A US official just made history in the West Bank — did he imperil prospects for peace?
Support for settlements is fundamentally incompatible with support for a democratic, Jewish-majority Israel
An Israeli flag flies along a highway near the settlement of Carmel in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank on Aug. 4. Photo by Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry August 5, 2025
When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited the Israeli settlement of Ariel on Monday, he made history — because no United States official of his rank has ever before set foot in a West Bank settlement.
And it wasn’t just the visit that mattered, but was what he said: Johnson declared that the “mountains of Judea and Samaria” belong to the Jewish people “by right,” quoting scripture and planting trees while flanked by Israeli settlers and Republican colleagues including Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Johnson may have thought he was offering solidarity with Israel. Instead, he produced a reckless endorsement of the very forces undermining the country’s long-term survival as a Jewish and democratic state. There’s a reason why senior U.S. officials have consistently avoided visits to West Bank settlements. It isn’t because they oppose a Jewish presence in biblical lands on principle, or dismiss Israeli security concerns, but because the settlements endanger not just peace, but Israel itself.
The West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since the end of the Six-Day War in 1967. It’s land that is claimed by the Palestinians, roughly three million of whom live there. Most of the world considers every settlement in it to be illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. And Israel has never granted West Bank Palestinians citizenship or voting rights in the state that, practically, controls their lives.
Israel knows it can’t annex the West Bank without causing serious problems. If it did, it would have to grant those 3 million Palestinians the rights of citizenship — or become an openly undemocratic state. So Israel has, instead, kept the West Bank in limbo, hoping the trick of non-annexation will make its avoidance of the rights question somehow OK.
It’s not. Some 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, a territory about the size of Delaware. But they exist under an entirely different legal regime.
They are citizens. They have civil rights, police protection, freedom of movement and access to Israeli national infrastructure, while their Palestinian neighbors face checkpoints, home demolitions and a near-total lack of legal recourse for the many wrongs they suffer.
This is the reality that has prompted an increasing number of international observers to use the term “apartheid.” While the comparison is technically inaccurate — unlike South Africa, there no legally enshrined caste system — the parallels are undeniably evocative. It is unsustainable and morally corrosive.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, especially since he allied with the far-right to build his current governing coalition, the settlement movement has become more brazen, leading to a higher proportion of settlements deep inside the West Bank. In May, the government announced approval for 22 new settlements in the territory, the most significant expansion in decades.
Which means the situation is only getting worse. Some settlements that sit near the Green Line — the pre-1967 border — could conceivably be absorbed into Israel through minor land swaps in a future agreement. But the many now placed deep inside Palestinian-claimed territory have carved up the land in ways that deliberately make the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state functionally impossible.
Many of them are home to violent extremists who rampage through Palestinian towns and villages with increasing frequency. These attacks, carried out in broad daylight and often with impunity, have become a frequent feature of life in parts of the West Bank. Even some of Israel’s allies have begun imposing sanctions on certain extremist settlers. The same day that Johnson made his misguided visit, a coalition of Democratic U.S. senators introduced a measure to begin ramping up consequences for Israeli settlers who engage in violence.
Johnson might have argued that he chose a relatively unproblematic settlement to visit. He’d be wrong. Ariel’s population of around 20,000 is more suburban than ideologically extreme. Yet its location is a major problem. It sits on hilltops so far into the West Bank that any future partition would require Israel to retain a long, narrow “finger” of land cutting through Palestinian territory just to connect Ariel with the rest of Israel.
That “finger” would bisect the West Bank at one of its most populated points. It’s a dagger into the very idea of a viable two-state solution.
Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has been trying to massage perceptions of the settlements’ legality, declaring them “not inconsistent with international law.” Johnson’s visit, and his support for a supposed Jewish right to territory in the West Bank, is likely meant to reaffirm that approach.
But legality is not the only issue here. Strategy is. The more the settlement movement grows, the more it cements a single-state reality in which Israel would permanently rule over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians. That is a demographic and moral dead end that guarantees perpetual conflict, isolation, and the eventual collapse of either Israel’s democracy or its Jewish majority.
Far-right Israelis don’t care about any of that. They think that Palestinians can be forever subjugated and perhaps be compelled to leave, and they hope to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which since the 1990s has run autonomy zones throughout the area. These islands of territory are disconnected from each other in a hodge-podge map created to accommodate, yes, the Israeli settlements.
Johnson’s visit thus, rather than showing support for Israel, aligns the Republican Party, the Trump administration and Americans in general with the people working to ensure that Israel cannot separate from the Palestinians — the only way it can survive as both Jewish and democratic.
The Johnson visit comes at a time when much of the democratic world is moving toward recognizing a Palestinian state — as a last-ditch effort to preserve the viability of the two-state solution before it collapses entirely. The United Kingdom, France, Canada, and others see recognition as the only lever left to keep both sides from sliding irreversibly into a one-state reality defined by endless conflict.
And while their approach has flaws, they’re not wrong about that danger.
It is worth remembering that in 2020, Trump himself proposed a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank — an imperfect but pragmatic plan that, had it been pursued, might have kept diplomacy alive. Instead, he and his allies now appear increasingly intent on placing the United States in defiance of nearly the entire rest of the world, undercutting the one framework for the Middle East that still commands broad international consensus.
This may be red meat for Evangelicals and the right-wing crowd, but it is poison for Israel.
