Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Tuesday that $37 million would be allocated to develop more than 70 alleged Jewish heritage sites in the West Bank, even as illegal settlement expansion keeps grinding forward in the occupied territory. The money was approved by a government steering committee. Ordinary people in the West Bank get the bill, while the state machinery gets another budget line.
The State Writes the Map
Smotrich called the move on X "a Zionist act of the highest order" and added, "A people without a past has no future." That line does the usual work of state ideology: turn land, memory and administration into a single project of control. The allocation follows an earlier $83 million program approved in May, part of a wider effort to expand Israeli authority over sites designated as Jewish heritage locations throughout the West Bank and Jordan Valley. The article does not say which sites are included in the new plan. It does say the plan is large, funded, and moving.
Smotrich has already tried to push that authority further. He previously sought control over sites such as Solomon’s Pools near Bethlehem and, in May, made an explicit threat to "erase" the agreements that confirmed Palestinian ownership of the site more than 30 years ago. Since his tour of the site, Israeli incursions into the area have increased. That’s the state in motion: claims, committees, tours, threats, incursions, repeat.
Heritage as Administration
The timing matters. The move coincides with the approval of the first reading of a bill in May to establish a "Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority" by the Knesset. The proposal also seeks to guarantee, by law, funding for the authority’s activities within the budget of the Ministry of Heritage. Bureaucracy rarely looks dramatic from a distance. Up close, it’s a funding mechanism for permanent control.
Palestinian officials criticized the plans, saying they are designed to increase Israeli control over occupied territory and facilitate further settlement expansion. That criticism lands on familiar ground. The article says Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law, yet the expansion continues and the money keeps arriving. International law gets its line in the story. The bulldozers and budgets get the rest.
Who Gets Governed
The new allocation is not presented as a neutral preservation project. Smotrich did not specify the sites included in the plan, which leaves the public with a funding announcement and a state-backed promise of more control over contested ground. The earlier $83 million program approved in May already formed part of the same wider effort. The Knesset’s first reading of the heritage authority bill in May added another layer, this time with legal cover and budget protection built in.
That’s how the apparatus works. One committee approves the money. One minister supplies the rhetoric. One legislature moves the law. The occupied population gets the consequences.
Palestinian officials see the pattern clearly enough to name it: more Israeli control, more settlement expansion, less room for anyone else. The article gives no sign of restraint from the institutions driving the process. It gives plenty of evidence that the machinery is still humming.