Last Tuesday, Israel put out tenders for 1,234 homes in E1, the area of the West Bank sandwiched between Jerusalem and the major settlement of Maale Adumim. Putting out tenders is essentially an opportunity for construction companies to bid on contracts, but this is no normal construction project.
For three decades, Israeli building in E1 has been a red line for Western governments that support a two-state solution because it would disrupt north-south traffic for Palestinians moving across the territory and disconnect the West Bank from East Jerusalem. This is why no Israeli government has taken it this far.
Under the published tenders, the deadline for submissions is October 19, a week before the Knesset election.
Some supporters of Israel believe that the importance of E1 is being overemphasized, since bypass roads make contiguity feasible.
“Stop making arguments that are debunked by anyone with access to a map,” wrote American Jewish pundit Seth Mandel in response to warnings that E1 imperils a two-state outcome.
The road meant to preserve that contiguity, the so-called Fabric of Life route, was first approved in 2020 and funded in March 2025. As of July, the Transport Ministry was still announcing the allocation for its paving. The tenders for E1 went out last week.
If Mandel and people like him are so confident that E1 is not an issue for a future resolution to the conflict, it’s worth asking why Bezalel Smotrich himself states that he is pushing for E1 in order to do away with the concept of a Palestinian state (Mandel brushes this off as mere electioneering). Moreover, anyone with a map can see that the space for Palestinians to move between the northern and southern West Bank would be increasingly narrowed to a thin strip between Maale Adumim and the settlements of the Jordan Valley.
If the threat to a prospective Palestinian state isn’t compelling, then at least the specter of Western sanctions might rouse some Israelis’ attention.
The next day, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called in Israel’s chargé d’affaires and promised sanctions against anyone taking part in settlement expansion. Britain then issued a joint statement alongside France, Germany, and Italy warning construction companies that taking part in the tender could mean they would be in breach of international law.
By Thursday, Channel 13 in Israel was reporting that the EU had drawn up a package of sanctions to be activated if construction begins, including labeling all Israeli products and suspending parts of security agreements.
On Thursday evening, the right-wing journalist Amit Segal published a column in Israel Hayom arguing that including Itamar Ben-Gvir in a senior role in the next Israeli government would be a disaster.
Ben-Gvir replied, saying the column hit him like a fist to the stomach. On Saturday night, Segal went on Channel 12 and said the thing that could get Israel sanctioned is Ben-Gvir. Not even Smotrich.
Amit Segal is the only real pro-Netanyahu figure with mainstream appeal in Israeli media. He’s also made recent inroads toward building an English-speaking audience with appearances on the Call Me Back podcast and his own Substack.
In his response to Ben-Gvir, Segal agreed that preventing a Palestinian state is crucial to Israeli security, but that Ben-Gvir is compromising that goal for optics and TikTok likes.
The first reason for Segal’s comments is strategic: Ben-Gvir makes it harder for someone like Smotrich to kill the chance of a future Palestinian state. It’s not that Smotrich is less radical than Ben-Gvir, but he’s a little more circumspect. Ben-Gvir is a loud populist who loves media attention and grabs the headlines, but in practice he is not a savvy policymaker. He has succeeded in changing Israel’s police and prison system, but it’s more about the publicity stunts than the tachles (substance). Case in point: the crocodiles Ben-Gvir placed outside a prison.
Smotrich is the opposite. The Israeli right learned from the judicial reform that doing things under the radar was more effective. Smotrich, who holds the influential posts of finance minister and minister in the defense ministry, has spent this term working to change Israeli realities in the West Bank, and the result has been de facto annexation. That’s why there have been no formal declarations of Israeli control over the territories, but there have been significant changes on the ground.
Segal shares the far-right’s goal of killing any chance of a Palestinian state, but he belongs to the Smotrich school that would rather do it with minimal attention. That is the same reason he came out against settler violence. Not because it upsets him deeply, but because it makes it harder to change the facts on the ground with the world watching.
The second reason that Segal is coming out against Ben-Gvir is political. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit is the only coalition party the polls show gaining rather than losing. It’s eating into Netanyahu’s base and polling at 9 seats, with Netanyahu’s Likud hitting a year-long low at 20 seats, according to the latest Maariv poll.
Ben-Gvir also has more mainstream appeal than Bezalel Smotrich, whose support is mostly confined to West Bank settlements. The national security minister goes out and talks to sectors of Israeli society beyond the national religious, as he did with his recent interview on the October 8 podcast. Ben-Gvir warns voters that Netanyahu seeks to form a broad unity government without him, a scenario that seems unlikely. Segal speaks to this audience, and if he says that Ben-Gvir is causing damage, people pay attention. It also positions Segal as more moderate within the Israeli public.
There’s a limit to how far this act can go. Netanyahu still needs a coalition that will provide him legal cover, and a unity government with Eisenkot or Bennett-Lapid won’t. Segal can make the case, but Netanyahu can’t actually assemble a government without Ben-Gvir’s seats.
The other read is that Ben-Gvir may simply be more toxic to swing voters deciding between the pro-Netanyahu and opposition blocs, and that Segal may mean every word of what he says. Segal writes in his column that in every American Jewish community he’s visited, however Orthodox and right-wing, he heard how hard it is to defend a government Ben-Gvir sits in, and that quotes from Ben-Gvir’s X account travel quickly across the ocean.
Boker tov, Amit!
Both statements could be true, but the E1 saga illustrates that the threat to Israel is bigger than any one provocateur. On the day Segal warned about Ben-Gvir, it was the “quiet” Smotrich who brought Israel the threat of sanctions. Smotrich appears twice in Segal’s column, but only for seat projections. If his real concern is indeed the sanctions, he would have picked a different target.
I’m watching whether other Likud allies make the argument about Ben-Gvir in September, and also whether Netanyahu will rule out a government with the far-right firebrand. He promised not to sit with Ben-Gvir in February 2021, and failed to keep that promise.
Ben-Gvir is ideologically disposable exactly because he makes a lot of noise but brings about little except for harsher treatment of Palestinian prisoners and expanded gun licenses. Segal wants the two-state solution dead too. He just wants it done cheaply and without fanfare. What happens next with E1 will show that the sanctions land on Israel regardless of which minister kills the two-state solution or how quietly it’s done.
What strikes me here is the difference between ministers and mechanisms. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric matters; it can normalize what was once beyond the pale. But ministers eventually leave office. Houses, roads, transferred authority and altered facts on the ground can outlive them.
Perhaps that is the deeper warning in E1: we naturally watch the politician making the most noise, when the more consequential question may be what he—or the quieter man beside him—leaves behind that the next government cannot easily undo.
As far as I can tell Eisenkot is also pretty strongly against 2SS and has advocated for Jordan Valley annexation?