In February, we led a week-long congressional delegation to visit Israel and the West Bank, the latest of several trips we have taken in recent years to better understand the region and the needs of the people who live there. What we saw on the ground is clear: annexation of the West Bank is happening before our very eyes. We were planning to visit the village of Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja in the northern West Bank. But three weeks before the trip, all 700 residents of the village fled due to violence from nearby settlers. When we drove through the ruined remains of the village, we saw groups of Israeli settlers having a picnic. We were able to visit the village Fasa’il al-Wusta in the Jordan Valley. When we visited, six out of eight families had fled. Two weeks later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) demolished the home of the family we visited. Now only one of those families is left. As the world’s attention is fixed on the war that President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started with Iran, Israel’s far-right government is quietly pursuing full-scale annexation in the West Bank. What we saw was a microcosm.
In 1981, the Israeli government approved a plan titled "Settlement in Judea and Samaria – Strategy, policy and plans." Written by the then-head of the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Congress, it laid out the need for a surge of settlement in “areas between and around the centers occupied by the minorities so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements, the minority population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity.”
In other words: split up the Palestinian population so that they cannot form a government.
Today, there is not a single supporter of the two-state solution in Israel’s current governing coalition, and ministers frequently call to destroy the possibility of a two-state solution and encourage, in the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians. While we drove through the West Bank, we saw the execution of this plan firsthand. Under President Trump, it is getting worse, and quickly. President Trump insists that he won’t let Israel annex the West Bank. But under his administration, the Israeli far-right has accelerated its efforts.
In 2025 alone, Israel approved 54 new West Bank settlements . In President Joe Biden’s four years as president, it approved 14. Eighty-six new settlement outposts, which are illegal even under Israeli law, were established in 2025, and the Israeli government has allocated millions of dollars to support them. These new outposts serve as bases of operations for radical Israeli settlers to launch attacks against Palestinians. 2025 saw over 1,800 attacks, the highest number on record. Since the war with Iran began, settler violence has escalated further, averaging more than six attacks per day. These latest attacks have resulted in the murder of seven Palestinians and injuries to dozens more. Over the years, we have raised these issues with the highest levels of the Israeli government. They dismiss these attacks as the work of a handful of extremists. But the Israeli military has total security control in the parts of the West Bank where settlers attack innocent Palestinians every day. The Israeli government has allowed these attackers to roam free, with almost no arrests, indictments, or convictions. In fact, the IDF’s own rules of engagement mean that they protect Israelis, not Palestinians. When violent settlers invade Palestinian villages, the IDF will often escort them, standing aside while they attack Palestinians. This is exacerbated by the fact that, since October 7, many IDF reservist units in the West Bank have been drawn from the settlers who live there. Traveling in the Jordan Valley and the East Ramallah areas, we saw the consequences of this inaction: empty homes and markets, the hollowed-out remains of the 60 Palestinian communities displaced by settler violence since October 7. Israel’s support for settlements means the continuation of displacement and forced statelessness. Continuing to give Israel’s far-right government free rein over the West Bank is also a catastrophe for both Israel and the U.S. For Israel, annexation would deepen its international isolation and further erode its democratic foundations. It would also undermine its own security, as steps that deny the possibility of a Palestinian state discredit Palestinians who have pursued statehood through diplomatic means and empower violent actors like Hamas. The drive toward annexation coddles an extremist strain of Israeli society that benefits from chaos and shares no values with the United States. Annexation would also be a disaster for American foreign policy. It would threaten to destabilize Jordan and shred our credibility to oppose the acquisition of territory by force. It could mean the end of aspirations for Israel-Saudi normalization and the integration of Israel into a more stable region. After two and a half years of major instability in the region, the last thing that Israel or the United States needs is another policy that disrupts the peace process.
America cannot afford to be a bystander any longer. There are a number of steps that Congress and the next administration can take that would make a difference. Throughout 2024, we led over 80 lawmakers urging President Biden to sanction numerous violent Israeli settlers and organizations undermining security and stability in the West Bank, as well as extremists like Smotrich in the Israeli cabinet who have promoted violence against Palestinians. The Biden administration ultimately sanctioned several of those bad actors, only for President Trump to revoke the designations the day he was sworn in, which made the situation on the ground even worse. Those sanctions should be restored. Over half of our Democratic colleagues in the House and almost all in the Senate have joined us in supporting the West Bank Violence Prevention Act , which would bring back the sanctions that Trump revoked. It is long past the time for that bill to be voted on. Additionally, as long as the Israeli government continues to incentivize Israelis to move to the West Bank, we should prevent Israelis living there from being part of the United States’ visa waiver program, which permits them to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without obtaining a visa. This would disrupt the networks of settlement organizations that operate in the West Bank and the United States and show that we will no longer afford special treatment to settlers. As long as Israel’s government is engaged in illegal efforts to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state, there can be no progress towards peace. The United States cannot turn a blind eye to this injustice any longer.