Promised land.

Byline: Mahir Ali

TODAY is the promised day for the Promised Land, the deadline Benjamin Netanyahu set himself for initiating his plan to annex Judea and Samaria, better known as the West Bank, and at least vaguely recognised internationally as Palestinian territory. At his latest - and perhaps last, though it would be imprudent to bet on it - swearing-in ceremony as the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu talked up the proposed annexation as 'another glorious chapter in the history of Zionism'.

During the third election campaign within 12 months, the prospect was dangled as bait to attract the right-wing vote. It wasn't a monumental success, given that Netanyahu's Likud party had to struggle to form a coalition, which now includes his most prominent rival, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, as defence minister and 'alternate prime minister'.

Gantz is not quite as enthusiastic about annexation as his boss but hardly in a position to oppose it outright. In fact, some of the strongest opposition comes from a slightly surprising source: the most virulent elements among the West Bank settler leadership.

It's not the idea of annexation itself that upsets them. It's the likelihood of a semi-annexation. The contours of Netanyahu's plan were unclear at the time of writing, but reports suggest it involves the Jordan Valley and about 30 per cent of the West Bank. According to the Trump administration's version of the plot, the ostensible idea is that the remaining 60pc or so would provide the basis for Palestinian 'statehood'.

Even the White House has switched its green light to amber.

That is far too ridiculous a proposition for even a halfwit to seriously entertain, so the more deeply embedded settlers' fears of being adjacent to, let alone surrounded by, a Palestinian state are unfounded, but their intolerance stretches to not wishing to live anywhere in the vicinity of territory where there is even a semblance of Palestinian self-rule.

Hence they favour total annexation of the West Bank. Many of them would probably be shocked to learn that such a stance effectively puts them on the same page as those on the left who argue that pushing the 1967 occupation to its logical conclusion - a goal that most Israeli regimes since then have at least secretly aspired to - would finally lay to rest the absurdist fiction of a 'two-state solution' and compel Israel to choose between either becoming a multiethnic democracy or formalising its long-standing...