Inside Israel’s 2026 Plan to Ethnically Cleanse the West Bank
What Israeli newspapers, planning documents, and official statements reveal about the next year of the settlement enterprise.
“If 2025 was the year of a revolution in decisions and a shift in policy, 2026 will be the year of the ground. You will see feet on the land.”
—Senior settlement official, speaking to Ynet this week
Now is the time when Substackers make predictions about the coming year. Fortunately for me, the subjects of my reporting proudly telegraph their every move, making prediction less a matter of prophecy than of listening closely to what the leaders of the settlement movement and their allies are already saying—and following those statements to their logical conclusions.
In short, here is my prediction for the occupied West Bank in 2026: Everything is going to get worse. The violence, the ethnic cleansing, the settlement building. All of it.
To get there, I spent the past two weeks combing through Israeli headlines, op-eds, and planning documents that spell out, in plain language, the settlement movement’s plans.
For those of us in New York, that future is already being marketed at select local synagogues, which continue to host settlement fairs, real-estate events, and information sessions offering step-by-step guidance on buying into the settlement enterprise, carefully whitewashed of the bloodshed that sustains it. And because that distortion is reinforced by headlines and condemnations fixated on the protesters outside, it is more important than ever to understand the machinery behind this movement and what it is preparing to unleash in 2026.