West Bank must not become another Gaza

For a brief moment when the Palestinian-Israel documentary “No Other Land” was announced as this year’s best documentary at the Oscars ceremony, the spotlight again shone on the daily hardships of Palestinians in the West Bank, which otherwise are generally neglected. For most of the past 18 months, for obvious reasons, the attention had been on the war in Gaza, at least as far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned, and there have been many other headline-grabbing issues on a packed international agenda.
Nevertheless, if there is one thing decision-makers with an interest in this conflict should have learned from events in Gaza, it is that ignoring and neglecting this conflict comes at a price — a very heavy one. Throughout the current extreme hostilities on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, as well as the Israel-Lebanon border, the security situation has also been deteriorating in the occupied West Bank, especially in its northern parts, and thousands of Palestinians have already been forced out of their homes, raising the fear not only of escalation, but also of Israeli annexation.
Israel’s playbook regarding the West Bank appears to be similar to the manner in which it is currently conducting its war in Gaza. It is not necessarily in the magnitude and intensity of the military operations, but in the disproportionate use of force in combating militants there while being insensitive to the lives and human rights of civilians. More recently, Israel has been increasingly keen to uproot the Palestinians from their houses without setting a time frame for their return.
To make things worse, if in Gaza the far right is still only fantasising about building Israeli settlements and resettling there, Israeli settlers are already scattered all across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and have an unquenched appetite for more land and new settlements. The more extreme among them are constantly provoking friction with the local population, either through violence or through their representatives in government and the Knesset who have been advancing policies and legislation that are further entrenching the occupation and leaving little hope for Palestinians to believe that one day they will be free and independent on their own land.
There is no denying that Israel is facing increased threats from militant groups in the West Bank, and this can be backdated to long before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and comes mainly from relatively recently formed groups that are not affiliated with any of the more established political organizations. They are mainly composed of a youth that is frustrated by living under an oppressive occupation, that does not trust its own (Palestinian Authority) leadership and consequently has been radicalized and has turned to armed resistance. An Israeli government that was less fanatic, less dogmatic, and capable of more nuanced policies than those of the current leadership, would have done everything in its power to reduce tensions in the West Bank, as it is overstretched on a number of other fronts, with an unfinished war in Gaza, a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, its efforts to establish a military presence deep inside Syria, and, it has been suggested, the plans it is hatching to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. But not this government.

Israeli settlers have an unquenched appetite for more land and settlements.

Yossi Mekelberg

It did not take long after the ceasefire with Hamas in mid-January came into effect for Israeli security forces to turn their attention to the northern West Bank and focus on the towns of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, with many of their military operations taking place in the refugee camps there. Mind you, these towns are in Area A, and are supposed to be under full control of the Palestinian Authority and its own security forces — the very forces that have assisted Israel in preventing an enormous number of attacks against Israelis over the years. But this now counts for nothing, because Israel’s government is driven by an irrational ambition to somehow bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and, by extension, its security forces, while still demanding that they keep the lid on militancy, and if such incidents should take place they are to blame for not doing enough to stop them. What is of particular concern is that if in the past Israeli security forces’ operations in these areas were more limited in scope and duration, this no longer seems to be the case, which suggests that beyond counterterrorism there are other Israeli objectives.
Last month, Israeli tanks deployed to the West Bank for the first time since 2003, as the Israeli military announced that it was expanding its operations to include larger parts of the north of the territory. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Israel Katz admitted he had instructed the military to remain for at least the next year in West Bank refugee camps that they have taken over, preventing about 40,000 recently displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes. The displacement of those from three refugee camps — Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams — is putting extreme pressure on other locations in the West Bank that they flee to. This is happening at a time when the UN agency that provides humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has been recently outlawed and boycotted by the Israeli government and is suffering from an acute shortage of funds. Displacing people who have nothing to do with violence against Israel and Israelis is an illegal, cruel, and unjust action to begin with, and the mere suggestion that it is only for a year is an insult to our intelligence, as we see their homes being leveled to the ground, the camps’ infrastructure being destroyed, and no one queuing up to rebuild them any time soon. It is more likely that similar operations will take place in other refugee camps.
As such there is not much new in the brutality of the occupation, only that it has gradually become worse the more it has become permanent, while the Israeli military has become subservient to the Israeli settlements and settlers scattered across the West Bank and particularly to the Jewish supremacists who have monopolized the settlement project. In the nexus of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperate need for the support of the elected representatives of the settlers in his coalition to stay in power; of his inability due to pressure from Washington to continue the war in Gaza; and his tactic of always keeping the security situation on edge to justify his claims that his appearances in court to give evidence in his corruption trial should become less frequent; and that this is not the time for a state commission to investigate the colossal failure of Oct. 7 — the West Bank is becoming the unfortunate arena of choice for Israel’s use of excessive force against both civilians and insurrectionists.
If this trend is not stopped, a de facto annexation is just a matter of time, followed by a so-called “legal” Israeli annexation. For the settlers, as for large parts of the current Israeli government, this, along with as few Palestinians as possible living in the West Bank, is their ultimate aim.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg