Mouin Rabbani
Jadaliyya / July 4, 2023
Israel’s latest assault on Jenin Refugee Camp, the largest since its 2002 invasion that laid waste to much of the camp, is designed to achieve a number of military and political objectives. Taken together these aim to make the West Bank safe for intensified Israeli colonization and, ultimately, formal annexation.
As with previous Israeli operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this one is likely to significantly degrade the Palestinian organizational infrastructure, and in the process deliberately inflict an enormous cost upon its civilian counterpart. Yet success at the strategic level will remain elusive; there is little reason to believe that Israel will today succeed where it failed not only in 2002, but repeatedly in the intervening years. Indeed, the fact of Israel’s current attack, and the reality that is being unleashed against an emboldened and more sophisticated Palestinian adversary, demonstrates the temporary nature of its earlier achievements.
At the same time the weakness of a Palestinian national movement beset by fragmentation and disintegration prevents it from translating Israel’s failures into Palestinian progress. The repeatedly proclaimed “unity of the arenas”, for example, thus far remains a slogan rather than collective defence agreement, and earlier this year failed to materialize even within the Gaza Strip when Israel assassinated a number of senior Islamic Jihad cadres and Hamas refrained from direct involvement. Israel’s campaign to transform the Palestinians from a unified people to a politically inconsequential demographic presence thus continues.
It’s tempting to view the Israeli invasion of Jenin as a product of the current Israeli government’s extremist composition and agenda. Yet the relevant operational plans were formulated a year ago under its Bennett-Lapid predecessor, demonstrating that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is primarily characterized by continuity and implemented by institutions rather than individual whim.
The catalyst for this operation was the changing landscape of Palestinian resistance in the northern West Bank. No longer dominated by either the factions or individual initiatives, new groups such as the Lion’s Den in Nablus recruited from across the board, and unencumbered by the political calculations of established leaders, commenced with regular and escalating attacks against the occupation army and Israel’s settlers. Their activities won them not only popular acclaim but also inspired the emergence of additional local militant groups, such as the Jenin Brigades. Over time these formations developed connections both with each other and with paramilitaries affiliated with established factions.
Acting in close collaboration with Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) worked intensively to eradicate these groups. But thoroughly emasculated by Israel and never deployed to defend Palestinians from nightly Israeli military raids or settler pogroms, the PA security forces lacked the legitimacy, popular acquiescence, and often also the motivation to perform this task. In 2004-2005 Israel’s categorical refusal to coordinate its Gaza redeployment with the PA reduced the latter to political irrelevance and helped lay the groundwork for Hamas’s subsequent seizure of power. In the West Bank its determination to reduce the PA to a sub-contractor for the occupation, coupled with PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s inability to transcend the role of compliant quisling, had a similar impact on the fortunes of those who prioritized the armed defence of their people.
As Palestinian militants carried out increasingly bold attacks in response to Israel’s relentless encroachment on their lands and lives, Israel conducted a series of increasingly violent incursions into Palestinian population centres to eliminate them. It rarely took prisoners, and routinely and indiscriminately killed civilian non-combatants while inflicting extensive destruction.
Several factors led Israel to put its plans for a massive show of force in Jenin into action. Not only had its intensive efforts in the city and its refugee camp met with considerably less success than in Nablus, but the Jenin Brigades and others were showing signs of increasing sophistication. Most recently, in June of this year, they deployed newly-developed roadside bombs against an Israeli unit that had invaded Jenin Refugee Camp and immobilized seven Israeli armoured vehicles, wounding at least seven soldiers. The unit was pinned down for hours, and could only be rescued after US-supplied Apache helicopters launched the first air strikes in the West Bank in two decades. Several days later four Israeli were shot dead near Ramallah by two gunmen affiliated with Hamas in reprisal for the killing of seven Palestinians and wounding of approximately 100 during the Jenin raid.
In Israel “deterrence” has sacred status, and its practical application – keeping the Arabs in their place – has been an obsession since the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine in the late nineteenth century. Its visible disintegration in real time additionally presented a significant political challenge for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu; a failure to ensure the security of Israel’s colonial project would not only turn an Israeli population already up in arms about his autocratic legislative agenda decisively against him, but would also lead to the implosion of his governing coalition, without which his ability to evade conviction for a variety of corruption indictments would evaporate.
Maintaining deterrence is similarly important to the resident fascists in his cabinet, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir. Themselves fanatical West Bank settlers constantly baying for more Palestinian blood, they are finding it increasingly difficult to deflect responsibility for the “deteriorating security situation” on to either the Palestinians or other Israelis. Given their senior roles in government, their demagoguery has limited currency and is experiencing diminishing returns.
Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people is as a rule the product of institutional consensus and meticulous planning. Yet on this occasion it is entirely possible that partisan considerations played a role, and that Netanyahu viewed the Jenin assault in part as a political pacifier to coalition partners opposed to his recent willingness to postpone elements of his autocratic agenda.
Be that as it may, the Jenin assault is ultimately part and parcel of a broader political agenda, which is to make the West Bank safe for the rapid acceleration of Israeli colonization, leading ultimately to formal annexation. This requires Israel to crush not only Palestinian resistance, but their national aspirations as well. As formulated by Netanyahu in late June to his parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, “We need to eliminate their aspirations for a state”. Ben-Gvir expressed it thus: “The Land of Israel must be settled and …. a military operation must be launched. Demolish buildings, eliminate terrorists. Not one or two, but tens and hundreds, and if necessary even thousands”. In Israeli parlance, particularly in circles such as Ben-Gvir’s, “terrorist” is shorthand for Palestinian, whether man, woman, or child, civilian or combatant.
The latest invasion of Jenin has followed a predictable pattern. Enormous and wilful destruction, indiscriminate fire, the use of civilian non-combatants as human shields, the deliberate obstruction of medical care to the wounded, the intensive bombardment of a hospital with tear gas, and the forced displacement of at least 3,000 residents. On this occasion conducted by approximately 1,000 elite troops backed up by some 150 tanks and armoured vehicles and an air force.
Whether this is intended as a hammer blow to be followed by a series of smaller raids, or as the first stage of a larger offensive that will expand to other West Bank regions and potentially the Gaza Strip, remains to be seen. Either way Israel will pronounce victory and claim it executed the operation exactly as intended and without a hitch.
What can also already be confirmed is that once again there is a sharp discrepancy between the international community and the West. Leading the pack for the latter is the United States, which rushed to proclaim that it views Israel’s invasion of a foreign refugee camp to be an act of legitimate self-defence that it fully supports, and to denounce as “terrorists” those defending their camp by returning fire at armed soldiers in uniform. In London government and opposition issued a unified response to Israel’s latest crimes by passing parliamentary legislation that makes it illegal for local authorities to boycott either Israel or its illegal settlements. In Brussels, the European Union is presumably debating the finishing touches of a statement expressing serious concern before commissioning yet another investigation of Palestinian textbooks.
No less craven is United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. With the flair of a minor State Department functionary, he once again slithered through a series of platitudes to avoid condemning Israel for actions he instantaneously denounces elsewhere. It bears recollection that in his previous post Guterres served two successive terms as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and continues to reference this decade of his career to the point of tedium. Yet when confronted with the aerial bombardment of a densely-populated refugee camp and the forced displacement of thousands of its inhabitants, he apparently saw nothing that merited censure.
Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine
