MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank — The sun-starched strip of sand and brush doesn’t look like much, but if you squint, you can almost glimpse the dreamscape of a future Palestinian capital.
“These spare lands mean that we can build our parliament, we can build our future institutions,” Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian expert on geography and settlement expansion, told NBC News earlier this month as he gestured across the controversial “East 1,” or E1, section of the occupied West Bank.
“If Israel builds here, it means that everything is finished at the same time,” the 76-year-old expert on Israeli settlements said at an overlook in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim. “This means that Jerusalem is surrounded from everywhere. … It means that there is no Palestinian geographic continuity between the north and south.”
The almost 5 square miles of land may seem undesirable and the conflict around it theoretical, but both Israel and the Palestinians regard the area’s fate with the same sense of urgency.
So when Israeli authorities approved the development of 3,400 homes last week, ultranationalist lawmakers celebrated what they saw as the death knell for a nascent Palestinian state and an acceleration of plans for Israel to annex the whole of the West Bank.
The development “practically erases the two-state delusion and consolidates the Jewish people’s hold on the heart of the Land of Israel,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, told a news conference when he announced his approval of the plans.
“Now they declare it clearly and they don’t need to hide it,” said Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank. “It doesn’t need philosophers and intellectuals to analyze. They speak about it themselves: ‘This is to kill any possibility of a Palestinian state.’”
Since the plan was tabled in the early 1990s, Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers like Smotrich have expounded upon the practical needs for new development as Jerusalem has become too crowded and environmental regulations have forbidden new building in the west of the city, which mostly belongs to Israel.
But Palestinians say the area, which straddles the enormous Maale Adumim Jewish settlement and the Palestinian-majority east Jerusalem, is the only undeveloped land that might host government buildings for a new state.
The construction would also split the West Bank in two, again fracturing an incipient Palestinian state already divided between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where almost 63,000 people have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Israel launched its military campaign after the Hamas-led terror attacks that day, which killed 1,200 people and saw around 250 taken hostage.
After almost 23 months of war, the country has faced mounting criticism about its conduct from traditional Western allies like the U.K., France and Canada, which have recently made conditional offers to recognize a Palestinian state, unless Israel revives talks to achieve that and agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza.
Those countries were among 21 that criticized the E1 development plans as a “violation of international law” in a statement Friday. “We condemn this decision and call for its immediate reversal in the strongest terms,” it read. British Foreign Minister David Lammy also called Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the U.K., to raise his objections.
But the recognition of a Palestinian state is seen by some Israeli politicians as rewarding Hamas, leading them to view the E1 proposals as a deliberate broadside against longtime allies whose statements are increasingly drifting away from their country.
“In the eyes of the right wing of Israeli politics, this is diplomatic pushback,” said David Weinberg, a fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. “But it’s diplomatic pushback that’s already on top of what have long been salient reasons, good reasons, for Israel wanting to build on E1.”
But for the Israeli right, the resounding triumph of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has drowned out such protests.
“The E1 plan was initiated three decades ago and it was always blocked due to American pressure,” said Lior Amihai, the executive director of Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy organization. “Now under Trump, they’re approving it. So certainly the lack of American resistance … enabled the Israeli government to approve it.”
The White House did not return a request for comment from NBC News about the E1 development.
Upon retaking office, Trump lifted Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers who had been implicated in repeated violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
In his first term, he moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognized all of the city as Israel’s capital. Most countries consider east Jerusalem to be occupied territory and do not recognize Israeli sovereignty. Israel, which captured east Jerusalem, including the Old City, from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, deems it as its eternal, indivisible capital.
So far this year, Israel has approved 25,000 settlement housing units in the West Bank, Amihai said, far surpassing the record of 12,000 units during the whole of 2020 — a massive increase Amihai credited in part to Trump because his administration had created “an environment where it’s easier for this government,” because “they don’t have to hide anything, they can say it vocally out loud.”
The additional units will accommodate the burgeoning growth of the 700,000 settlers the United Nations estimates already live in the West Bank in settlements widely considered illegal under international law.
Even as the E1 plan slogged through decades of bureaucratic and diplomatic obstacles, Israeli officials prepared the land some of their countrymen refer to as Judea and Samaria, using the biblical term, with a clear intention to develop it.
The Samaria and Judea Police District headquarters relocated there in 2008. Highways and other roadworks connecting Jerusalem and Maale Adumim’s infrastructure to the same largely uninhabited land have also been installed.
Once housing there is finished, Palestinian observers say the area will become closed to their community. Even those simply driving through from the Palestinian provisional capital of Ramallah to the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem will probably have to seek longer routes, they say.
Such detours shouldn’t preclude further agreements between Palestinians and Israelis, Weinberg said, even as he dismissed the notion of a Palestinian state under current circumstances.
“Instead of battering Israel, the West should be advancing realistic space-saving arrangements for Judea and Sumeria,” he said. “Israel’s need to build on E1 does not need to be a bar to an agreement with a serious Palestinian government.”
Yet the Israeli right wing has made its intentions known, Jabarin said. Such a sudden, strenuous assault on Palestinian statehood — particularly with American blessings — will require more than diplomatic rhetoric to reverse.
“Wording there, condemnations here — it doesn’t make any change,” he said. “It will not push Israel back in any way.”
