Israel Abolishes Land-Sale Ban, Extends Civil Powers into Areas A & B of West Bank

This manoeuvre echoes Israel’s 1980 Basic Law that formally annexed East Jerusalem and the 1981 Golan Heights Law—both incremental steps that were later normalised despite initial global censure. Structurally, it continues a century-long settler-colonial pattern seen in the 1862 US Homestead Act or South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act: change the paperwork first, then the demographics. By hollowing out the 1993 Oslo framework and the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the move signals a pivot from ‘conflict management’ to unambiguous territorial incorporation, eroding the two-state paradigm that has underpinned diplomacy since UN GA Resolution 181 in 1947. Over a 100-year horizon, this could entrench a single polity stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean—either an unequal ethnonational state or, if pressure mounts, a rights-based binational model—fundamentally recasting Israeli-Palestinian relations and the wider Middle-East alignment long after today’s leaders are gone.