The finance minister of Israel does not say “the West Bank.” He has never had much use for that phrase. In the vocabulary of Bezalel Smotrich — far-right ideologue, settler camp’s man in the treasury, and custodian of the government’s purse strings — the occupied territory is Judea and Samaria, the biblical map laid over the modern one. And in an interview published Sunday by Ynet News, Smotrich reached for that biblical geography and then went considerably further down the road than he has ever gone in public: the Israeli military, he said, should make war there.
go to war in Judea and Samaria, to do there what we did in Gaza, to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is a terror authority
To do there what we did in Gaza. Let that sentence sit in the air for a moment. The Palestinian Authority — the body that administers the West Bank’s Palestinian cities and coordinates with Israel on security — is, in Smotrich’s formulation, no partner, no administration, but “a terror authority” to be dismantled, in a campaign modelled on the war that has flattened Gaza’s cities over three years, a landscape in which, as a CBC News investigation found, neighbourhoods lie levelled and military bases stand where families say their dead are buried.
And the timing! The remarks landed on the very day Israeli authorities announced a week-long comprehensive military closure across the occupied West Bank — the whole territory sealed, crossings shut — with the reason given being the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. So: the gates close for the holiday, the army locks the territory down, and the minister who controls the money goes on the record proposing that the gates stay effectively closed forever.
A long march to Sunday’s sentence
None of this arrived out of a clear sky. Smotrich has spent years telling anyone who would listen exactly what he intends for the territory. At a 2024 meeting of his Religious Zionism faction, he was recorded saying he was “establish[ing] facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria an integral part of the state of Israel,” as the Guardian reported. Later that year he pushed openly for annexation of the settlements, calculating — as CNN reported at the time — that a supportive White House might let him do it. And this February, per Al Jazeera’s account, new rules opened the way for Jews to buy land in “Judea and Samaria” — in the announcement’s own framing — just as they would in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Rews has reported from the ground on how that quiet absorption looks parcel by parcel: the springs requisitioned, the archaeological site rebranded, the fences creeping outward.
Sunday’s words, though, were of a different register entirely. Not bureaucracy, not land registries, not “facts on the ground” — but war, named as such, on the Gaza model, declared desirable by the man second only to the defence establishment in his reach over the territory he insists on calling by another name. What the interview means in operational terms — whether the army, the cabinet, or anyone with the authority to act shares the minister’s appetite — the reporting so far does not say. What it does say, quite plainly, is what the finance minister wants, and he has never been a man in the habit of hiding his wants.