Israel’s accelerating crackdown on the West Bank over the past two years has reached the point of feeling like the new normal. Palestinians say that the strangulation of their daily lives and the chronic regime of closures between cities and villages is here to stay, with many describing the situation on the ground as “irreversible.”
But this crackdown also runs contrary to the long-established Israeli policy of avoiding “friction” in the West Bank to prevent an “explosion” from Palestinians in response to Israeli repression. This was the dominant approach of successive Israeli governments up until October 7, 2003.
In late February, before the beginning of the month of Ramadan, the Israeli army and security branches warned the Israeli government of a possible escalation in Palestinian “violence” in the West Bank. In the past, the holy month has been known to coincide with escalating political tensions in the territory due to the al-Aqsa Mosque in galvanizing protests around the rights of Palestinians to pray freely at the holy site. Israel has historically attempted to maintain calm during these months by allowing Palestinians from the West Bank to obtain permits to enter Jerusalem and visit al-Aqsa, but this year, Israel broke with convention.
Early in the holy month, Israel issued only 10,000 permits for Palestinians to visit, a historic low made even worse by the fact that the permits were restricted to children under 12, men over 55, and women over 50. Then, once the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran started, the Israeli army revoked all Ramadan-related permits entirely.
This comes after Israeli settlers stormed the al-Aqsa compound 24 times during the month of February alone, with thousands of Israelis taking part in the performance of Jewish religious rituals in violation of the accepted status quo at the site.
This all represents a sharp escalation, given that similar stormings of the site during Ramadan in the past have elicited widespread protests in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. The most recent example was the 2021 “Unity Intifada” that broke out in response to provocations at al-Aqsa and the threat of evicting residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
It is as if the Israeli government is deliberately trying to provoke an explosion in the West Bank, running contrary to all warnings from the Israeli security establishment. But why would Israel want such an explosion?
Creating ‘irreversible’ facts on the ground
According to Palestinian historian Bilal Shalash, Israel has entered a phase where it is trying to bring its conflict with its enemies to a “decisive end.” This is clearly evidenced in its ongoing aggression in Iran and Lebanon, but the West Bank is another arena where Israel seeks to clear the deck. “Israel is motivated by the fact that its main sponsor and ally, the U.S., is trying to do the same thing at a global scale, from Latin America to Iran,” Shalash explains. “And in the case of Iran, it also happens to be the center of opposition to Israel’s domination in the region.”
Shalash argues that this marks a break with the previous Israeli policy of launching smaller-scale periodic crackdowns on Palestinian communities in a bid to avoid a major conflagration. Such limited waves of repression, which Shalash says Israeli officials have called “mowing the lawn,” were designed to keep political tensions below a certain threshold. “They have been followed by periods of relative stability,” he explains.
This philosophy has been the doctrine governing Israel’s regime since it occupied the West Bank in 1967, Shalash explains. “Israeli generals recommended that as long as daily life went on normally, without any large-scale upheavals, Israel could deal with acts of resistance individually,” he noted.
“Israel has effectively dismantled all social structures that could produce any collective reaction to what it is doing in the West Bank.”
Khaled Odetallah
But historically, Shalash says, Israel has also interrupted this strategy in favor of escalating its crackdown on Palestinians when a large-scale wave of Palestinian resistance caught it by surprise. “This was the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a wave of Palestinian armed resistance,” he explained. “And in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was in response to the First Intifada.”
Other events included Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, which responded to the Second Intifada, and the current unprecedented escalation over the past two years, which followed October 7, 2023.
The latter campaign, however, has also marked a qualitative shift, according to Shalash, who explains that the Hamas attack made Israeli leaders conclude that “mowing the lawn” no longer worked. “This intensified wave of Israeli repression has a new feature: it is attempting to create demographic and geographic realities that are irreversible,” he said.
Those irreversible facts are the displacement of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in large parts of the West Bank and the de facto annexation of those areas. It is supposed to lead to what Shalash describes as a “‘decisive’ outcome” in which “Palestinians would be cornered in isolated ghettoes inside an annexed territory.”
“They would have no political system of their own, and they would live in conditions that push them to leave the country in large numbers,” Shalash explained.
Whether this actually comes to pass, however, depends on how Palestinians react, Shalash stresses.
This particular factor is the main difference between the current Israeli crackdown and previous ones, says Khaled Odetallah, the founder of Palestine’s Popular University and one of the co-editors of Al-Janub: The Palestinian Journal for Liberation Studies.
“The difference is that this time Israel is also taking advantage of the general paralysis in Palestinian society as a result of a heavy crackdown that has been ongoing for several years, and which has only doubled since October 2023,” Odetallah pointed out.
“Israel has effectively dismantled all social structures that could produce any collective reaction to what it is doing in the West Bank, from shutting down NGOs and human rights associations, to mass-arresting union and student activists, and even by displacing entire refugee camps, in Jenin and Tulkarem,” he noted.
In the absence of a strong Palestinian entity that is capable of pushing back, Odetallah says, “it is difficult to see how the ‘decisive’ process that Israel has set in motion in the West Bank can be halted.”
How to resist Israel’s ‘decisive’ plan
The situation Shalash and Odetallah paint is dire. But Odetallah says that things might even get worse.“The Palestinian Authority’s entire relevance relies on the Gulf states’ insistence on a Palestinian state as a condition of normalizing relations with Israel,” Odetallah explains, “But that might change as a result of the ongoing war on Iran.”
“We are not in the prelude to this ‘decisive’ process,” Odetallah says. “We are in the middle of it. It would normally trigger a reaction. But so far, that remains completely absent.”
For Odetallah, the main thing Palestinians need to consider now is to remain on their lands and to resist the unrelenting pressures that Israel is exerting upon Palestinian communities to pack up and leave. Palestinians have called this strategy sumud, or “steadfastness.” But Odetallah doesn’t consider it a passive position. “It is an effort to sustain people’s capacity to stay and live as a collective,” he explained. “This steadfastness requires a lot of work, socially and economically, and a lot of support, too, especially since the current ‘decisive’ Israeli offensive doesn’t show any sign of stopping.”
Since the beginning of Ramadan, three weeks ago, Israeli forces have conducted more than 200 arrests in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, which has also reported an increase in raids on Palestinian prisoners’ cells by Israeli prison service forces. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have demolished more than 300 Palestinian properties in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, according to the Jerusalem Legal Aid Center. A reality coupled with the skyrocketing of ISraeli settler violence, which has killed five Palestinians in the West Bank in the last week alone.
These measures are all coming to a head in the lead-up to the Israeli elections, due next November. In mid-February, Smotrich laid out his vision for the tasks of the Israeli government’s upcoming tasks in a public speech from a West Bank settlement. He stressed that the next Israeli government must “revoke the Oslo Accords and extend Israeli sovereignty” to the West Bank. He also said that Israel must “take practical steps to encourage emigration” of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to Smotrich, this would secure “the long-term solution” to the conflict, but Palestinians call it ethnic cleansing.
This is why the Israeli government is trying to provoke an “explosion” in the West Bank. It wants to use it as an excuse to move toward the “decisive solution” it has sought for the Palestinian question.
