If you think about what annexation actually means, it means like making a territory that's not yours, like unilaterally deciding this is now part of our country.

What the settlement movement is doing and what Smotrich's efforts amount to is taking Israeli civil law across

the green line that separates Israel from its occupied territories and applying it to the West

Bank where that's not Israel. That is an occupied territory under international law. And when they

are now applying Israeli law and is what is really like housing law and sending housing budgets there, they are just chipping away dismantling the legal occupation.

They are also dismantling Palestinian Authority rule and replacing it with Israeli law, which is a de facto annexation.

Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

There's obviously been a lot of attention paid recently to the ceasefire in Gaza, which, as I speak to you now, is very tenuous and maybe falling apart.

As all of this attention has been on Gaza over the last few years, totally, obviously understandably at the front of mind of people covering the region, talking about the region,

there's been another story taking shape in the West Bank.

Obviously, the West Bank is not governed by Hamas.

It's governed by the Palestinian Authority.

In the West Bank, there are a lot of Jewish settlers who have taken up residence, often illegally, even in violation of,

ostensibly of Israeli law, who have gone about a kind of project of essentially kind

of encroachment and harassment towards their Palestinian neighbors who are living in the West Bank.

And that encroachment and harassment has sometimes

taken extremely violent forms, including shooting and killing Palestinians, which have been

documented by reporters and human rights groups. This activity in the West Bank has increased

recently, particularly under the Netanyahu government, which is incredibly

allied with the settler movement. It's a huge part of their core constituency. The ministers,

many of the ministers in the government are strongly connected to that settler movement.

And I think if you follow the region, you kind of know this in an abstract level, like there

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