase the IDF’s civil authority and transfer its duties to Israeli ministries, police, courts, and regulators. Civil institutions would fully handle zoning, taxation, and utilities. The separate systems that divide an Israeli and a Palestinian living within sight of each other would fall under a single system.

Supporters argue that this would end the legal gray zone that leaves Israelis subject to military decrees while their Arab neighbors remain under yet another legal framework. Critics say it would cement two classes of residents inside one expanded state.

Jerusalem offers the clearest precedent. After the Six-Day War, Israel extended its law to the eastern side of the city—Old City, Mount of Olives, and dozens of Arab neighborhoods—folding them into the capital. Arabs in those areas were not made citizens but “permanent residents,” a category that grants individual rights without national ones. They can live, work, and vote in municipal elections, but not in Knesset races. They must also prove that Jerusalem remains their “center of life,” or risk losing that residency.

Whether the same framework would apply to Arabs in annexed parts of Judea and Samaria is the explosive question. The majority of Israelis rejects granting full citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Area C, the region most likely to be annexed first—considering the Islamist push for expanding control via demographics, this does make sense. Some propose permanent residency, as in Jerusalem; others suggest autonomous Arab enclaves left under Palestinian Authority control.

Both ideas are riddled with practical and moral hazards. Israel’s own experience with eastern Jerusalem shows how unstable “resident, not citizen” status can become.

No Israeli official has produced a clear mechanism for absorbing a large Arab population while protecting both the state’s Jewish majority and its democratic order.

The current sovereignty push sidesteps the issue entirely. It refers applying Israeli law to Jewish communities and avoid any mention of neighboring Arab villages. The silence is deliberate. Applying sovereignty is far easier to proclaim than to administer.

The Oslo map remains central to this discussion. Under Oslo II in 1995, Judea and Samaria were divided into Areas A, B, and C as a temporary arrangement.

• Area A, roughly 18 percent of the land, sits under full Palestinian Authority control and includes major Arab cities like Ramallah and Nablus.

• Area B, about 22 percent, has shared Israeli security and Palestinian civil authority.

• Area C—over 60 percent of the territory—holds almost every Jewish settlement and remains under full Israeli control.

The framework, meant to last five years, still governs decades later.

Area C has become the core of the sovereignty debate. About half a million Israeli Jews live there, along with some three hundred thousand Arabs spread among villages and encampments.

Any [currently] realistic annexation drive would target the areas with Jewish population density while excluding the Arab centers in Areas A and B. The legislation now before the Knesset refers specifically to “areas of settlement in Judea and Samaria,” a clear nod to Area C.

The objective is to bring the populated settlement blocs fully under Israeli law while absorbing as few Arabs as possible.

Even a step-by-step approach, such as starting with Ma’ale Adumim, would begin in Area C, which Israel already runs day-to-day.

None of this involves sending Israeli police into Arab cities like Jenin or Nablus tomorrow.

The mainstream Israeli plan envisions extending sovereignty to territory Israel already controls, not occupying new ground. Whether foreign governments—or the Palestinians themselves—accept that distinction is another question entirely.

Inside Israel: Who Wants Annexation, and Who Doesn’t