There has never been an American president more supportive of Israel than Donald Trump, which is why, in order to solidify its claim to Judea and Samaria, Israel must annex all or part of the territory while Trump is still in office. We cannot take the chance of waiting until after the next presidential elections, when we could be faced with a new president who will more than likely not support Israel as much as Trump and could even be a strong critic of Israel.
Now, of course, annexation brings with it problems that are obvious to those who are familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The biggest problem may be how to deal with the demographic changes that would occur if Israel were to annex the West Bank. Say, for example, that Israel were to formally annex the territory and give all of its Palestinian residents Israeli citizenship with all the rights and privileges associated with it. The Jewish state would then be adding around 3 million Arab citizens. That means that after adding these new citizens to the 1.8 million Arabs who already have Israeli citizenship, Israel would have around 4.8 million Palestinian Arab citizens. Jews, with a population of more than 6 million, would still form the majority in the country, but not for long as the Arab birthrate, especially in the West Bank, far exceeds that of Israeli Jews. Eventually, Israel would be faced with a scenario where the majority of its citizens would be Arab, not Jewish, which would be the end of the Zionist project and Jewish independence. Therefore, to preserve Israel as a Jewish state, the country will have to come up with a way of annexing the West Bank without annexing all of its people.
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To do this, Israel should annex parts of the West Bank that do not have a large Palestinian population. This is an idea that has been proposed by several right-wing Israeli politicians. Many of them propose that Israel annex Area C, as it is known in the context of the Oslo Accords, which would give Israel the majority of the West Bank's territory without absorbing most of the Palestinian population that resides in Areas A and B. Critics of this idea claim that this would all but kill the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it would not give Palestinians enough land on which to build a viable state, and a Palestinian state comprising Areas A and B would not be contiguous but would be split into unconnected pieces and completely surrounded by Israel.
These critics are wrong.
It is possible for Israel to annex Area C and still leave Palestinians with enough land on which to build a state of their own. The West Bank in its entirety is 5,655 square kilometers (2,183 square miles). Area C represents 61% of the West Bank, which leaves the Palestinians with 39%. That means the Palestinians would have 2,205 square kilometers (851 square miles). Together with the Gaza Strip, which is 365 square kilometers, the approximately 5 million Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would have a total of 2,570 square kilometers (992 square miles). To put this in perspective, Singapore is just 721.5 square kilometers (279 square miles) and has a population of 5.8 million people. But despite its size, the East Asian city-state has managed to make itself into an economic powerhouse. If Singapore, with a population slightly higher than that of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, can build a dynamic, modern and prosperous state with just 721.5 square kilometers, the Palestinians should be able to do the same with a landmass that is more than three and a half times as large.
Furthermore, lack of territorial contiguity does not have to be a major problem. The idea of building an elevated highway and/or rail to connect the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been floated around for many years following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. There is no reason why elevated highways and rail networks cannot be built to connect parts of a Palestinian state.
The Palestinians are a well-educated and ingenious people. There is no good reason why they could not build a viable state that could in time rival Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or Kuwait. They just need the will and the leadership to do it. Right now, unfortunately, they are more preoccupied with destroying Israel rather than trying to build a prosperous future in a state of their own.
