Netanyahu has pledged to begin annexing parts of the West Bank as soon as next month. What are the implications of such a move, and what can be learned from Israel’s previous annexations of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights?
In this policy lab, Yara Hawari and Rania Muhareb weigh in on what annexation means, its significance within Zionist thought and Israeli history, and potential avenues to push back against future land grabs.
Yara Hawari is Al-Shabaka’s co-director. She previously served as the Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst. Yara completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught various undergraduate courses and continues to be an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.
Rania Muhareb is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University, and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in the School of Law at the University of Galway, where she completed her PhD in December 2024. Her doctoral research examined the mobilization of the apartheid framework by grassroots organizers and human rights organizations to pursue international justice and accountability in Palestine. Rania was the 2025 Palestine Postdoctoral Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, where her research focused on Palestinians’ right to health, drawing on the Apartheid Convention, the Genocide Convention, and the settler-colonialism framework.
