This is what former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once said: "Run and seize the hills. Seize one hill and another hill... as many hills as possible... expand the territory. Everything we seize will be ours, what isn't seized will be in their hands" (November 1988). With a 36-year delay and an ironic reversal of roles, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's sixth government is implementing the unwritten will of the man who was the greatest builder of the settlements and became their destroyer.
Without paying attention to it, the settlements, which tore the public apart in bitter ideological conflict for three generations, are being absorbed into the Israeli consensus. This is called normalization. Quantitatively, the numbers are almost fantastical – the current government has done work in Judea and Samaria in the past three years equivalent to what Sharon spread over his 16 years as minister, before he reversed course and changed his mind.
Remember former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's threats, "not even one stone," or the opposition of Democratic administrations in the US to retroactive legalization of illegal outposts? Well, in 2025 alone, 30,000 new housing units were advanced or built in Judea and Samaria. The current government has authorized close to 55 outposts and approved the establishment of 69 new settlements. Everything is on the table. Straightforward. Not crooked, without embarrassing tricks like "new neighborhood" or "military camp," supposedly. Add to that 144 new farms spanning about a million dunams (approximately 247,000 acres), grazing and desert areas that in the past were targets for illegal Palestinian construction; add also the return, military and settlement, to northern Samaria, and the cancellation of Sharon's destructive disengagement there – and you have a genuine drama.
Even a thousandth of all this would have toppled governments in Israel in the past and disrupted Washington-Jerusalem relations to the point of threats of sanctions, freezing aid, and arms embargoes. For President Donald Trump's administration, not only does this not matter – on the contrary, from his perspective, this construction freedom helps deflect pressure from the Republican base demanding sovereignty now. In a real way, not as an excuse – this construction, which will ultimately double the Jewish population in Judea and Samaria, is a kind of de facto sovereignty (sovereignty in practice); additional roots that Israel is planting in the ground, certainly stronger than de jure sovereignty (legal sovereignty) without action.
So how did we get here? How did this endless dispute become a relatively marginal issue?
Part of the change can be understood by returning to public opinion polls from before October 7. Reality today is different – a large majority opposes a Palestinian state and understands how dangerous it is. A smaller majority views the settlements as a security and Zionist "asset" rather than a "burden." More and more Israelis now understand that groundbreaking steps of unprecedented scope and depth in Judea and Samaria are needed to torpedo the nightmare scenario of a Palestinian state, so that a threat similar to Hamas won't sit on our necks and threaten population centers in the lowlands and coastal plain.
Even opponents of the settlements, whose media power exceeds their actual weight in the public, play a role in normalizing this enterprise. They have found another nemesis, even loftier and more important in their eyes than the settlers – Netanyahu. Bibi as an object of hatred surpasses the settlers for them, by far.
The prime minister himself contributes to normalization because he has tied his future and political survival to the Religious Zionism (political party) of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, architects of the change, in a way that no longer allows him to evade advancing the much-needed settlement revolution in the ancient territories of our homeland.
And suddenly, instead of putting sticks in the wheels, they're pulling them out; instead of convening the planning institutions in Judea and Samaria twice a year, they convene them twice a month. The lawyers who blocked and stopped almost everything are replaced by lawyers willing to help and advance, and authorities that were in the IDF's hands are transferred to the civilian level.
The organizing logic of the new trees in Judea and Samaria, which are reorganizing the forest for us, is embodied in the concept of continuity, or continuums. In E-1 (a strategic corridor east of Jerusalem), for example, the plan to connect Ma'ale Adumim to Jerusalem pits an Israeli settlement continuum from west to east toward the Dead Sea against a Palestinian continuum from north to south, from Ramallah to Bethlehem. From the Palestinian point of view, this continuum is vital for a Palestinian state, and precisely because of that, for us, it's a disaster. The question is who will complete building their continuum first.
An identical question lies before us in Atarot in northern Jerusalem, where a large Jewish neighborhood of about 9,000 housing units is planned. Its approval will be advanced, one hopes, after the prime minister returns from the US. "The plan, if implemented," the Peace Now website explains in words that no right-winger could formulate better, "will prevent the possibility of connecting east Jerusalem with the Palestinian surroundings and will practically prevent the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state..." Atarot, according to Peace Now, "is designed to create a wedge in the Palestinian continuum... (preventing) the Palestinian development of the most central and important metropolis in the future Palestinian state – the Jerusalem-Ramallah-Bethlehem metropolis."
This is, of course, exactly why Atarot, which is first and foremost a Zionist dream, is so vital and urgent. Examples of similar continuums are not lacking – Doran will connect between Negohot and Adura in the southern Hebron Hills; Sdema, over which Women in Green waged a fierce battle to prevent its transfer to the Palestinians. The government approved establishing a new settlement there that will contribute to the future continuum between eastern Gush Etzion and Jerusalem. Rehavam in Gush Shiloh also deepens Israeli hold near Highway 505 in the section between Kfar Tapuah and Migdalim in Samaria. So too Maalot Halhul, near the al-Aroub bypass road, is destined to become a significant point between Kiryat Arba and Gush Etzion.
The Alon Road, which for years experienced stone-throwing attacks, shootings, explosive devices, and Molotov cocktails, is now quiet after farms and outposts were established along it – "tower and stockade" (the rapid settlement method used in pre-state Israel) 2025 model. This is the case in dozens of other places, including in Wadi Haramiya, where Jews seized the hill from which ten soldiers and civilians were shot to death about 24 years ago in one of the worst attacks the area has experienced, and here you have renewed meaning – civilian and pioneering settlement – to the concept of security.
Even before de jure sovereignty (legal sovereignty) arrives, de facto sovereignty (sovereignty in practice) grows from below. Effectively no less, and perhaps even more. The State of Israel is clothing the ancient homeland territories in "concrete and mortar garments," building for generations. Sovereignty? That too will come.
