West Bank Dispatch: Carving a resistance haven in an era of defeat

Key Developments (June 9 – 12)

• Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian in the Ramallah district, near the Rantis checkpoint west of Ramallah city on Friday, June 9. The Palestinian man was identified by the Palestinian Ministry of Health as Mahdi Biadsa, 29. The Israeli army claimed Biadsa was riding in a stolen vehicle, and allegedly “attacked an IDF [Israeli army] soldier and attempted to steal his weapon” during the army’s search of his vehicle, Al Jazeera reported.
• Israeli forces attacked a funeral in the town of Beit Ummar in the Hebron district in the southern West Bank on Friday, June 9, firing tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at the mourners in the funeral procession. According to Wafa news agency, Israeli soldiers sealed off the main entrance as the funeral procession approached, sparking confrontations. “Soldiers showered the mourners and the pallbearers with volleys of tear gas canisters”, Wafa reported, adding that dozens were suffocated by the tear gas, and two people were injured with rubber-coated steel bullets. There is a permanent Israeli military base at the entrance to Beit Ummar, which sits close to the town’s local cemetery. Israeli forces routinely attack funeral processions in the town – in 2021, a young Palestinian man was killed by Israeli forces while attending the funeral procession of a 12-year-old boy from Beit Ummar who was killed by soldiers the day prior.
• Israeli forces arrested around 30 Palestinians and injured at least five more during arrest raids across the West Bank, according to local reports. On Friday June 9, Israeli forces raided the town of Nabi Saleh and arrested two Palestinian youths who Israeli forces had reportedly injured in the days prior. Last week, a two-year-old boy, Mohammad Tamimi, was shot and killed by Israeli forces. The death of the toddler sparked protests in Nabi Saleh, and widespread international condemnation.

In-depth

It has been almost a year and a half since armed resistance found a resurgence in the West Bank. Many predicted that it wouldn’t last very long, questioning either its efficacy or viability in profoundly hostile military terrain. Others were far more optimistic and in some cases bordering on the guardedly utopian, believing that certain areas of the West Bank could become guerilla havens that the Israeli army would not penetrate without casualties. Aside from the example of Gaza, the only existing model for what that might look like was Jenin refugee camp, whose long history of armed resistance during the Second Intifada not only allowed for the persistence of an armed presence in the camp, but also led to the evacuation of settlements in the Jenin area. Yet what led many to claim the camp as a “liberated area” was the fact that, with the formation of armed resistance groups like the Jenin Brigade, Israeli raids into the center of the camp were becoming exceedingly infrequent.

Nidal Khazem, a slain member of the Jenin Brigade, intimated as much to Mondoweiss’s Senior Palestine Correspondent Mariam Barghouti in an interview in October 2022: “Our goal is to have all of Palestine liberated, but what we’ve done as a small group is an achievement…Look at the camp. The camp is a liberated area. But as the Jenin Brigade, we can’t liberate Palestine.”

Khazem’s observation wasn’t entirely wrong. His own assassination took place outside of the camp while he was in Jenin City, and so was the case with most other Israeli assassinations of Jenin Brigade members during the past year and a half. They would generally take place either on the camp’s outer edges or in the city. This didn’t mean that the Israeli army was incapable of entering the camp, but it did mean that the army preferred to wait for members of the armed groups to leave the camp’s protection to strike. Most of them were young men living in hiding within the camp’s confines for months on end, with little to no military training or discipline. Venturing outside of the camp became a necessary, if perhaps foolish attempt, to salvage their sanity. They did so at their own peril, and to their ultimate demise.

The Lions’ Den tried to convert the Old City of Nablus into a similar resistance haven, but they didn’t have the advantage of an accumulated tradition of an independent armed presence in the Old City. It may also be likely that, since the Lions’ Den was a fledgling organization that enjoyed a meteoric rise in popular sympathy for it, the Israeli army might have considered it worth it to launch massive invasions into the city in an attempt to nip it in the bud and to terrorize Nablus’s civilian population, in an attempt to dissuade them from offering support to the resistance.

This might explain the scale of the massacres Israel committed during the past year in Nablus and Jenin, since the vast majority of the injured and a significant portion of the slain were civilian noncombatants. After all, Israel’s war against the resistance was not only a war against the armed groups, but most crucially against their popular base.

Yet the more optimistic predictions that the West Bank might be converted into liberated pockets interwoven with the Palestinian Authority’s bantustans have so far not come to pass. Certainly the immediate prospects for this scenario have been diminished in light of Israel’s heightened campaign of repression and extrajudicial assassinations during the past six months.

While the news of assassinations, army raids, arrests, and lone wolf operations has continued to come in without interruption, it is undeniable that the erstwhile vitality of the West Bank resistance groups has dimmed in recent weeks. There is some regional variation on this score, but Israel’s concerted onslaught against Aqbat Jabr refugee camp, the Old City of Nablus’s Yasmina neighborhood, Balata and Askar refugee camps, Jenin refugee camp, and Tulkarem, has left behind a trail of martyrs, and there are only so many losses that the resistance groups can bear before their ranks begin to thin. The Yasmina neighborhood is now emptied of its militant youth, the martyrs’ cemetery in Jenin refugee camp is running out of graves, and Aqbat Jabr continues to be regularly invaded by the army following a weeks-long siege on Jericho during the previous month. Jenin refugee camp might hold out for a while longer, and the armed presence there is likely to remain even in the long term — but the presence of arms and the use of arms are not the same.

This has been Israel’s strategy of slow strangulation since the start of 2022. While it can unleash an even more brutal onslaught that would kill hundreds — glimpses of which can be seen in two aggressive invasions at the start of the year in Jenin and Nablus — such a heavy hand might risk backfiring and inciting more resistance. Even this kind of relatively low-intensity warfare was enough to cause a conflagration, and the underlying cause of this moment of resistance — the settler colonial project — has not vanished.

This doesn’t mean that armed resistance in the West Bank is irreversibly in decline, but it does mean that it exists in exceedingly hostile terrain. It exists in cities and refugee camps that have been laid bare before the combined efforts of a settler colonial power and a collaborationist native authority that work together to unearth the soil in which the resistance grows. While this reality continues, the prospects of carving a guerilla haven will remain remote, and resistance fighters will have to keep fighting from the margins.

Key figures

• At least 157 Palestinians, including 27 children, have been killed in 2023 in the West Bank and Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
• More than 2,000 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli forces between January and April 2023