In a week dominated by US impeachment and mass protests in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bolivia and Hong Kong, one earth-shattering development gained infinitely less attention than it deserved: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the US no longer regards Israeli settlements on Palestinian land as illegal.

Even prior to this, the rate of announcements that fundamentally prejudice the Palestinian question has been dizzying: US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem, and later the Golan Heights, as Israeli; Israel’s plan to retrospectively legalize settlements; proposals from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet allies to annex much of the rural West Bank; US decisions to halt funding and deny Palestinian refugees’ right of return; and Netanyahu’s election pledge to annex the entire Jordan Valley.

In parallel, there has been a rapid upsurge in settlement construction and expansion. Benefitting from cheap house prices and state subsidies, 620,000 Israelis now live on occupied land — 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population.

Whereas settlers were once a crackpot messianic fringe movement, a succession of right-wing leaders since September 2000 (when the West Bank settler population, excluding East Jerusalem, was around 170,000) have succeeded in making the settlement enterprise synonymous with the Israeli state. With settlement blocs becoming a normalized, quasi-permanent part of Israel’s commuter belt, bank mortgages are now easily available.

Israel is meanwhile in an advanced state of political meltdown, heading toward its third inconclusive round of parliamentary elections. This is largely because Netanyahu has blocked any configuration in which he does not continue as prime minister; because he is determined to hold the country hostage to avoid stepping down over corruption charges.

This is against a backdrop of intensifying skirmishes with Iranian proxies. As well as the Syria and Lebanon borders being increasingly fissile, the recent escalation in Gaza is a reminder of how easily all-out conflict can erupt with little prior warning.

Jared Kushner’s “deal to end all deals” was a bad joke before it was farcically voided of all content by Trump’s lavish gifts to Netanyahu (what gifts are cheaper to give than those that are not yours in the first place?).

The settlement enterprise was never just about increased living space, but rather plunging a poisoned dagger into aspirations for Palestinian statehood.

Baria Alamuddin

The settlement enterprise was never just about increased living space, but rather plunging a poisoned dagger into aspirations for Palestinian statehood. The geographical distribution of over 250 settlements and outposts calculatedly dissects Palestinian land into ribbons, chokes off Palestinian access to East Jerusalem, and isolates population centers from one another.

The Jordan Valley (around one-third of the West Bank) only has around 11,000 Jewish settlers. Yet the seizure of military zones and “nature reserves” has left Palestinian farmers with only 12 percent of the land, in an area that once generated most of Palestine’s agricultural produce. Construction permits for Palestinians are almost impossible to obtain, and rudimentary shelters are routinely demolished.

Given that Trump’s unilateral stances on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the West Bank are also illegal and nakedly seek to help Netanyahu avoid jail, why has the Trump administration not already been hauled before the courts to answer for its gratuitous sabotage of regional security, along with enabling Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds?

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Arab uprisings, for decades Palestine was the principal grievance fueling regional instability and radicalization. Palestine became a central element of Al-Qaeda recruitment propaganda, and provided the central justification for Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah taking up arms and accepting Iranian funding.

The Palestine issue was thus the Trojan horse that allowed both Sunni radicalism and Iran-backed Shiite militancy to take root, despite the ayatollahs and the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden having little sympathy for the Palestinians.

With or without Arab and international backing, at some point the Palestinians, pushed by dispossession and destitution, will erupt in a new intifada (uprising). This is likely what Netanyahu wants, as it would provide a pretext to militarily crack down, steal additional land and further restrict civil freedoms.

What Netanyahu would never be able to grapple with would be a peaceful intifada of all 4.5 million Palestinians under occupation, along with nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Israel. Such a mass civil uprising would paralyze Israel’s capacity to respond, and force the Palestinian question back onto the international agenda.

Unilateral attempts to dictate Palestine’s status are further evidence that we no longer live in a global system rooted in international law. These measures violate so many UN resolutions, which for decades adopted consistent positions on Jerusalem, occupied land, refugees and other questions.

If international law is not imposed consistently and rigorously, then it is nothing. Dictators and warmongers will base their own genocidal, expansionist schemes on what Israel and Iran have been allowed to get away with.

With a further 5 million Palestinians living just outside Palestine’s borders, vacuous declarations of annexation are impotent against the time-bomb of demographics, necessitating that an Israeli state seeking to devour all of Palestine can never be a representative democracy, and may have to fully evolve into a military dictatorship in a doomed attempt to crush mass popular dissent.

Such a nakedly apartheid state would struggle to win public solidarity anywhere in the world, including among educated and conscientious Americans. With Israel wholly reliant on foreign funding and military aid, this drift toward pariah status erodes the fundamental tenets that ensure its very survival.

For their own ruthlessly partisan gain, Trump and Netanyahu boast that they have realized all of Zionism’s most grandiose ambitions. Instead, they have guaranteed its long-term demise.

• Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.