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For Israel’s settlement movement, this April was a moment of triumph. For years, the movement had lobbied the Israeli government to reverse its 2005 decision to remove multiple settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. This month, the lobbying paid off. Israel formally reestablished Sa-Nur, the last of four West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005, to be relegalized. The settlers, then, had finally removed all traces of the disengagement in the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Sa-Nur’s legalization as a “historic correction,” while settler leader Yossi Dagan claimed that Israel had finally managed to “turn back the clock.”

But Israel is doing far more than turning back the clock in the West Bank. It is creating a new reality that will—in Smotrich’s words—“kill” Palestinian statehood once and for all. Its chosen means for doing so are threefold: expanding settlements; forcing West Bank Palestinians into smaller physical spaces; and, above all, increasing the pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA).

For Israel’s settlement movement, this April was a moment of triumph. For years, the movement had lobbied the Israeli government to reverse its 2005 decision to remove multiple settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. This month, the lobbying paid off. Israel formally reestablished Sa-Nur, the last of four West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005, to be relegalized. The settlers, then, had finally removed all traces of the disengagement in the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Sa-Nur’s legalization as a “historic correction,” while settler leader Yossi Dagan claimed that Israel had finally managed to “turn back the clock.”

But Israel is doing far more than turning back the clock in the West Bank. It is creating a new reality that will—in Smotrich’s words—“kill” Palestinian statehood once and for all. Its chosen means for doing so are threefold: expanding settlements; forcing West Bank Palestinians into smaller physical spaces; and, above all, increasing the pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This campaign, which began before Oct. 7, 2023, but has subsequently escalated at an alarming pace, is now pushing the febrile status quo in the West Bank to the brink of collapse. Left unchecked, it risks undoing the post-Oslo status quo for good, bringing about the collapse of the PA and transforming what is currently one of Israel’s quietest borders into a quagmire of indefinite chaos.

Centrist Israelis frequently express frustration when the international community takes Smotrich’s messianic pronouncements as reflective of policy or public opinion. Yet when it comes to the West Bank, it is Smotrich who increasingly........

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