Surprise, surprise! Violent Palestinian resistance in the West Bank is raising its head. The human monsters have woken up from their slumber and started exploding. Suicide bombers have returned and the host of Israeli pundits have a learned explanation: It's the Iranian money. Without it, the West Bank would be calm. With it, people are willing to commit suicide just to get their hands on some. It's all the Iranian octopus.
How easy it is to attribute everything to Iran. Israelis love doing it. There is a devil and he's Iranian, and he's to blame for everything. Maybe there is Iranian money, maybe there isn't, but the intensified struggle is the most predictable, understandable development, given what has been taking place in the West Bank over the 11 months of the Gaza war. The only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.
Over the 11 months of war, Israel has ripped up the West Bank, just as it is now doing to roads in Tul Karm and Jenin; nothing is left of them. This is the hardest period the Palestinians have experienced since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, even harder since it's taking place in the shadow of another attack, a more barbaric one, in Gaza. In contrast to Defensive Shield, the current assault has no reason or justification. Israel has exploited the war in Gaza to cause turmoil in the West Bank. The response was late in coming, but it has now arrived.
The Israeli assault has two arms this time: the army, Shin Bet and Border Police on one hand, and violent settler militias on the other. The two arms are coordinated; they don't get in each other's way. Sometimes they blend into each other, when the stormtroopers from the outposts don uniforms – these are the "emergency response teams," which grant legitimization to every pogrom. The army takes care not to interfere, neither in small nor large incidents.
In this context, a statement by a senior military source who warned about settler violence over the weekend expressed unbelievable gall. "Jewish terror is causing great damage to security in the West Bank," said the source, whose forces could and should have stopped Jewish terror a long time ago. There has not been a pogrom in which soldiers weren't present and did nothing to stop it. Occasionally, they take part in it – and the senior officer dares lament it.
October 7 was not just a day of calamity for us, it was one for the Palestinians as well. There are no more words for describing what Israel has wrought in the Gaza Strip, but it didn't hold back in the West Bank either, with the encouragement of the Kahanist cabinet members and the silence of the prime minister, other ministers and the public.
In recent weeks I have visited Jenin, Tul Karm, Qalqilyah, Ramallah and Hebron. Nothing resembles the reality of October 6, even though the West Bank played no part in the October 7 attack. On October 8, three million Palestinians there woke up to a new reality, not that the preceding one had been humane or legitimate. With a passion for vengeance and for seizing opportunities, the Israeli boot mercilessly pressed down harder on the West Bank's neck.
Tens of thousands of acres were expropriated and robbed over these months; there is hardly a hill left in the West Bank without an Israeli flag or outpost that will one day be a city. Roadblocks have also returned in full force. You cannot move from one place to another in the West Bank without encountering them, waiting there, humiliated, for hours. You cannot plan anything in a reality in which at least 150,000 people have lost their livelihood, after work in Israel was completely closed to them. Everyone there has been penalized for October 7. Eleven months without wages leave their mark. What did you expect?
There is now a new kid on the block: the drone. Under the shadow of war, the air force has started firing into the densely populated West Bank. According to UN figures, 630 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war began, 140 of them in 50 airstrikes. What is permitted in Gaza is now permitted in the West Bank. Soldiers have internalized this fact, and their conduct toward Palestinians has changed accordingly. If we're not in Gaza, at least let us behave as if we were. Ask any Palestinian what he's gone through. Despair has never been greater.
And after all that, there's not going to be terror?