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As Israel pummels Gaza, the crisis in the West Bank comes into focus
Before Oct. 7, analysts were fretting more about the West Bank, not Gaza, as the potential spark for an explosion of Israeli and Palestinian violence. The calendar year had seen a surge in violence involving Palestinians and Israeli settlers — the latter emboldened by a coterie of influential far-right ministers holding top positions in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Human rights groups tracked an escalation in attacks by armed setters, who stormed through Palestinian villages, vandalized Palestinian property and destroyed Palestinian crops. A tense security environment saw an uptick in Palestinian militancy, with Israel’s military deploying the bulk of its manpower to counter perceived threats in the West Bank. Even before the Islamist group Hamas’s bloody rampage through southern Israeli towns and kibbutzim three weeks ago, which triggered a punishing, brutal Israeli response, 2023 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in two decades. But in the aftermath of the deadliest day in Israel’s history, the scales have tipped even further. In the shadow of the war in Gaza, Israeli settlers have ramped up their attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Groups of settler vigilantes, some roaming around on ATVs, have set fire to Palestinian homes. A Palestinian man harvesting olives was gunned down by a Jewish settler this weekend. he Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says at least seven Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers since the war in Gaza began; more than 100 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces over the same time period, according to the United Nations, as tensions boil over. Hundreds of Palestinians have been driven from their homes by settlers, who appear to be acting with a degree of impunity. It has raised fears among Palestinians in the West Bank that the current febrile moment could be a prelude to a wider campaign of violence and expulsion. “The war in Gaza gave the settlers the green light,” Tariq Mustafa, who fled his home in the Bedouin community of Wadi Siq after threats from armed settlers, told my colleagues. “Before, they would yell at us to go to Ramallah. Now they are telling us to go all the way to Jordan.”
The Israeli campaign against Hamas, entrenched in the Gaza Strip, is understandably dominating attention. But it’s allowed an already deteriorating situation in the West Bank to drift in an alarming direction. “The lack of attention has allowed the settlers and their enforcement bodies, official (the military and the police) and semi-official (the settlements’ security officers and right-wing volunteers acting as escorts), to escalate their attacks against Palestinian herders and farmers with a clear goal: to expel more communities from their land and homes,” wrote Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. According to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank on 100 different occasions and in at least 62 locations from Oct. 7 to Oct. 22 — with that figure undoubtedly higher a week later. But the violence is part of a deeper trend. According to September U.N. data, 12 percent of Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank had been forced from their homes because of settler intimidation and violence. “The Israeli government is supportive of these attacks and does nothing to stop this violence,” noted a recent statement from 30 Israeli human rights groups and civil-society organizations. “On the contrary: government ministers and other officials are backing the violence and in many cases the military is present or even participates in the violence, including in incidents where settlers have killed Palestinians.” Netanyahu’s far-right government includes a number of extremist politicians who specifically champion the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the annexation of some of its land — moves that are viewed broadly by the international community as illegal and an impediment to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. The latter is a cause rejected outright by figures such as like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who emerged from the far-right fringes of Israeli politics to positions of influence in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Smotrich infamously called this year for the flattening of an entire Palestinian town in the West Bank. Ben Gvir, in recent weeks, has gone about various Israeli towns and West Bank settlements distributing high-powered guns to local civilians.
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| Settlers from Kochav Hashachar in the West Bank march on a road to the Palestinian village of Taybeh on Friday. A confrontation between settlers and Palestinian farmers the day before left one settler and several Palestinians injured. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post) |
Their increasing clout and angry worldview have hung over a year of spiraling violence in the West Bank. And it may be all the more validated as Israeli attitudes grow more hawkish in the wake of Hamas’s atrocities. About half a million settlers live in the West Bank, in settlements that abut the lands and homes of a Palestinian population six times their number. For the Israeli right, their security concerns are paramount. For Palestinians, life under a relentless military occupation is only stoking further despair and radicalization. Since Oct. 7, Israeli security forces have detained hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank as part of a wider crackdown on potential militancy.
“Israel’s sweeping security measures in the West Bank are an extension of its war against Hamas in Gaza, an attempt to eliminate the militant group and permanently shift the balance of power in a conflict that has raged for decades,” my colleagues reported a week ago. “But many Palestinians and some analysts warn the measures could have the opposite effect. Hamas’s presence is limited in the West Bank, where the rival Fatah movement holds power, but many of its aims are shared by a new generation of militant groups that have taken up arms here over the last year. The fighters are young, loosely organized and opportunistic.”
Sensing the looming troubles, the Biden administration has urged Israel to rein in its extremist settlers. President Biden said last week that their actions and incitement were “pouring gasoline” on an already volatile situation. But in the current climate, with Netanyahu bent on a “mighty vengeance,” that’s easier said than done.
“A responsible Israeli government would approach Israel’s challenge in the West Bank as the two-front battle that it truly is: against Palestinian and Jewish violence alike,” wrote Alex Lederman of the Israel Policy Forum. “But this problem transcends Israel’s current political reality. Just as this war is prompting Israelis to question long-held assumptions about how Israel should navigate the challenges posed by Hamas in Gaza, it should also spur a reckoning about the unnecessary and avoidable security burden posed by the settlement movement.”
In the West Bank, ordinary Palestinians are bracing for worse to come. “Fear fills the air as people remember a 2002 Israeli invasion that destroyed much of the West Bank’s infrastructure and left many people dead,” wrote Ramallah-based journalist Dalia Hatuqa. “A repetition of that invasion is the specter in people’s minds as they clear out grocery store shelves, anticipating another stretch of long days being trapped inside due to an army curfew which may or may not come.”