The Agreement We Were Never Shown
Three days before the Knesset formally dispersed, Bezalel Smotrich announced that the security cabinet had approved NIS 1.3 billion for the establishment of 34 West Bank settlements. He also pointed to a further NIS 1.075 billion for settlement roads—the infrastructure through which temporary sites become connected communities and political intentions acquire durable geography. The sequence was presented as another achievement of the finance minister, but its timing makes it impossible to treat it as an ordinary budgetary announcement.
By then, Smotrich had also declared that plans for three settlements in northern Gaza had been prepared and required only Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. He was not presenting an abstract ideological vision or asking the electorate to consider a remote possibility. The plans existed, the locations had been selected, and the remaining obstacle was described as political authorization from the prime minister.
The obvious explanation is electoral. Smotrich leads a party fighting for its parliamentary survival and must persuade its constituency that no one else can convert theological geography into state action with comparable efficiency. Yet electoral theatre usually consists of promises about what a politician will do after receiving a mandate. Smotrich is doing something more consequential: constructing conditions that will confront the electorate as accomplished or partially accomplished facts before it has issued its next mandate.
That distinction should direct public attention away from Smotrich’s personality and toward the architecture within which he operates. He did not grant himself jurisdiction over the civilian administration of the West Bank, nor could he convert ministerial ambition into roads, budgets and legal recognition without the cooperation of the government. His power was allocated through a coalition agreement, protected by Netanyahu and embedded in the machinery of the state.
The extraordinary arrangement negotiated in 2022 gave Religious Zionism extensive authority over planning, construction, demolitions, appointments and civilian policy in the territories. The coalition agreement also committed the government to advancing Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, subject to Netanyahu’s political discretion. No hidden agreement is therefore required to explain the direction of the policy, because that direction was written in public even if much of the political center preferred to interpret it as rhetorical compensation offered to an inconvenient coalition partner.
What remains unexplained is the concentration of decisions, the acceleration of funding and the creation of potentially irreversible territorial arrangements at the moment when ordinary parliamentary scrutiny was about to end. The relevant question is no longer simply what Smotrich wants, since he has never concealed it. The question is what he may have been authorized to complete before the electorate was given another opportunity to intervene.
This possibility cannot yet be established as fact, but it cannot be dismissed merely because no document has appeared. Is Smotrich completing the program agreed in 2022, or is he executing the territorial portion of a later bargain reached before the Knesset dispersed? Was support for the controlled conclusion of the parliamentary term, the coalition’s final legislative campaign or the reconstruction of the same governing bloc after the election exchanged for a schedule of decisions that had to be secured before voters could obstruct them?
There may be no secret document. Political agreements are not always written, signed and deposited in an archive where they wait to be discovered by an investigative reporter. They can exist as reciprocal permissions, understood deadlines and carefully sequenced acts in which each participant knows what must be delivered, what must remain publicly deniable and which commitments are valuable precisely because they become difficult to reverse.
Israeli politics has never been innocent of such transactions, but the currency matters. One coalition partner can be compensated through legislation, appointments or exemptions, while another can be compensated through roads, budgets, jurisdictional transfers and new communities placed on contested land. Some political debts are paid in offices; others are paid in geography.
Geographical payment is particularly powerful because it survives the coalition that authorizes it. A minister can be removed, a party can fall below the electoral threshold and a government can be replaced, but a road does not resign. A settlement supplied with infrastructure, legal recognition, military protection and a dedicated budget does not return to the condition of a proposal merely because the electorate changes its mind.
This is the political function of irreversibility. Smotrich does not need to win the next election in order to capture part of the period that follows it. He needs to ensure that any future government will inherit a landscape whose reversal would demand more political courage, administrative effort and social conflict than its preservation.
His method is therefore more sophisticated than formal annexation. A declaration of annexation would provoke immediate legal, diplomatic and political confrontation because it would identify a decisive moment, a responsible government and a recognizable change in status. Administrative annexation distributes the same movement across planning committees, ministerial powers, budget lines, roads, outpost legalization, land registration, military protection and differential enforcement.
No single act appears sufficient to alter the formal legal status of the territory. Their accumulation nevertheless determines who can build, who can move, whose presence receives infrastructure, whose construction is treated as a security threat and whose unauthorized initiative is later absorbed into state policy. Sovereignty appears not as a proclamation but as an asymmetry made routine.
This is also why settler violence cannot be understood solely through the familiar language of a state losing control over extremists. Loss of control suggests that the government seeks one outcome while undisciplined actors repeatedly produce another. Yet the political system can retain the territorial benefits generated by settler pressure while classifying the violence itself as an aberration to be investigated, condemned or attributed to an unruly fringe.
The state need not order every incursion, attack or unauthorized creation of a new fact. It can distance itself from the first move, allow the resulting confrontation to be translated into a security problem and then reorganize its consequences through closures, military deployments, planning decisions and additional protection for settlements. What appears as institutional weakness may therefore function as selective non-control: initiative is privatized, liability is dispersed and the resulting geography is ratified by public power.
Smotrich understands this mechanism unusually well. His achievement has not been to persuade the country formally to endorse every element of his program, but to place himself where state classification becomes material reality. He does not need to win every public argument about annexation when he can influence the administrative procedures that determine which communities receive roads, which outposts acquire recognition and which Palestinian possibilities become inaccessible before any great constitutional or diplomatic debate begins.
The government’s responsibility cannot be dissolved into the claim that Smotrich is simply being Smotrich. Netanyahu chose to provide him with an institutional apparatus proportionate to his ambitions and then maintained that arrangement throughout the coalition’s term. A prime minister cannot grant another minister the instruments of territorial transformation, approve the governmental machinery required for their use and later present the consequences as the private enthusiasm of an ideological subordinate.
Smotrich may be the operator, but the machine is governmental. His program passes through cabinet decisions, public budgets, ministerial jurisdictions, military protection and administrative procedures that depend upon the participation or acquiescence of institutions far beyond Religious Zionism. The insistence on treating him as a solitary radical performs a useful political service: it allows the system that made him effective to appear moderate by comparison.
The central democratic question is therefore not whether Smotrich’s intentions are known. He has expressed them with a clarity rare in political life. The question is what Netanyahu and the other coalition leaders authorized, promised or silently accepted in order to preserve their government, conclude its term on their preferred conditions and prepare the alliances upon which their return to power may depend.
Citizens are entitled to know whether they are entering an election in which territorial policy remains genuinely open or one in which decisive commitments have already been converted into administrative momentum. They are entitled to know whether the next government will choose among available futures or merely administer obligations inherited from a bargain that was never presented to the public.
Formal elections do not guarantee democratic choice when the most consequential alternatives have been removed in advance. The public may still elect the Knesset from which the next government will be formed, but it cannot meaningfully decide the future if the outgoing government has already arranged that some futures will arrive with roads, budgets and armed protection while others survive only as theoretical possibilities.
This is not simply a dispute over whether a caretaker or outgoing government retains the legal authority to act. Legal authority does not exhaust democratic legitimacy, particularly when decisions are designed to outlive the government making them. The more irreversible the consequence, the stronger the obligation to disclose the political bargain, administrative sequence and strategic purpose that produced it.
The Knesset dispersed on July 17, and elections are scheduled for October 27. The government, however, did not cease operating when parliamentary life entered its electoral suspension. Budgets continue to move, plans continue to mature, approvals continue to be granted, and the material effects of political commitments can accumulate while public attention is redirected toward campaigns, personalities and polls.
An election conducted under these conditions risks becoming less a decision about the future than a retrospective judgment on a future already materially constrained. Voters may dismiss the architects of the policy while remaining bound by the roads they financed, the jurisdictions they transferred and the settlements they placed beyond easy reversal. Electoral defeat would then remove the authors without dissolving the architecture.
A few days ago, in “If We Decide,” I examined Smotrich’s grammar of absolute victory. His formula was direct: if “we” decide to conquer, liberate and settle parts of Gaza, “that is what will happen.” Settlement would retain the army, the army would produce permanence, and permanence would receive the name of security.
The final question in that article concerned responsibility: would those included in Smotrich’s political “we” accept responsibility for the decision made in their name? Placed beside the commitments converted into budgets, roads and territorial preparations before the Knesset dispersed, that question now reveals an earlier and more disturbing problem. Responsibility becomes almost ceremonial when the public is summoned only after the decision has migrated elsewhere.
When Smotrich says, “If we decide,” does the decision still belong to the public that will vote in October, or to a closed circle capable of transforming coalition obligations into infrastructure and territorial facts before the ballots are counted? Perhaps the agreement was never shown because it was never written as a document; perhaps it was written directly onto the map.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
