West Bank Dispatch: Tomorrow’s uprising

Key Developments (Jan 24 – Jan 30)

• Israeli forces shoot and kill 26-year-old Naseem Nayef Salman Abu Foudeh with a bullet to the head in Hebron on Monday morning, January 30.
• Israeli forces commit a massacre in Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, January 26, killing ten Palestinians, including two youths and one elderly resident of the camp. 
• Omar Al-Saadi, co-founder of the armed resistance coalition, the Jenin Brigade, dies of wounds sustained during the massacre.
• A day of mass confrontation and protest follows the Jenin massacre on Friday, January 27, culminating with a shooting operation that leaves six Israeli settlers and one Ukrainian national dead in the settlement of Neve Yaacov.
• The Israeli government calls for retribution and collective punishment of Palestinians following the Jerusalem shooting on January 27.
• Israeli settler violence against Palestinian villages and towns increases, with a record of 144 settler attacks recorded in a single night in Nablus on January 28, killing one 18-year-old.
• Israeli forces arrest dozens of Palestinians within the span of 72 hours in East Jerusalem.
• Israeli authorities deploy the army to support the Israeli Police in Jerusalem. 

In-Depth

The next escalation is already here. 

It feels very different from previous cycles of resistance and repression. It is as if Palestine is on the brink of something closer to an uprising. 

The cycle was set in motion on January 26, when the Israeli army raided Jenin refugee camp in one of the most extensive and wide-ranging invasions since the Second Intifada. The stated objective of the operation was to root out a Palestinian resistance cell. What followed was a massacre. 

Ten Palestinians were slaughtered, and it set Palestine on fire.

The next day saw popular protest and resistance across all of the West Bank, from shooting operations by Palestinian resistance groups in Nablus and Jenin to clashes between Palestinian youth and the army on the outskirts of towns to mass funerals held on Friday for the slain. Many of those funerals would later turn into celebrations when the news broke of an event that would overshadow the day’s actions.

A Palestinian from Shu’fat refugee camp by the name of Khairi Alqam, 21, carried out a shooting operation in the illegal Israeli settlement of Neve Ya’akov near East Jerusalem. The shooting resulted in the killing of at least seven Israeli settlers and injuring at least three others. Alqam was his grandfather’s namesake, who was stabbed to death by an Israeli settler in 1998. That settler was released from prison in 2010. Alqam was celebrated as a hero who sought revenge for his grandfather and the martyrs of the Jenin massacre.

The day after the Jerusalem shooting saw even more resistance operations, as a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was shot and injured after he allegedly opened fire on two Israeli settlers and left them injured. The shooting occurred near the Israeli “City of David” tourism park, which over the course of several years has displaced dozens of Palestinians in Silwan.  

What we see from these events, and the myriad protests, clashes, and resistance operations that have followed throughout the week, is that Palestine is witnessing something more than “rising tensions.” It might not be an Intifada in the formal sense, but all we know is that it is different.

Others have said this before. The many popular uprisings from 2015 to the present have seen Palestinian action wax and inevitably wane. But each new uprising left a cumulative lesson behind it, and Palestinian resistance has developed along two parallel lines: organized armed groups mainly centered in Nablus and Jenin, and the rise of “lone wolf” attacks by individuals. 

Paradoxically, the lone wolves have, up to this point, been far more damaging to Israel in terms of human casualties, and they have also posed a serious security challenge to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, which is left unable to predict and prevent these operations from happening, unattached as they are from any network or organization that can be surveilled, infiltrated, and arrested or assassinated.

But the assassinations haven’t been enough to curb even the organized armed groups. Israel has dipped into its playbook of collective punishment to try and “deter” militant action — demolishing the family homes of Palestinian resistance fighters, locking down entire cities and refugee camps, shooting and killing any Palestinian on sight — but to little avail. Some left-of-center Israeli pundits warn that the broader Israeli collective punishment becomes, the more Palestinians will be pulled into the arena of struggle.

Maybe this moment of popular ferment and rebellion will eventually fizzle out like the preceding ones. Maybe the revolts of the future are equally destined to rise and fall until the death knell of the Palestinian Authority finally sounds. But what is certain is that the new Israeli government has been taking the policy of collective punishment to heart and is proposing new legislation to expand its punitive measures even further, including the “deportation” of the relatives of resistance fighters — yet another Zionist means of incremental ethnic cleansing.

All of this is to say that while the many possible futures of Palestinian resistance remain formless and kaleidoscopic, the colonial constant ensures that resistance will have a future.

Important figures

• 35 Palestinians have been killed in the first month of 2023, including eight children. 
• The highest concentration of Palestinians to be killed this month are in the Jenin governorate, at 20 Palestinian martyrs.
• Half of the Palestinian children killed in 2022 were in the Jenin and Nablus governorates. 
• 173 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2022, as part of Operation Break the Wave. 

Mondoweiss Highlights

Israeli government calls for retribution and collective punishment in wake of Jerusalem shooting, by Yumna Patel

Co-founder of Jenin Brigade succumbs to wounds sustained in Jenin massacre, by Mariam Barghouti