President Trump’s statements on Tuesday about an American takeover of the Gaza Strip and displacing millions of Palestinians were immediately dismissed by many as reckless and half-baked pronouncements, a provocative threat that Mr. Trump was unlikely to enforce.
At the same time, his comments are the latest example of how government officials on the right in both the United States and Israel now speak publicly about a shared goal: the takeover of Palestinian land.
The question of whether the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — territories captured and occupied by Israel in 1967 — might become the foundation of a future Palestinian state has been at the center of decades of failed diplomacy, bedeviling American presidents, Palestinian leaders and Israeli prime ministers.
While the prospects for this future dimmed long ago, Mr. Trump’s election has newly emboldened right-wing ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and some of Mr. Trump’s own appointees, to speak publicly about Israel’s right to fully take over the West Bank.
“It’s the most right-wing government that we’ve ever had in Israel — and there never was a U.S. administration that shared these views to this extent, either,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.
Days after Mr. Trump’s election, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, whom Mr. Netanyahu has given broad authority over the West Bank, said Mr. Trump’s return to the White House meant that “the year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the territory that makes up the West Bank.
During his news conference with Mr. Netanyahu on Tuesday, Mr. Trump was asked directly whether he supported Israeli annexation of the West Bank. He declined to answer, saying that his administration would have an announcement in “four weeks.”
But he has already appointed at least two people to his administration — Elise Stefanik, his choice to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Mr. Trump to be ambassador to Israel — who hold views similar to Mr. Smotrich and his allies.
During her confirmation hearing, Ms. Stefanik was asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, whether she shared Mr. Smotrich’s view that Israel had a biblical right to the entire West Bank.
She said she did.
In an interview, Mr. Van Hollen said that “there is a very dangerous alignment right now” between American and Israeli officials on the issue of Palestinian self-determination.
“Now we have someone in the White House who wants to greenlight the dreams of far-right extremists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir,” he said, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently resigned as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security minister over the cease-fire deal in Gaza.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order reversing the Biden administration’s sanctions against a group of Israeli settlers responsible for violence and land grabs against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israeli annexation of the West Bank is a goal shared by both ultranationalists in Israel and many evangelical Christians, including Mr. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, who see the conflict in the Middle East — and the power struggle over the land itself — as a sign of the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Mr. Huckabee has said that “there’s no such thing as a West Bank.” He said that Israeli settlements in the territory, which are considered illegal under international law, are not settlements but “neighborhoods.”
“There’s no such thing as an occupation,” he said during a visit to the West Bank in 2017.
An American or Israeli takeover of Palestinian land would all but scuttle the chances of another diplomatic prize that Mr. Trump said he seeks: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has said that Israel must take concrete steps toward an independent Palestinian state if there is any chance for the kingdom to officially recognize Israel.
Hours after Mr. Trump’s news conference, the Saudi foreign ministry issued a statement saying that “the establishment of the Palestinian state is a firm, unwavering position” of the kingdom.
With Mr. Trump’s ambitions for the region in possible conflict, Mr. Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador, said he thought the president could ultimately be persuaded to block an Israeli push toward West Bank annexation.
“If he wants a Saudi deal, then he won’t go along with annexation,” Mr. Rabinovich said.
Since returning to office in 2022, Mr. Netanyahu has become increasingly blunt about his opposition to Palestinian sovereignty. After years of equivocating on the issue, he boasted last year that “my insistence is what has prevented, over the years, the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel.”
As his coalition prepared to enter office in December 2022, it issued a declaration of the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and pledged to bolster Jewish settlement in all areas, including the occupied West Bank.
Since then, Mr. Netanyahu has made good on that pledge by granting Mr. Smotrich vast new powers over West Bank governance. Critics denounced the move — which gave Mr. Smotrich, a civilian, authority over matters previously overseen by the military — as a form of de facto annexation.
And Mr. Smotrich himself described the move last year as an attempt to seal Israel’s control over the territory without being accused of formally annexing it.
Analysts see Mr. Netanyahu’s most recent appointments to government as an effort to cement that opportunity. His new ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, is a West Bank settler who had been a spokesman for the settler movement.
Caroline Glick, an adviser to Mr. Netanyahu appointed in recent days who accompanied the prime minister to Washington this week, has long pushed for Israel to annex the West Bank and rejects Palestinian statehood.
And, even though he recently left Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Mr. Ben-Gvir remains an influential voice among the prime minister’s supporters. Shortly after Mr. Trump’s statements on Tuesday, Mr. Ben-Gvir took to social media to give his enthusiastic support.
“Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he wrote.
