On the eve of Netanyahu’s White House visit, an emboldened Israeli right wing sees a chance to build – and to renounce the two-state solution

The posters hanging near the municipal buildings in the Jewish settlement of Beit El – in Hebrew “the House of God” – have a simple message: “Go in peace. Come back with sovereignty.”

They are words aimed at a single individual, an instruction from the settlement movement to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for his visit to Washington on Wednesday to meet the US president, Donald Trump.

The “sovereignty” demanded is Israel’s over the settlements of the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, regarded by most of the international community as illegal.

In Beit El, as in the other Jewish settlements on the West Bank, there is a sense of mounting optimism that this time, and with this US president, the sentiment on the poster may be more than just hopeful words – that a new reality, sympathetic to their ambitions, may be rapidly emerging.

Beit El, on a rocky ridge overlooking the offices and mosques on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Ramallah to the south, is a case in point. Last Sunday, Israel’s ministry of defence approved a permit for a residential block for a yeshiva – a religious school – linked to the American Friends of Beit El, a charity in which Trump’s ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, is heavily involved.

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The family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, adviser and suggested envoy to the Middle East, has donated money to Yitzhar, one of the West Bank’s most hardline settlements, south of Nablus. The Trump administration – while saying it wants a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians – has suggested that settlements are not necessarily an impediment to that goal.

Beit El’s symbolism for the settler movement is not only political. It is regarded as the site of Jacob’s stone, where the patriarch – according to biblical tradition – took a rock for a pillow and in his dream was promised the land of Israel.

If Netanyahu’s visit comes in the midst of a huge surge in new settlement construction approvals – some 6,000 announced since Trump’s inauguration – the settlement movement is pushing for more.

Pro-settlement politicians were also behind the push for a new and highly controversial law, passed last week by the Knesset, that retroactively “legalised” dozens of wildcat outposts and thousands of settler homes in the occupied West Bank that had been built on Palestinian private land and had been regarded, even by Israel, as illegal.

The cumulative effect has been a growing sense among those Jews living in the communities of the occupied West Bank – and their supporters – of a kind of settlement spring, marked by their unprecedented political and social influence and by the promise of ever more building.

As the hills of the West Bank have turned green after the winter, in public the far-right ministers in the Netanyahu government have talked of annexation: of the large settlement bloc at Ma’ale Adumim and in even grander terms of swaths of the West Bank.

And they have an even larger ambition in their sights: pushing Netanyahu not only to build but to renounce the two-state solution.

In Beit El’s municipality offices Chaim Silberstein, a councillor at the settlement where he has lived for 32 years, expresses a mood prevalent in large parts of the settlement movement. “I would define our attitude as cautiously optimistic,” he says. “Trump is a wild card. We don’t really know what he has in mind. That’s what defines the cautious part of my statement. The optimistic part is he is surround by advisers who are 180 degrees different from previous occupants of those seats at the White House and state department.”

Silberstein is conscious too that Friedman’s link to Beit El, and to the new building there, has put the settlement in the spotlight ahead of his imminent confirmation hearings as ambassador – already a fraught process because of Friedman’s views, which are closer to the Israeli settlement movement than the mainstream of American diplomatic opinion.

“Without a doubt [the disclosure of the building approval by the anti-occupation group Peace Now] was aimed at the confirmation hearings,” he says. Silberstein is careful to make a distinction. The settlement movement, he insists, “is gaining not winning”.

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But he sees a historic opportunity to build even in the face of growing opposition in the world outside of Washington. “Israel should act prudently but it should act speedily, and it should create as many facts on the ground,” Silberstein says.

Even before Trump’s election that was a trend well established by Israel’s most rightwing government yet. According to figures released last week by the Yesha council – which represents the settler movement – the number of Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank reached 421,000 in 2016, an increase of 3.9% since 2015, twice the rate of population growth inside Israel.

If Silberstein demonstrates caution over the settlement movement’s recent progress, it has not been reflected on a political front where a resurgent right and far right have moved to exploit the weakness of Netanyahu – beset by police investigations – and Trump’s swearing in. That has been seen most visibly in a giddy sense of triumphalism among some on the right, sharply in evidence during last week’s debate and vote on legalising outposts built on private Palestinian land.

If the charge was led by obvious figures such as the rising star of Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, Bezalel Smotrich, who has cast himself as a populist pro-settler outsider – who called on Israel to “expand Israeli sovereignty and continue to build and develop settlements across the land” – that call was also taken up by more mainstream figures.

Among them was Ofir Akunis, the technology minister and a member of Netanyahu’s own party, who warned: “All land of Israel is ours, and this cannot be disputed or be divided. The concept of settlement blocs is no longer relevant because there are no Arabs to negotiate with anymore.”

The forthrightness of recent statements – including one by Bennett calling for annexation – has not been lost on European governments which, unlike Trump, have been critical of recent pro-settlement moves.

That has seen both Germany and France last week question Israel’s credibility on supporting the two-state solution and the peace process. The reality is that the growing influence of the settlement movement in Israeli politics is not confined to recent weeks. Political currents have been shifting in their direction at a time when national religious figures have become ever more prominent at the head of Israeli institutions.

Critics of the current trajectory in Israeli politics have noted – like Silberman himself – that Trump remains unpredictable and something of an unknown. They have questioned the wisdom too of betting on an aberrant presidency, outside of the international mainstream, whose influence may be transitory.

Yair Lapid, the centre-right opposition politician who has been troubling Netanyahu most in recent polls, has led the charge, not least against the outpost legalisation law, describing it as “unjust, not smart”, and a “law that damages the state of Israel, the security of Israel, governance in Israel and our ability to fight back against those who hate Israel”.

Trump’s own unpredictability on the issue was dramatised most recently on Friday. Before this week’s meeting, he appeared to reverse course to suggest settlements might be a problem after all, but adding he was also not minded to condemn Israel.

It was a swerve predicted by Asher Schechter in the newspaper Haaretz, quoting Trump’s own Art of the Deal and his lack of attachment to “one deal or one approach”. Suggesting, perhaps, that Israel’s settlers may have celebrated too soon.