JERUSALEM — With the Palestinians planning to make their case this week to upgrade from organizational status to nonmember status at the United Nations General Assembly, one senior Israeli minister condemned the move as “the easy and wrong way out” on Monday, while another said the time had come for Israel to consider its own unilateral move toward a separate state: annexing parts of the West Bank and withdrawing from others.

The first, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, said at a briefing for journalists here, “The goal is not a statement but a state; the way is not condemnation of Israel, but negotiations.” Of the Palestinian bid, he said: “It’s easier, but it won’t bear fruit. A statement in the U.N. will give him some advantage in the public opinion, but this is it. Nothing will change on the ground.”

But even as Mr. Meridor, a veteran politician whose voice is one of the most moderate in Israel’s inner cabinet, emphasized the need to return to the negotiating table after a four-year stalemate, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the time might have come “to take action to start the separation process” without waiting for a deal with the Palestinians.

In an interview with the right-wing daily Israel Today, parts of which were published on Monday, Mr. Barak called for the annexation of three large settlement blocs — Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim and Ariel — where a vast majority of the 350,000 Jews in the West Bank live, and the removal of up to dozens of smaller settlements scattered across the area. He proposed that those in the farther-flung areas be offered money to move — as individual families or whole communities — either to the annexed blocs or to what is now Israel, and that those unwilling to leave remain under the rule of the Palestinian Authority for a five-year trial period.

“This will not only help us with the Palestinians, but also with other countries in the region, with the American administration, and of course ourselves,” said Mr. Barak, who mentioned his interest in unilateral action at a conference in May but did not provide details.

“This isn’t an easy decision,” he added. “The time has come to make decisions that are not only based on ideology and gut feelings, but also a cold, realistic reading of reality.”

The call for unilateralism is out of sync with the public diplomacy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly at a time when his office is criticizing the Palestinians’ unilateral attempt to upgrade their status at the United Nations.

Mr. Barak’s proposal is anathema to settlers and their supporters, who see uprooting so many people as unimaginable. They point out that a similar, though smaller, disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was traumatic for Israeli society and created an opening for the militant Hamas wing that now rules the area. The plan is equally derided by Palestinian leaders, who loathe the notion of having their future borders determined by Israeli’s decisions on annexations and withdrawals and complain that the large settlement blocs compromise the viability of a new state.

“What he’s talking about, if we’re going to think in terms of geography, is disastrous,” said Nour Odeh, a Palestinian Authority spokeswoman. “It represents an agenda that has nothing to do with a two-state solution.”

She noted that the Ariel bloc stretches more than 10 miles into the West Bank and sits on an important water source. “Ultimately all these settlements — their presence, their expansion, their expanded borders and so on — they’re all illegal, and we don’t recognize their legitimacy,” she said.

Many in Israel saw Mr. Barak’s statements less as a serious new policy initiative and more as an attempt to distinguish himself politically from the rest of the cabinet amid increasing talk of elections being called for early next year rather than as scheduled in October 2013. Mr. Barak, who is not a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-leaning Likud Party but leads his own small Independence Party, in recent weeks has spoken out against the elevation of an educational institution in Ariel to university status and has harshly criticized the prime minister’s budget proposal.

“As Henry Kissinger once aptly said, ‘Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic political system,’ ” Dani Dayan, the head of the settler movement, said in an interview. “Barak’s plan is a nonstarter with the Israeli public that totally opposes unilateral withdrawals. It caters to a small portion of the electorate on which Barak bases his political calculations for his future.”