Last month, the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would cease to respect the Oslo Accords’ division of the West Bank into Area A (administered directly by the PA), Area B (under shared Israel-PA control), and Area C (under Israeli control). In practical terms, doing so means building homes in Area C and settling Palestinians there. Hillel Frisch notes that the European Union has been helping Ramallah do just that for several years:

In July 2011, a report entitled “Area C and Palestinian State Building” was produced by the EU. It was then brought to the European Parliament in December and approved by the European Commission in early January 2012. . . . In April 2012, the PA’s Ministry of Local Government published a strategic action plan entitled “Planning Support for Palestinian Communities in Area C.” The EU announced its support for this plan in an official document published in 2012 called “Land Development and Access to Basic Infrastructure in Area C.”

By 2016, the European Community had spent a total of 10.5 million euros to draw up and implement zoning plans for 90 Palestinian settlements and support land-development projects in Area C in conjunction with the PA. Such aid is explicitly envisioned not only as helping marginalized communities but as part of a blueprint to assist Palestinian state-building.

The objective is clear: to create continuous Arab settlement from the south to the north of the West Bank, while simultaneously thwarting Israeli designs to create continuous neighborhoods from [the West Bank town of] Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem. . . . As new Israeli building dwindles to insignificance in areas east of Jerusalem, the PA, with European help, has succeeded in housing tens of thousands in a space no larger than 3.5 square miles. This population is more than double the number of inhabitants in Ma’ale Adumim and the other Israeli localities in the area.

One might hope that such efforts would at least serve to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians who move into the new housing, but that is not the case:

Palestinian strategic settlement in the area comes at the expense of the quality of life of the new residents of these . . . sprawling developments. . . . The single road to traverse the vast urban expanse is only two lanes wide [and thus] is continuously clogged. . . . Fire trucks would find it impossible to reach the scene in the event of even a small emergency, let alone an earthquake. Garbage burns in the open with devastating health effects on the inhabitants of the development as well as in the nearby Jerusalem neighborhoods of Isawiyyah and French Hill.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].