I expect that Netanyahu will announce the annexation of the Jordan Valley in the next year, while the U.S. President who will recognize the move.
Unless Israel gives full citizenship and civil rights to all the Palestinians who live in the annexed territory (and they won't), the move will also make clear that Israel is embracing outright apartheid. With annexation, Israel won't be able to make the distinction between "Israel proper" where it allows Palestinians to have citizenship, and the occupied territories, where it does not. The distinction was already extremely flimsy. After a half century, the pretense that occupation was a temporary situation in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war is no longer tenable. It has long been clear to everyone who wasn't bending over backwards to pretend that Israel was a Western-style democracy that denial of full rights to people in the West Bank on a permanent basis is official Israeli policy. But rhetorical cover is still important. Annexation would mean abandoning that cover and making the ethnic-based denial of rights even more stark.
Unless Israel gives full citizenship and civil rights to all the Palestinians who live in the annexed territory (and they won't), the move will also make clear that Israel is embracing outright apartheid. With annexation, Israel won't be able to make the distinction between "Israel proper" where it allows Palestinians to have citizenship, and the occupied territories, where it does not. The distinction was already extremely flimsy. After a half century, the pretense that occupation was a temporary situation in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war is no longer tenable. It has long been clear to everyone who wasn't bending over backwards to pretend that Israel was a Western-style democracy that denial of full rights to people in the West Bank on a permanent basis is official Israeli policy. But rhetorical cover is still important. Annexation would mean abandoning that cover and making the ethnic-based denial of rights even more stark.
