The current election campaign in Israel has thus far focused on embarrassing and even pathetic attempts to classify every party and candidate on a right-left platform, where even those defined as “leftists” do not suggest a diplomatic solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. At a time when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busy inciting against Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who before the election intends to announce his decision on whether to indict Netanyahu for corruption, members of his Likud are committing to burying the two states for two people concept in favor of advancing the annexation of the West Bank. That is, what four years ago, on the eve of the 2015 election, was considered a crazy idea that only right-wing extremists toyed with has become mainstream in the Likud. 

Thus on Feb. 5 Tourism Minister Yariv Levin said the following with great confidence: “The application of Israeli sovereignty over all of the Land of Israel is in my eyes not a question of if but how we do it and when we get to it. In my view, it should start with applying laws that have specific relevance not only for the residents themselves, but also for the territory.”

In fact, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked had already promised to apply state laws in civil matters on the West Bank, in January 2018. “We intend to normalize life in Judea and Samaria [West Bank],” she had said. “We are in the territory. There’s no occupied state that seeks to regain the occupied land.” 

Levin, like other Knesset members and ministers from the Likud (and other parties), have been recruited for the cause of annexing West Bank territories by the Sovereignty Movement, founded in 2010 by the right-wing activists Yehudit Katzover, of the Kiryat Arba settlement, and Nadia Matar, of Efrat, in the Etzion settlement bloc. The two also head a movement called Women in Green, which was established in 1993 following the signing of the Oslo Accords. The movement's popular name stems from its followers wearing green hats and demanding that Israel not return to the Green Line (border demarcation).