Post #5148

📰 Annexation by Spreadsheet: Netanyahu Tests Trump’s “Red Line” Israel has found a neat way to say “annexation” without moving a single checkpoint: call it land registration. The cabinet just approved a new mechanism to register huge chunks of the occupied West Bank — mostly in Area C, about 60 percent of the territory — as “state land,” in a process Palestinians and rights groups are bluntly calling de facto annexation. On paper, the Foreign Ministry sells it as an “administrative measure” to “bring order” to the cadaster. In reality, Smotrich and Levin are boasting that it will “strengthen our hold” and advance a “settlement and governance revolution” from “Judea and Samaria” onward — the quiet part isn’t even quiet anymore. The trick is in the fine print. Palestinian landowners will have to prove ownership through documentation systems that decades of occupation, Ottoman law, Jordanian rule and Israeli military orders have turned into a bureaucratic minefield. Fail to clear every hurdle and the land defaults to “state” — which in practice means cheaper, cleaner access for settlers, and a one‑way legal ratchet that converts living villages into zoning opportunities. Peace Now calls it a “massive land grab” and warns Trump that Netanyahu is “annexing right under your nose” after the U.S. president publicly vowed he wouldn’t allow formal annexation. The UN secretary‑general and the EU say it flatly violates international law; Israel shrugs and prints more forms. The move comes on top of earlier security‑cabinet decisions to ease settler land purchases, unseal land records, and expand Israeli enforcement powers even into Areas A and B, which were supposed to be under Palestinian Authority control under Oslo. Taken together, it’s a legal slow‑motion redraw of the map: settlers get more tools, more land and more state muscle; Palestinians get more demolitions, more dispossession, and a “peace process” that now consists of watching their future state transferred, parcel by parcel, into a database labeled “ours.” Trump, officially, is against annexation. Netanyahu, officially, says this is just housekeeping. Everyone else can see the punchline: if you change the law, the records and the enforcement until occupation becomes indistinguishable from sovereignty, you don’t need a ceremony or a flag‑raising. You’ve already moved the border — you just did it with a land registrar instead of a tank. #israel#palestine#westBank#settlements#annexation#fakeDemocracy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸