Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / August 31, 2024
Israel’s old policy of containing armed resistance in the West Bank is over. Palestinians are now wondering whether the war on Gaza has expanded to the West Bank.
Israel’s ongoing military onslaught on the northern West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas has now entered its third day. The Israeli army has made a point of describing it as the largest-scale invasion of the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, a message largely meant for its Israeli audience, and perhaps also meant to terrorize Palestinians as a form of psychological warfare — Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel should deal with the West Bank the same way it has been dealing with Gaza, including “temporarily evacuating” residents.
The actual scale of “Operation Summer Camps,” as Israel calls it, has so far fallen short of the West Bank invasion from 22 years ago, but Palestinians have nonetheless been left wondering: is this the beginning of our Gaza moment?
From the early hours of the operation, Israeli forces sealed off Jenin and besieged its public hospital, while more forces raided the refugee camps of Nur Shams in Tulkarem and al-Fara’a in Tubas. In many respects, this has not been an unfamiliar sight in these camps even before October 7. Israel’s crackdown on armed resistance in the northern West Bank and elsewhere has steadily risen since late 2021.
The emergence of the Jenin Brigade, followed by the emergence of the Tubas and Tulkarem Brigades — and the short-lived Lions’ Den in Nablus — posed a serious challenge to Israel’s attempts to maintain stability in the West Bank as it expanded its settlement project.
The areas of Jenin, Tubas, Tulkarem, and Nablus became increasingly difficult to raid for Israeli forces, forcing Israel to further militarize these areas and deploy airstrikes and armored vehicles. This changed the security landscape in the West Bank for a whole year before October 7.
An extension of the war in Gaza ?
Since October 7, Israel ramped up its raids on the northern West Bank’s cities, especially in refugee camps that have served as havens for the resistance groups. The Israeli strategy was to preempt the further development of armed Palestinian activity in response to Gaza’s al-Aqsa Flood operation and to neutralize the West Bank as an additional front in the war on Gaza. While the West Bank as a whole was largely pacified, the northern West Bank remained an active battleground. Instead of being deterred, the resistance groups in Tulkarem, Jenin, and elsewhere increased their capabilities, especially in terms of manufacturing IEDs. Then armed resistance began to spread to rural parts of the northern West Bank, marking a pattern of growth in the presence of armed groups.
As the months passed by, the rhetoric of Netanyahu’s allies — like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — increasingly called for decisive action in the West Bank by extending the all-out war on Gaza to the West Bank. This was accompanied by an escalation in settlement expansion and annexation measures, which Smotrich and Ben-Gvir pushed for with the backing of their popular base of militant settlers.
However, the continued engagement of Israel in Gaza and its inability to declare a decisive military victory against Hamas made it harder to declare the West Bank as a new front in the war, especially with a second front open with Hezbollah along the southern Lebanese border.
At the same time, the war in Gaza transformed into a war of attrition in the past few months, increasing internal and external pressure on Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza. This is where the West Bank assault comes in.
As Israel is expected to start winding down and reducing operations in Gaza, it is now attempting to expand operations to the West Bank in order to prolong the state of war as much as possible, given that Netanyahu’s interests align with the continuation of the scenario of attrition. If this is the case, that means the West Bank assault is only in its beginning stages; as Israeli forces withdraw from Gaza they will become freed up to step up pressure in the West Bank.
Moreover, the West Bank represents strategic importance to Israel, given its intent to annex large swathes of Area C, which comprises over 60% of its total area. This plan is the centerpiece of the Israeli right’s political platform, which also currently holds decisive sway in Israeli politics. In addition, the West Bank’s geographic proximity to Israel’s center and the porousness of the Separation Wall make the idea of a program of armed resistance in the West Bank intolerable for Israel.
Change of strategy
Israel’s latest operation in the West Bank has already killed 17 Palestinians, including two teenage siblings. It has destroyed more infrastructure in the targeted cities, while dozens of residents have been arrested. As this reality gradually becomes the status quo in the West Bank, the reality that emerges is a shift in Israeli strategy. We could already glean this change since October 7, but the latest operation in the West Bank has brought it into clearer focus: it is a shift from a policy of containment to a policy of intensified assault.
For years, Israel has followed a policy of avoiding major upheavals and maintaining stability by engaging in limited raids in the West Bank, largely launching broad arrest campaigns that have been, in many instances, preemptive in nature. Since October 7, this policy has given way to the terrorization of the Palestinian population as a whole; it is not only a counterinsurgency campaign against armed resistance groups, but a war on Palestinian society in the West Bank as a means of deterring them from resistance.
Regardless of whether the war on the West Bank is an extension of the war on Gaza, what is clear is that we have entered a new phase in Israel’s policy toward the West Bank. Even if the war in Gaza ends tomorrow, the West Bank will now become a new arena of escalation and annexationist settlement expansion for the foreseeable future. The old status quo of artificial stability has been shattered, and there’s no going back to how things were before. This is both to the benefit of Israel’s settlement ambitions, but also to its peril, as it risks a conflagration in the West Bank and the broader region.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
