From late 2022, Israel's 37th government clarified that annexation was not merely a short-lived rhetorical fixation of previous election cycles but a feature of Israeli politics that deserves sustained and comparative analytic attention. The reemergence of demands to return settlers to Gaza and maintain permanent security control after the war appear to reinforce, and reconfigure, the contours of the “one-state reality” that has received newfound scholarly, policy, and activist attention in recent years. Interlocking long, medium, and short-term political processes have created this situation. Yet the meaning of "annexation" as a political program has remained notoriously ambiguous. Its advocates have proposed and debated myriad plans and strategies, but there has not yet been any convergence or crystallization of a government agenda. The ambiguity of "annexation" is exacerbated by the fact that debates about the "application of sovereignty" and extension of "law, jurisdiction, and administration" transpire alongside arguments that a "one-state reality" already exists and that "de-facto annexation" has already occurred. This paper provides a genealogy of the idea of a “one state reality” and excavates past and contemporary Israeli debates about annexation. It uses this history to bring a degree of conceptual order to analysis of the present juncture in the Israeli state's relationship to the territories conquered in 1967 and the Palestinians it has ruled over since. The paper proposes a conceptual schema to differentiate between different mechanisms of territorial incorporation in order to answer the question of how states annex territory. It concludes by demonstrating how analysis of these mechanisms of incorporation can inform more rigorous thinking about the consequences of different types of annexation than has been the norm in public or scholarly discourse. It demonstrates that there are identifiable links between different mechanisms of incorporation and the political processes they are likely to trigger within Palestinian politics and in Israeli-Palestinian relations