It's Not Yet an Intifada, but the West Bank Is Heading Towards an Eruption - Israel News -
The not-yet-an-intifada in the territories is kicking up quite a storm even without being officially named. A case in point is the night between Wednesday and Thursday this week.
In the Tul Karm refugee camp, explosive devices and hand grenades were thrown and shots were fired at a Border Police force that was arresting a wanted individual; five members of the undercover Mista’arvim unit were wounded, three of them seriously. Next to the settlement of Avnei Hefetz, Palestinians in a passing car opened fire at a moped rider, who wasn’t hurt; an Israel Defense Forces unit pursued and killed the two men in the car. At Joseph’s Tomb, in Nablus, where the IDF, under pressure from the settlers and the Haredi population, continues to insist on allowing worshippers to enter, explosive devices were detonated as a bus convoy passed, this time without casualties.
- Jenin’s long history of defiance against Israel and its occupation
- In the West Bank, Netanyahu's government is sacrificing the law
- Palestinians in Israel need international intervention
No fewer than three battalions, and various means, were allocated once more to the guard mission in Nablus. A few hours earlier, at midday Wednesday, the IDF closed the Hawara-Nablus road for three hours in the wake of a surge of incidents in which stones were thrown at Israeli vehicles. Traffic at the southern entry to and exit from Nablus was completely disrupted.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, center, participating this past April in a march to the evacuated West Bank outpost of Homesh.Credit: Amir Levy
A new situation prevails in the West Bank, and it’s not confined exclusively to the Jenin area. It’s the culmination of several developments across a few years and is also connected to the ongoing weakening of the Palestinian Authority. A major cause of the rising tension is the character of the present government. The additional minister in the Defense Ministry, Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism), effectively completed his takeover of the system by which building permits are issued for the settlements and the settler outposts. The policy he’s implementing is aimed at annexing the West Bank. Smotrich has already overcome the feeble resistance he encountered from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the IDF’s top brass.
At the same time, the most extreme elements among the settlers are discerning – and rightly so – that the government is with them and will see to it that violent attacks on the Palestinians do not run up against the full rigor of the law. This leniency is dictated from above by the authorities toward every perpetrator of violence who is considered “one of us” – car-rammers and assailants of demonstrators against the regime coup, spitters at Christian clergy and pilgrims, and even people from La Familia, the fan club of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team, who beat up supporters of other teams. The exact same convoluted reasoning is voiced in all these cases by cabinet ministers and MKs to ostensibly condemn the violence and, in the same breath, to cite extenuating circumstances for it.
The severe incident in Tul Karm is a manifestation of a worrying trend that has been going on for more than a year: Palestinian organizations being armed with standard-issue weapons and with explosive devices, some of which are also standard. In this case the exchange of fire took place at close range. But the planting of lethal devices in pits that are dug under the road is also increasing the risk to Israeli forces when they enter to make arrests. Standard-issue explosive devices have also been sent to other destinations – from Arab crime families inside the Green Line, to terrorist squads. Last month, on the eve of Rosh Hashana, two Palestinians from the Jerusalem area were arrested on suspicion of having detonated an explosive device in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park.
A burning tire during clashes with the Israeli forces near the Tulkarm refugee camp on Thursday.Credit: Raneen Sawafta / Reuters
The increase in the number of incidents is also due in part to efforts from outside, by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, to spur local militants to act. This support includes inputs of money, combat material and instructions for organizing in the West Bank. Both the IDF and the Shin Bet security service are aware that their margin of error has narrowed. A squad that is planning an attack and is not taken into custody in the casbah or the refugee camp will soon come across an Israeli family driving on a West Bank road, and if its personnel are more ambitious they will get to Tel Aviv, too.
The incident in Tul Karm stirred, expectably, a series of Pavlovian reactions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel views Iran as being “directly responsible for the wave of terrorism in Judea and Samaria” – as though there isn’t here, in addition to that, a violent Palestinian struggle whose reasons are well known. And an extreme Hardali (Haredi nationalist) organization called Torat Lehima (“combat doctrine,” with a play on the word “Torah”) announced that the Border Police officers were wounded as a result of the “criminal abandonment of heroic fighters and allowing their blood to be shed”; the government, this group alleged, is implementing a “security policy of the progressive left,” as shown by the IDF supposedly tying the hands of the fighters and not bombing the camp from the air.
The Palestinians are waging the struggle against Israel without any connection to the hopes for peace that are being floated via the Israeli-Saudi channel. But a positive development in the normalization talks with Riyadh could also have implications both for the territories and the Lebanese border. On one hand, Israel hopes that the PA will make do with measures and easements that will be agreed upon in talks, and that it will work to calm the situation on the ground; on the other hand, the rejectionist camp, from Iran to Hamas, will have good reasons to try to counter the success of the agreement by igniting a conflagration in the territories.