Three days before the Knesset formally dispersed, Bezalel Smotrich announced that the security cabinet had approved NIS 1.3 billion for the establishment of 34 West Bank settlements. He also pointed to a further NIS 1.075 billion for settlement roads—the infrastructure through which temporary sites become connected communities and political intentions acquire durable geography. The sequence was presented as another achievement of the finance minister, but its timing makes it impossible to treat it as an ordinary budgetary announcement.

By then, Smotrich had also declared that plans for three settlements in northern Gaza had been prepared and required only Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. He was not presenting an abstract ideological vision or asking the electorate to consider a remote possibility. The plans existed, the locations had been selected, and the remaining obstacle was described as political authorization from the prime minister.

The obvious explanation is electoral. Smotrich leads a party fighting for its parliamentary survival and must persuade its constituency that no one else can convert theological geography into state action with comparable efficiency. Yet electoral theatre usually consists of promises about what a politician will do after receiving a mandate. Smotrich is doing something more consequential: constructing conditions that will confront the electorate as accomplished or partially accomplished facts before it has issued its next mandate.

That distinction should direct public attention away from Smotrich’s personality and toward the architecture within which he operates. He did not grant himself jurisdiction over the civilian administration of the West Bank, nor could he convert ministerial ambition into roads, budgets and legal recognition without the cooperation of the government. His power was allocated through a coalition agreement, protected by Netanyahu and embedded in the machinery of the state.

The extraordinary arrangement negotiated in 2022 gave Religious Zionism extensive authority over planning, construction, demolitions, appointments and civilian policy in the territories. The coalition agreement also committed the government to advancing Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, subject to Netanyahu’s political discretion. No hidden agreement is therefore required to explain the direction of the policy, because that direction was written in public even if much of the political center preferred to interpret it as rhetorical compensation offered to an inconvenient coalition partner.

What remains unexplained is the concentration of decisions, the acceleration of funding and the creation of potentially irreversible territorial arrangements at the moment when ordinary parliamentary scrutiny was about to end. The relevant question is no longer simply what Smotrich wants, since he has never concealed it. The question is what he may have been authorized to complete before the electorate was given another opportunity to intervene.

This possibility cannot yet be established as fact, but it........

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