Ma’ale Adumim was in a festive mood on Thursday. The city was decorated with flags and posters everywhere announcing the “signing of the Ma’ale Adumim umbrella agreement.”

This agreement, which involves all government ministries and relevant companies, is indeed a historic event. After decades in which Israeli governments refrained from touching the E1 area that connects Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem, the agreement fixes construction in this incendiary zone, which will house 20,000 Israelis within 10–15 years, thereby cutting the West Bank into two parts and preventing Palestinian territorial contiguity from north to south.

“There will be no Palestinian state,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at the Thursday ceremony in Ma’ale Adumim. In 2009, he had promised a Palestinian state in his famous Bar-Ilan speech, and in 2020, he had conditionally agreed to such a state as part of US President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century.” But government ministers who attended the ceremony on Thursday are confident that this time, there will be no turning back.

This reporter has for decades been covering the story of construction in the vast East-1 area that stretches over 12,000 dunams (3,000 acres) between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem, south of the Ma’ale Adumim road.

Dozens of annexation plans and construction initiatives have come and gone since the era of prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government in the late 1980s. I attended at least two ceremonies where the new neighborhood “Mevaseret Adumim” was inaugurated, with great fanfare, on E1 lands.

None of these plans were realized, and not even outposts were established in the area due to the extreme sensitivity and international focus. Nowadays, only the Ma’ale Adumim police station stands there, defined as an essential public building that does not indicate political annexation.

The bitter dispute has always been between right-wing factions who seek to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state through the elongated neighborhood to be built in E1, and left-wing elements convinced that a Palestinian state is the only solution to the conflict and that whoever blocks this option condemns the region to eternal war.

Zeev Hever (Zambish), one of the leaders of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank, who was present at the event on Thursday, expects the new agreement to lead ultimately to Jerusalem connecting to Ma’ale Adumim, while the new neighborhood would encircle the village of Az-Za’ayyem and turn it into a Palestinian island inside Jerusalem. If so, Israel would be taking a Palestinian village currently under Palestinian Authority control, annexing it, and bringing thousands of Palestinians into Israel’s sovereign territory.

Netanyahu, who until recent years had been anxious about demographics and refrained from applying sovereignty in the West Bank, scoffed in Ma’ale Adumim at those who still call Judea and Samaria “the occupied territories.”

“The territories are indeed occupied. Joshua bin Nun conquered them,” Netanyahu said, referring to Moses’s successor as leader of the biblical Israelites. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who sat next to him on the stage, beamed with delight.

Things are advancing at breakneck speed. What was delayed for 35 years is now happening as if there were no tomorrow. It was only three weeks ago that the government approved construction plans in the E1 area. Those plans provided for 3,400 housing units, but those present at the event were already talking about 3,527 units.

A day after the plan was approved, 21 countries signed a joint declaration against the decision, from Australia and Japan to France and Denmark. The United States did not condemn the project; a State Department spokesman announced that construction in E1 was not a top priority for the administration.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has indicated that the US is unlikely to intervene. “The US has never asked Israel to not apply sovereignty,” Huckabee said earlier this month. “I have repeatedly stated that the US respects Israel as a sovereign nation and will not tell Israel what to do. This is also what Secretary Rubio has said as recently as this week.”

“The ambassador did not understand why we are not building in our homeland,” said Ma’ale Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrah on Thursday.

Construction in E1 is the last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution. To paraphrase Theodor Herzl, at Ma’ale Adumim, Netanyahu buried the two-state solution. Four former prime ministers – Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu himself – wanted to promote construction in the area but recoiled due to international reaction, and they pledged to the Americans to freeze such plans.

The government’s E1 plan, as noted, would connect the city of Ma’ale Adumim – with its own sizeable territory and surrounding settlements – to Jerusalem, and split the West Bank in two. It was also revealed at the ceremony on Thursday that Ma’ale Adumim is also about to expand eastward and southward with two more large neighborhoods, “Tzipor Midbar” and “Mitzpe Nevo Mizrah.”

“Within five years, there will be 70,000 people in Ma’ale Adumim,” the prime minister said. These new neighborhoods will rise after 20 years during which the city was not expanded.

Netanyahu arrived in Ma’ale Adumim an hour and a half late. The many government ministers present idled away the time; some of them sat on stage swinging their legs. Netanyahu compensated them with compliments, seeming to lavish special attention on two – Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem, a resident of Ma’ale Adumim, and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi. Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs, a resident of the Neve Daniel settlement, was also present.

I was surprised, though, by Ma’ale Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrah, a 43-year-old who understands the challenging reality of the West Bank and is among the few people present who recognize that Israel cannot afford to entirely stifle the political aspirations of the Palestinians.

Yifrah opposes a Palestinian state, but he initiated the new “fabric-of-life” road that will allow Palestinians safe passage from north to south through “Mevaseret Adumim.” This helped him convince American officials who inquired about the E1 plan to set aside their objections, mild though they were anyway.

There are still those who remain skeptical about the entire plan, however, especially after the dozens of approvals and cancellations over the years. I asked David de Mercado, a Ma’ale Adumim resident, if he was going to buy an apartment in the new neighborhood.

“Are you crazy?” he replied, “In a year’s time, there could be a new government in Israel that will cancel this whole thing.”