Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / August 13, 2024
Palestinians fear that if a regional war breaks out, Israel might try to use the opportunity to carry out a second Nakba.
As the rest of the world braces for the prospect of an all-out regional war in the wake of Iran and Hezbollah’s impending attacks against Israel in retaliation for the assassinations of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation have their own fears about what a wider conflagration might mean for them.
For Palestinians in Gaza, things can hardly get any worse. They have already been the subject of a relentless genocide that now marks the bloodiest period in Palestinian history. Some have even wondered whether a regional war with Hezbollah and the “Axis of Resistance” might actually take some pressure off Gaza since the Israeli military would likely be tangled with other fronts.
But things are different for the Palestinians living in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the part of historic Palestine that now makes up the Israeli state. While paling in comparison to the Gaza genocide, these communities have also faced unprecedented levels of Israeli repression since October 7. But a major war in the Middle East might be a game-changer for them, with its potential impact raising more apprehensive questions than answers.
As Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the October 7 attack, Israeli forces ramped up repressive measures on Palestinians in the West Bank, launching a wave of mass arrests and increasingly violent raids in West Bank towns and cities. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers have increased their attacks on Palestinian rural communities, expelling some 20 Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley and the eastern slopes of the West Bank with little media attention.
‘They have shelters. We only have the sky.’
“If a war breaks out and includes the West Bank, we have no place to go,” Habes Ka’abneh, a father of three and member of the displaced community of Wadi Seeq east of Ramallah, tells Mondoweiss.
The Wadi Seeq community in the eastern slopes of the West Bank includes 40 Bedouin families who were displaced from the Naqab desert in 1948 and then again from the south Hebron hills in 1967. Settlers attacked the community on October 12 of last year and forced its inhabitants to leave under pain of death. Most of them have been living on the outskirts of nearby villages and towns for the past ten months. Habes and his family have been living on private lands of the Palestinian Christian town of Taybeh.
“Israelis are in panic because they have to store food in underground shelters, but we don’t even have shelters. We are living under the sky, so even if a stone falls on our tents, it would harm us, let alone a bomb,” Ka’abneh says.
He and his community cannot store food because they provide for their families on a day-to-day basis. “As Bedouins, we depend on our livestock, but we lost the lands where we used to let our flocks graze, and we can’t afford to continue to buy feed. Most of our livestock has either died or been sold so we can provide for our families.”
But subsistence isn’t Ka’abneh’s main concern in the event of a war. “Our biggest fear is the violence from the settlers. After October 7, they displaced us and attacked us. What would they do if a major war broke out? Who will even look at us?”
The unprecedented level of settler violence, especially in the area where Ka’abneh lives, has led to record numbers of settler pogroms and arson attacks since October 7. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has escalated its plans to annex Area C of the West Bank, where Bedouin and other rural Palestinian communities live. In June, Israel’s hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced that he had been implementing a plan to transfer the Israeli army’s administrative powers in the West Bank to the government, a de facto form of administrative annexation. Israel also revoked a 2005 law that banned Israelis from settling in the northern West Bank, while Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, continues to distribute firearms to settlers in the West Bank.
In the northern part of the West Bank, the Israeli army has increased its military raids on Palestinian cities and refugee camps, intensifying its crackdown on local resistance groups in the area. Israeli raids, which have become almost daily, include drone strikes and the destruction of infrastructure and public and private property.
“We are already living in constant fear,” says Najat Botmeh, a schoolteacher and social worker in Jenin refugee camp. “Not since we recently heard the news of a possible regional war, but since more than four years ago. Our camp is a daily target of Israeli raids.”
“We witness death every week, sometimes every day. Our streets are bulldozed, our houses are damaged or destroyed. The occupation threatens to do to Jenin what they did to Gaza, but we are already in a very similar situation,” Botmeh says. “My son tells me that he is worried, and I tell him that we are already living through what he is worried about.”
She explains.
“Yes, I am worried about a major regional war, but it is a fear that we have already been living. The raids in Jenin already forced families to flee outside of the camp in early 2022,” Botmeh clarifies, recounting her harrowing experiences over the past two years. “I moved out for a while, as all houses in my neighborhood were damaged and hit, but then Israeli forces shot at the house across the street from where I and my family had moved to, outside of the camp. This is what makes me worry the most, that no place is safe in all of Palestine.”
‘Israel never dropped its displacement project’
The feeling of insecurity extends to Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship and live within the modern borders of the Israeli state.
“If a regional war breaks out, especially if Israel is attacked, nobody in the world will pay attention to one or two million Palestinians in ‘48 Palestine,” says Razi Nabulse, a researcher from Haifa at the Institute for Palestine Studies. “No more than the two million Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Israel never dropped its project of displacing Palestinians from all of Palestine. The real question was always when were the conditions ripe to finish the job. These intentions are no longer hidden or implicit,” Nabulse says.
In July, Bezalel Smotrich said in a radio interview that “Arabs in Israel are an existential danger to the state,” adding that “there are large numbers of Arabs inside our state, and they possess weapons stolen from the army’s bases.”
Israel imposed military rule on ‘48 Palestinians for 20 years since its establishment. Until the early 1990s, they were strictly banned from raising Palestinian flags or identifying as Palestinians.
“After October 7, Israel practically imposed military rule again on ‘48 Palestinians through the criminalization of political expression, like raising the Palestinian flag, and through waves of arrests. What would happen if a regional war breaks out?” Nabulse says.
“The ‘48 Palestinians feel powerless in the face of the atrocities in Gaza. It has led some to believe that if they don’t express their Palestinian identity, like before the Oslo accords, they will be safe,” he explains. “But this is a dangerous assumption because Israel doesn’t want to take us back to before Oslo. It’s taking us back to 1948. Its problem with us isn’t our political stance or our form of political expression. Its problem is with the fact that we exist.”
This feeling of incapacity has influenced Palestinians in the West Bank as well, explains Hamza Aqrabawi, a popular artist and researcher in Palestinian folklore.
“Palestinians have a collective memory with wars that are present in popular art and sayings, like references to displacement and running to mountains and caves, like in the 1967 war, or storing food and closing windows with duct tape, like during the Gulf war,” Aqrabawi tells Mondoweiss.
“But this time, it seems that Palestinians are not reverting to these traditions,” he remarks. “They’re behaving as if a regional war won’t affect them. The reason is that the scenes of atrocities in Gaza have made them lose any hope in the Arab world and the world at large, to the point that they don’t feel there is a point in panicking.”
Aqrabawi invokes a popular idiom in such circumstances. “He who is wet doesn’t fear drowning,” he intones. “The general wisdom in the phrase is that the only thing useful in the event of a war is steadfastness, survival, and remaining on the land.”
Above all else, this is the lesson learned from the Nakba. No matter where Palestinians reside across their fragmented political geographies, they’ve internalized the importance of steadfastness when faced with the prospect of a second event of mass expulsion.
“Unlike the Nakba of 1948, people now know what leaving means,” Nabulse says. “They would never be allowed back. Regardless of how they behave now, Palestinians are very unlikely to leave if a war breaks out and Israel opens the borders.”
“We adapt, we survive, and we remain here. We have nowhere else to go,” Najat Botmeh echoes. “If we are in danger everywhere we go, what’s the point of leaving?”
“Leave where?” Habes Ka’abneh says ironically. “We’ve already been displaced multiple times inside our country.”
“But we’d rather die than leave the country altogether,” he vows.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
