Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / July 5, 2024
The West Bank remains unusually calm as Israel carries out its genocide in Gaza. But while Israeli repression has dissuaded an uprising in the streets, the tectonic plates underneath continue to shift.
As war rages on in Gaza and along the Lebanese border, the West Bank has taken a backseat in the news in the wake of Israel’s unrelenting genocide. Absent the proliferation of small pockets of armed resistance in refugee camps and urban centers in the north, the West Bank has maintained an uneasy sense of calm.
This silence is uncharacteristic. In previous years, Palestinians in the West Bank have reacted to the occupation’s crimes through a series of mass mobilizations, daily clashes with Israeli troops, general strikes, and campaigns of civil disobedience. The First Intifada of 1987, although beginning in Gaza, was mobilized into a united and organized movement in the West Bank, a role which it has continued to play in the thirty-odd years since.
This includes the “Unity Intifada” in May 2021, when Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and ‘48 Palestine rose up in a collective reaction to Israeli attempts to expel Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The wave of mass protests across the West Bank’s cities was larger than it had ever been, reaching its peak on May 18 when a general strike was observed in all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.
This all changed after October 7. Over the past nine months, mass mobilization has been virtually absent, despite the unprecedented horrors of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has claimed the lives of over 37,000 Palestinians.
Yet with the memories of past events of popular revolt still fresh in people’s minds, the current lack of mobilization in the West Bank has led many to conclude that Israel has effectively neutralized it as an arena of struggle.
Before October: anything but neutralized
To look at the news in the months and years before October 7, any observer would have thought that the West Bank would be an active front in the war. Daily Israeli raids on Palestinian cities and refugee camps were met with confrontation by Palestinians, who increasingly began to use arms instead of stones to face off against the troops invading their homes. Locally-based armed resistance groups began to spread across different cities, from Jenin, to Nablus, Tulkarem, Tubas, and Jericho.
The phenomenon attracted analysts and journalists, who spoke of a “new generation of Palestinian resistance.” Western news outlets reported on the armed rebellion of “the West Bank’s Gen Z fighters” in outlets like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Vice. Many were left wondering whether what was happening in the West Bank could be called a Third Intifada.
This situation of upheaval was at least two years in the making. In 2021, the escape of six Palestinian prisoners from the Gilboa maximum security prison sparked a wave of armed resistance in Jenin, where two of the escapees had taken shelter. Israeli forces recaptured them after clashing with a small group of gunmen. After the recapture, more youth began to join the group, until the Jenin Brigade came into existence. It was followed by the Lions’ Den in Nablus, the Tulkarem Brigade in Tulkarem, and the Tubas Brigade in Tubas. These cities and their adjacent refugee camps became havens for armed resistance groups.
Simultaneously, local civil resistance movements increased in several locations where lands were threatened by settler expansion, like in Kufr Qaddoum, Salfit, and Nabi Saleh. In some places, civil resistance had been ongoing for over a decade. In others, it had been absent since the First Intifada — but now sprang back to life. One of the most famous cases is the village of Beita, south of Nablus, where residents have been protesting the Israeli settler outpost of Evyatar on Mount Sabih for three years. Israeli forces imposed and continue to impose repetitive closures on the village, patrolling its entrance, raiding it regularly, revoking working permits of its thousands of breadwinners who work in Israel, arresting and wounding hundreds of residents, and killing at least ten of Beita’s youth to date.
After October: new levels of repression
While all pales in comparison to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the Israeli crackdown on resistance in the West Bank took on an entirely different meaning after October 7. Israel revoked tens of thousands of work permits for Palestinians, blocked dozens of roads that Palestinians used to move around between cities and villages in the West Bank, and dramatically intensified its arrest campaign against Palestinians.
In the first two months after October 7, Israel doubled the already existing Palestinian prison population, at one point reaching over 10,000 prisoners. The number of administrative detainees — those detained without charge or trial — has reached 3,600, whereas the number was 1,300 before the war.
The scope of arrests also increased, widening to include Palestinians from all walks of life, including many who are not politically active. Many of the arrestees are community leaders, journalists, and civil society activists with little to no tenuous ties to politics. Inside the prisons, human rights reports and testimonies of released Palestinians all revealed unprecedented levels of humiliation, abuse, and torture, effectively extending the genocide of Palestinians to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
According to a spokesperson of the Addameer Prisoner Support Association, who asked not to be quoted by name, “Israeli arrests systematically target active members of the community who have the capacity of mobilizing it, especially those who have a past in doing so,” adding that “this is clearly seen in the arrests of individuals who work in civil society, in academia, in the media, and in human rights.”
Outside cities, the violence of Israeli settlers rampaged exponentially, effectively expelling some 20 rural communities in the West Bank through violent attacks and death threats. Israeli settlers also increased their attacks against Palestinians traveling on West Bank roads, adding to the risk of beatings and arrests at Israeli military checkpoints.
These Israeli measures have resulted in the killing of 554 Palestinians and the arrest of 9,400 in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, over the past nine months.
The reason for the intensity of the Israeli crackdown is no mystery. It is preemptive, designed to shock and dissuade Palestinians in the West Bank from opening up a second front in the “al-Aqsa Flood” battle.
The impact on the streets
In the northern cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, the meteoric escalation of Israeli raids in both number and scope of violence and destruction resulted in an increase in the intensity of armed confrontations with Palestinian resistance fighters. At least seven Israeli soldiers, including two officers, have been killed since October 7 in West Bank raids, including the death of an officer and the injury of 17 soldiers in Jenin just last week.
Yet as the armed groups in the West Bank have managed to so far weather the onslaught, civil mobilization in its traditional form in the West Bank has remained largely absent.
On October 17, ten days into the genocide in Gaza, Palestinians in several West Bank cities took to the streets following the news of Israel’s bombing of the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, which killed 500 people. In Jenin and Ramallah, some protesters chanted slogans against what they saw as the PA’s inaction. Protests turned into clashes with the Palestinian police, and five protesters were killed. In the following weeks, protesters avoided clashing with the PA, as their numbers grew smaller, and more leading figures of the protests were arrested by Israel.
On March 30, which marked Palestinian Land Day, the city of Ramallah had a special moment of revival. Thousands marched through the streets of the city, including people of all ages, for around two hours, chanting in support of Palestinians in Gaza and denouncing the genocide. Then it was all over.
One protester told Mondoweiss after the march that “people saw it as an opportunity to express themselves after months of being silenced, which is why the number of participants was higher than other marches since the beginning of the war, and also why it lasted for so long.”
“Traditionally, the march would head to the city entrance [near the Beit El settlement] and end with some protesters clashing with occupation soldiers, but this time, everybody knew that it was not going to happen, which is why the march roamed the city center for so long,” the protester said.
On May 15, which marked Nakba Day, dozens of Palestinians, mostly young people, took their chances and headed to the northern entrance of Ramallah and al-Bireh, demonstrating in front of the Beit El checkpoint. Several were wounded, and one Palestinian protester was killed.
Aysar Safi, 20 years old, was a second-year student of physical education at Birzeit University from the Jalazone refugee camp north of Ramallah. He was the sixth Palestinian from Jalazone to be killed by Israeli forces since October 7.
Aysar’s older brother and his father are both detainees in Israel’s jails. Since their arrest, Aysar had been taking care of his father’s aluminum shop, working and studying at the same time. His uncle described him as “his mother’s right hand.” His mother, meanwhile, was too deep in grief to speak.
“Aysar was very affected by the genocide in Gaza and said that we had to do more here in the West Bank to help our people there,” a friend of Aysar told Mondoweiss. “He was always present at the reception of released prisoners and funerals of martyrs.”
“His killing wasn’t random. The occupation soldiers aimed at his stomach,” the friend pointed out. “They were using live fire, not rubber-coated bullets. They were sending a message that they will not tolerate any protests, because they want to keep people scared and keep the West Bank passive.”
But for Palestinian historian Bilal Shalash, who studies the history of Palestinian resistance, “the West Bank is anything but passive.”
“Historically, there is a pattern in Palestine, where high waves of resistance start in one region, then when it calms down, it is picked up by another,” Shalash tells Mondoweiss. “The occupation is afraid of the West Bank picking up from Gaza, especially in the north, and this is why it intensifies its crackdown on it in such a brutal way.”
As for civil mobilization, Shalash believes it has been highly dependent on geography. “It is not completely absent,” he notes. “In the villages close to the annexation wall or to Israeli settler roads, mass mobilization can vary. Some villages have developed their local mass movement in the past years or decades and continue to protest weekly, while in other villages, a few young men clash with occupation forces and settlers when they raid.”
In the cities, people often protest within their urban centers without confronting the occupation, a product of the Oslo regime’s spatial separation of Palestinians from the occupier. This has led many to refrain from participating in such actions, Shalash notes. “They don’t see the point of it,” he explains. “Some do still participate because they want to send a message to the PA concerning internal Palestinian politics.”
The PA has shown its intent to suppress a mass upheaval in the West Bank, but Shalash believes that there are limits to how much the PA can ban protests without risking a larger backlash. “That’s why these protests can still happen,” he says.
Additionally, mass mobilization in Palestine has been partly dependent on the involvement of the middle class, which formed a part of the political intelligentsia and popular movement. That same middle class has now been drawn into a consumerist and depoliticized lifestyle, which is only maintained by the continuous flow of money from outside the country — both to the PA and to the NGO sector.
Yet that very stability is now being undermined by Israel.
As Israel refuses to end its war on Gaza and tensions rise across the region, all previous signs of stability in the West Bank have disappeared, one after the other. Israel has only responded with even greater repression, hoping to prevent a major shake-off, at least at surface level. The trouble is that underneath, the tectonic plates have not stopped shifting.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
