According to official Israeli policy, what is supposed to happen to the Palestinians?
Executive summary
Official Israeli policy as reflected in government statements, laws, and recent operational choices prioritizes Israeli security and demographic control while offering conditional, limited Palestinian self-rule tied to disarmament, governance reforms, and demilitarization—rather than an unconditional restoration of full Palestinian sovereignty or the right of return [1] [2] [3]. In practice, that policy has translated into separation of the territories, restrictions on movement into and out of Gaza, settlement expansion and measures that international human-rights groups say amount to systematic discrimination and even apartheid [4] [5] [6] [7].
1. Official stated objectives: security first, conditional Palestinian autonomy
Public and leaked policy frameworks repeatedly foreground Israeli security as the precondition for any political accommodation with Palestinians, advancing proposals that envision Palestinian self-rule confined by strict security guarantees, separate security forces, and international oversight—with Palestinian governance acceptable only after reforms and demilitarization [1] [2] [3].
2. The policy of separation and territorial control
Since at least 2006, Israel has enforced an explicit policy of separating the West Bank from Gaza and managing territories in ways intended to limit Palestinian territorial and political cohesion, an approach described in reports as aimed at maintaining Israeli control over land and demographics [4] [6] [7].
3. Gaza: treated as a hostile territory with controlled access
Israeli policy treats Gaza through a security lens—labelled by some official language as “hostile territory”—and seeks to control movement and population flows, including plans to restrict entries through Rafah to ensure more Palestinians leave Gaza than enter it, and an insistence on disarming Hamas as a precondition for durable governance changes [4] [5] [8].
4. Palestinian governance: conditional engagement, pressure and penalties
Israel’s stated approach ties any expansion of Palestinian authority to reforms: it has publicly pushed for a reformed Palestinian Authority or alternative committees to assume civil roles in Gaza only if they meet Israeli security and anti-terror conditions, and has used financial and administrative levers—such as withholding tax transfers and benefits—to punish Palestinian political moves deemed hostile [3] [1] [9].
5. Actions, accusations and international pushback
Concrete measures associated with these policies—settlement expansion, movement restrictions, home demolitions, and punitive laws and practices—have prompted strong criticism: international bodies and human-rights NGOs have documented discriminatory regimes across Israel and the occupied territories, with some concluding the cumulative effect meets the legal thresholds of apartheid and alleging serious violations in Gaza; proposed Knesset laws to broaden capital punishment against Palestinians have drawn condemnations that they would deepen systemic discrimination [7] [10] [11].
6. The implied endstate—and the limits of available reporting
Taken together, official Israeli policy documents and reporting depict an implied endstate in which Palestinians would live under limited, conditional self-rule with autonomous internal police only after compliance with Israeli security demands, while large elements of Israeli control—over borders, movement, land allocation and demographic policy—would remain; that framework falls short of guaranteeing an independent Palestinian state or an unrestricted right of return, and it has ignited legal, diplomatic and human-rights challenges internationally [1] [2] [3] [6]. Reporting used here is drawn from international media, NGO reports and U.N. commentary; direct text of current Israeli government white papers or legislation implementing each element was not provided in the documents available for this analysis, and therefore this account relies on secondary reporting and analyses cited above [5] [9] [12].