Not far from the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, east and south of Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, lies the West Bank, which has reshaped Israel's strategic deterrence as it pursues the new Middle East project at the region's expense.
The security knot remains at the core of every plan in Israel's extremist mentality. It is the West Bank, which Israel calls "Judea and Samaria," as part of establishing a state of settlers as the nucleus of Greater Israel, the heart of the new Middle East project.
Israel relies on fragmenting Palestinian cities and communities to consolidate its control of the West Bank, severing the geographic continuity between them, blocking infrastructure development, and expelling Palestinians by various means. Some of these are direct, as in the Bedouin communities in Yatta, Jericho and Nablus, where escalating settler attacks target properties, roads and homes, disrupt Palestinians' daily lives, damage water wells and springs, and steal livestock, under the pretext of military training or closed military zones.
At the same time, the Israeli army has intensified its invasions and is carrying out ethnic cleansing in refugee camps in the northern occupied West Bank and other cities, driving Palestinians from their land out of fear for their lives and livelihoods.
Settlers, protected by the Israeli army, are also escalating their orchestrated chaos in towns and on main roads.
Israel is pursuing several urgent goals, foremost among them military preparations to dominate hills, water springs and mountains as strategic points against "external threats."
Israel has studied history and found that the Ottoman Empire controlled these territories before 1924, and that the Jordanian army employed the same tactics in 1967. For this reason, Israel has accelerated its plans by using settlers to expand settlements and intensify their attacks against Palestinians, creating a pretext for a military presence in every area. This also gives cover to the settlers and their fabricated claims of a return to their ancestral land in "Judea and Samaria."
This is the justification Israel is building into its narrative for the world, seeking to convince it that it acts out of religious conviction, not as an occupying state.
Recent reports have revealed the incentives and benefits the Israeli government offers to those willing to live in settlements, including free apartments, salaries and tax exemptions, not to mention the Jewish Agency and its efforts to bring Jews into the area. This means the Israeli army wants to pave the way for settlements to serve as its cover, using them as a protective buffer between the army and Palestinian cities.
What matters is the merging of strategic interests, not coexistence with Palestinians. This is clear in the attacks by settlers, who seek to take control and force Palestinians to accept living under their tyranny as employees, and to obey settlers as their rulers.
A close look at the reasons behind the expansion of settlements and their encroachment on Palestinian cities shows that the basic aim is to control people's lives and erase the Palestinian presence, according to Trump's 2020 Deal of the Century, which seeks to obliterate the Palestinian cause and turn the West Bank into a state of settlers, where the Israeli occupation calls Palestinians "temporary Arab residents."
Israel and the US are trying to pave the way for their projects by weakening Arab and Muslim countries, erasing the Palestinian cause from their priorities, and stripping their armies of their strength in order to establish Israeli hegemony over the region.
To that end, building military bases in the West Bank, surrounded by settlements, is of paramount importance to Israel. This strategy will extend into Lebanon and Syria, which is why Israel shows such determination to occupy these territories.
Without accountability or deterrence, Israel will press ahead with this plan, leading to further escalation and threatening the national security of neighboring countries. The new Middle East project cannot succeed without the success of Trump's Deal of the Century, including the annexation plan in the West Bank and the elimination of the Palestinian right to a sovereign state, in order to fulfill the dreams of the Zionist movement, with grave consequences for the region.
Further escalation is therefore expected, targeting the existence of Palestinians and their resistance, resilience and steadfastness, through settler attacks and army operations aimed at increasing pressure on Palestinians: demolishing homes, confiscating land, and torturing Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints to make their lives unbearable.
Israel uses settlers to deflect international criticism and to reinforce the settlers' narrative of history and religious belief, covering up its military plans.
Meanwhile, Israel is trying to Judaize Jerusalem at the expense of holy sites such as Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. This indicates that these satanic plans are being implemented, whether openly or implicitly. Although it is included in the West Bank plan, Israel isolated it two decades ago by building the apartheid wall, expelling its residents, and imposing further restrictions on its institutions and people, making it impossible for them to live there.
Israel's war on UNRWA and its drive to shut the agency down aim to obliterate the sole witness to the Nakba, and the clearest evidence of it. Whether by targeting refugee camps or destroying UN institutions, Israel insists on implementing its own policies while disregarding existing understandings and the Jordanian custodianship of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in a bid to impose temporal and spatial division by force. All of this is closely tied to the West Bank.
