DaysofPal – In a move reflecting a shift in Israel’s settlement enterprise from gradual expansion to comprehensive strategic planning, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced the launch of what is known as the “Million Plan” in the occupied West Bank. The initiative, one of the largest settlement projects unveiled by the Israeli government in recent years, carries an estimated cost of approximately 2.7 billion shekels.
The plan no longer treats settlements as isolated residential clusters but rather as a single, integrated urban entity. Its stated objective is to directly connect all settlements across the occupied West Bank to the “Gush Dan” metropolitan area inside Israel, a move widely seen as an attempt to transform the West Bank into a geographic and economic extension of Israel’s central region.
A Blueprint for Permanent Control
According to details released by Israeli officials, the plan includes large-scale development of settlement infrastructure, covering road networks, electricity, and water systems, as well as logistical and economic corridors linking settlements to Israel proper. The project is set to unfold over a period of five to seven years, entrenching irreversible realities on the ground that would be difficult to dismantle politically.
The implications of the “Million Plan” extend far beyond urban expansion. The initiative seeks to fundamentally reshape the geography and demography of the West Bank by increasing the number of settlers to around one million. Such a demographic transformation would directly undermine any future prospects for a contiguous and viable Palestinian state.
Observers argue that the plan amounts to de facto annexation without a formal political declaration, allowing Israel to administer the West Bank as an internal space while avoiding the international repercussions that an official annexation announcement would likely trigger.
Settlement Acceleration and Demographic Engineering
The plan’s announcement comes amid an unprecedented acceleration in settlement activity across the West Bank. This includes the approval of thousands of new settlement housing units, the retroactive legalization of outposts previously deemed illegal, the expansion of settlement councils’ authority, and increased pressure on Palestinian towns and villages through land confiscations and the construction of bypass roads.
This broader landscape reflects a transformation of settlement policy from a negotiating tool into a full-scale sovereignty project, driven by a right-wing government that views the West Bank as “Israeli land” whose fate must be determined on the ground.
Settlement affairs expert Suheil Khalilieh described the “Million Plan” as an advanced stage of creeping annexation, even without an official declaration. Speaking to our correspondent, Khalilieh said that linking West Bank settlements to Gush Dan effectively strips the Green Line of its political and legal significance, turning the West Bank into a geographic and economic extension of Israel.
He added that the plan is based on long-term settlement engineering designed to create uninterrupted settlement continuity, fragment Palestinian geography, and encircle population centers. Such measures, he warned, would eliminate any realistic possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state, or even a viable form of self-rule.
Khalilieh cautioned that implementing the plan would lead to expanded land seizures and deeper spatial segregation through bypass roads and settlement jurisdiction zones, transforming Palestinian cities and villages into isolated enclaves within a vast settlement-dominated landscape.
He stressed that the “Million Plan” is neither a housing nor a development initiative, but rather a comprehensive geopolitical control mechanism aimed at imposing irreversible facts on the ground ahead of any future political process.
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