Current Events, Episode 166
israel at war, EXPLAINED: the west bank
december 4, 2023
BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE
The West Bank — what many Jews call Judea and Samaria — is another sector of this war that is boiling over with tension and violence. While Israeli forces arrest thousands of Hamas terrorists, fanatical Jewish settlers attack Palestinian civilians. What is going on and how did we get here?
The Gaza Strip might be the most complicated piece of land on Earth right now, but the West Bank surely comes in a close second. A few days ago, November 29, two Hamas terrorists murdered three Israelis in broad daylight at a bus stop in Jerusalem. They simply got out of their car and started shooting at people. Two off-duty Israeli soldiers and an armed civilian shot them dead. The terrorists had come from a nearby Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, which is nestled up against the West Bank. Which begs the question: how is Hamas in Jerusalem, when Israel is fighting them in Gaza?
The answer is that Hamas is also in the West Bank. It’s a sector of this war that is really important but is understandably not getting as much attention as what’s happening in Gaza. But the West Bank is simmering with tension and violence. Since October 7, Israel has been on high alert in the West Bank, arresting Hamas operatives and engaging in frequent gun battles. Perhaps a couple hundred Palestinians have been killed — mostly fighters but, as always with Hamas, some innocent civilians have been caught in the crossfire. Israel is desperately trying to keep the terrorists at bay to prevent another front from opening in this war.
And remember, too, that Israel is also worried about war breaking out on its northern border with Lebanon, where Israel is under daily attack from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group. Around 100,000 Israelis are still displaced from the towns and kibbutzim near the border because of the danger. Although Israel and Hezbollah are trading fire, and people have been killed, it has been kept just low enough to prevent this other front from fully opening up.
Right now the West Bank is a volatile mix of groups violently opposed to each other with a few million people caught in the middle. There is the Israeli military, Hamas and other terrorist groups, the Palestinian Authority, and a small but fanatical group of Jewish settlers. And there’s the outside inputs: Iran supporting the Palestinian terrorists. Israel’s hardline government supporting the violent settlers. And, of course, the complex, intractable, and paradoxical Israeli occupation. And the implacable Palestinian commitment to violence, and failure to build anything stable out of the areas which they do control.
So the two big pieces in the West Bank right now are Israel’s operations against Hamas, and the settler violence that is wrecking havoc. These are important pieces for understanding the wider context of the Israel-Hamas war. I’m your host Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.
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The West Bank defies quick and simple historical explanations, and it would take a very long time to run through all the permutations. But let’s set ourselves up for a minute. In ancient times, when the area was under Jewish sovereignty, it was called Judea and Samaria, the names still used by many Israelis today — especially the religious and those on the right. From 1948 to 1967 it was occupied by Jordan. Then Israel captured the territory during the 1967 Six Day War. There has never been an independent Palestinian state there, and the Palestinians have rejected decades of offers to form one alongside Israel. Thus Israel has been left in charge of the West Bank, unable to either absorb it into Israel proper, nor turn it over to the Palestinians as an independent state. In the years after the Six Day War, the settlement movement picked up steam, establishing small Jewish communities and neighborhoods around the West Bank, some of which eventually turned into full towns.
The security requirements of counterterrorism, and the need to maintain, support, expand, and protect the settlements, have resulted in the interminable Israeli occupation of all or parts of the West Bank. What in 1967 was assumed to be a short-term situation has now persisted for 56 years. Today there are roughly 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and about 450,000 settlers. Note that I am not counting East Jerusalem here, which is often considered a separate entity from the rest of the West Bank.
From 1967 until the 1990s, Israel occupied the West Bank in its entirety. But that changed with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was the beginning of a peace process designed to end the occupation and the wider conflict. Under its terms, the West Bank was split into three sections: A, B, and C. Area A is under complete Palestinian control, from civil administration to security. Think of Area A as intended to be a mini self-governing Palestinian state. No Israelis settlers are allowed to live in Area A and, until recently — which we’ll come to — the Israeli army didn’t operate there, either.
Area B is a mix of Palestinian civilian control and Israeli security authority. Israelis are also not permitted to live there. In recent years settlers have illegally established small outposts in an effort to claim the land, often seizing it from private Palestinian ownership. The Israeli army removes them, but they return or set up shop somewhere else. It’s a small but aggravating problem.
Then there is Area C, which is about 60% of the West Bank, and that is territory completely under Israeli control. Here is where the settlements are. The numbers vary, but there are around 130 settlements which are legal under Israeli law, and scores more that aren’t legal. According to the Israel Policy Forum, around 20,000 Jews live in illegal settlements. The settlements — legal and illegal — range from a ragtag group of shelters to full-on suburbs and small cities in their own right.
The problem is that these three areas are often not contiguous — that is, the Palestinian Areas A and B are often islands inside of Area C. This is where the Israeli occupation’s checkpoints results in restricting Palestinian movement between the various areas. And the wider picture is that, if Areas A and B and parts of C are going to form the future Palestinian state, then they’ll have to be connected — that is, some number of Israeli settlements are going to have to be dismantled in order to turn that land over to the Palestinians. Estimates are that around 150,000 Jewish settlers would have to be removed. Polls show that most of them would go willingly if the government ordered them to. Alternatively, Israel cannot just annex the West Bank into Israel. Not only do the Palestinians not want that, but in the long-term it means that Jews would lose their majority in Israel, and thus Israel would no longer be a Jewish state.
It’s also the case that many of the Jewish settlements are also islands. Only in a few places are they clustered together in something resembling an urban core. Especially the smaller ones are nestled amongst clusters of Palestinian villages, and are far away from the urban centers that provide a lot of necessary services. They are heavily dependent on financial support from the Israeli government.
It’s all very complex. At the moment, though, we’re looking at two interrelated things happening. One is the rise in violence from armed Palestinian groups, like Hamas, who have free rein in parts of the West Bank. The other is the violence coming from some of the Israeli settlers. Both are combustible enough on their own, but together we are looking at a situation where a single bad incident could explode the whole West Bank into open warfare.
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Let’s start with the Palestinian side of the equation. Since the 1990s the Palestinian Authority has been in charge of Area A that includes both administration and security, as well as Area B’s civil government. The problem is that in recent years they’ve become so corrupt, inept, hated, and weak that they’ve lost control of entire parts of Area A. The vacuum has been filled in with terrorist groups backed by Iran, such as Hamas. Other groups are more freelance, refusing to owe allegiance to any particular outfit.
So, yes, Hamas is not just in charge in Gaza, but they’re all over the West Bank, too. They are lying in wait for the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. The last couple years has seen a surge in their popularity — and another big boost from the October 7 massacre, and the recent release of Palestinian prisoners from the hostage deal. Hamas wants the usual things: Israel eliminated, Jews gone from the Middle East, the Palestinian Authority tossed out, and themselves in charge of a fanatical Islamic regime. That’s one major reason why Israel can’t let up on the occupation: Hamas is a massive security threat. Israel cannot allow what happened in Gaza to happen in the West Bank.
I mentioned before that Israel is technically not allowed to operate in Area A. But in light of the PA’s weakness the past couple years, its inability to tamp down the terrorist groups, the army has reserved the right to enter Area A for specific operations. This has led to dozens of battles between Palestinian armed groups and Israeli security forces, as the Israelis try to arrest terrorists and disrupt their operations. The journalist Ksenia Svetlova writes that the IDF is aggressively operating in various cities to “thwart planned terror attacks, eliminate underground tunnels and confiscate deadly weapons.” That’s right — those infamous Hamas tunnels aren’t just in Gaza but are popping up in the West Bank, too. Total nightmare scenario.
According to The Economist, last year was the deadliest in 20 years for the West Bank; the last eight weeks since October 7 is looking to beat that. The vast majority of those killed have been the terrorists. But, as always when dealing with criminals who hide behind civilians, some innocent people have been killed in the crossfire. Hamas terrorists recently killed an IDF soldier and wounded five after attacking a checkpoint near Jerusalem. They were on their way to stage a larger massacre in the city, and police found a huge stockpile of weapons in their vehicle.
As I’ve talked about before, Israel's overarching goal is the restoration of its military deterrence — warning off the terrorists that despite October 7, the IDF is still powerful enough to crush its enemies. The concern is that the West Bank terror groups are emboldened by October 7, which seems to be the case in some of these incidents. So Israel is trying to round up those who pose a threat, while also trying to stave off an explosion of violence that will spiral out of control into open warfare.
It’s a precarious and very dangerous situation. It’s made the worse by the violence coming from a cohort of Jewish settlers who have also been emboldened by October 7.
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There are three types of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Secular Jews, ultra-Orthodox, and Religious Zionists, split pretty much evenly. If you ask secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews why they are living there, you’ll likely get a social and economic answer. Housing is much cheaper, the cost of living is lower, it’s a slower pace of life, a tight-knit community. These aren’t religious fanatics. They don’t have any particular ill-will towards the Palestinians and aren’t looking to steal Palestinian land. Their settlements are legal under Israeli law. These are the people who would generally be willing to move elsewhere if the Israeli government decided to give up their settlement.
So that’s two-thirds of the settlers: secular and Orthodox Jews usually living in the West Bank for economic reasons. The other third belongs to the Religious Zionists. Here the economic reasons for settlement are less important than the religious ones. Religious Zionists see a religious imperative to settle on the entire Land of Israel — that is, all the land that in ancient times belonged to the Jews, which includes the West Bank. Religious Zionists believe that complete Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel will bring about the Messiah and the redemption of all humanity. It’s a messianic vision that traces back more than century. In many ways it is an elegant, inspiring, and immensely positive addition to the Zionist Movement, which was secular and had long excluded religious Jews. Religious Zionism ensured that religious Jews could fully participate in the upbuilding of the Jewish homeland, and continue to do so in the State of Israel. They see themselves as carrying on the pioneering spirit of the early secular Zionists, who had also found purpose and meaning in settling the land. For most of the last century, Religious Zionism was a moderate movement — for instance, it wasn’t interested in territorial expansion.
After Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, Religious Zionists saw the opportunity to unite their messianic vision of settling the land with the political situation of the State of Israel. They became fierce and powerful advocates for the settlement movement, developing an ideological and political movement to further the cause. Their heyday was the late 1970s and early 80s, when Israel had a right-wing government for the first time. Settlements have continued to expand since then, but in fits and starts depending on whether the left or right was in power.
The problem with a messianic vision is that it can lead to fanaticism. In the case of Religious Zionism, the settlements took on purposes beyond the fulfillment of a religious messianic vision. They became a vehicle to deny the creation of a Palestinian state. Settlement locations were specifically chosen for their placement in the midst of populated Palestinian areas, in order to create those islands of Arab land that would make it hard to string together to form the territorial continuity necessary for a state. Settlements became about expressing Israel’s dominance in the West Bank, maximizing the amount of territory that Israel could claim when, Religious Zionists hoped, the state would formally annex the West Bank. In doing so, the settlements required ever more resources from Israel, especially from the military, which had to devote tons of manpower to defending the settlements. It’s the aggressiveness of the settlement building that has soured public opinion in both Israel and Palestine, undermining the trust necessary to move towards a durable peace — what we call the “two-state solution.”
So what has happened in the last few years is that the deepening messianic extremism has turned into outright hostility against the Arabs and an ultra-right nationalism that tolerates no compromise, dissent, or discussion. Of course, most Religious Zionists don’t ascribe to such a hardline views. I know numerous Religious Zionists from West Bank settlements whose moderate views sound much like anyone else’s, though they have an additional, unique perspective that comes from growing up in, and living in, the West Bank.
But on the fringes of the Religious Zionist movement emerged a small, ultra-hardline, violent core of settlers. It’s these guys who are causing the trouble.
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This hardline, violent group of extremists are often referred to as the “hilltop youth.” This is because their MO is to establish illegal outposts on the top of hills that either overlook Palestinian land, or are on Palestinian land to begin with. These days the hilltop youth are predominantly young, religious men who refuse to recognize the authority of the state and are utterly obsessed with the Land — with a capital “L.” Believing that it all belongs to the Jewish People as given to them by God, their goal is to expel the Arabs from everywhere they consider Jewish land. Again, we’re talking about a very small group here — probably less than a thousand people, though there are probably several more thousand who share and sympathize with their views.
These hilltop youth engage in what they call “price-tag attacks.” That is, the “price” Palestinians pay when Jews are attacked, or the Israeli government forces them to dismantle an illegal settlement, or left-wing Jews show up to protest them. Often these price-tag attacks are in the form of vandalism: burning a Palestinian farmers’ olive trees, or destroying a shed, or spraying racist graffiti on a private home. But these price-tags can also be violent, including murder. The hilltop youth have been emboldened over the last couple of years because they have, for the first time, sympathetic politicians high up in Netanyahu’s government who will support them. Not only are these politicians hardline right-wingers, but several of them are part of the settlement movement, and a couple of them are even associated with the violent groups. And so these hilltop youth have been getting away with murder, quite literally in some cases. Netanyahu is reluctant to crack down on them because it would anger the extremist members of his coalition whose support he needs to stay in power. Some attacks have been met with arrests and prosecutions and imprisonment. But for the most part the hilltop youth act with impunity.
Since October 7, things have only gotten worse. Not only have the hilltop youth been on the rampage, but there have been several incidents of Israeli reservists joining them. Video emerged of a couple Israeli soldiers abusing Palestinians they had detained. Thankfully those soldiers were pulled from duty and are facing criminal investigation. But there are other accounts of Israeli security forces joining with the settlers, or at the very least intentionally looking the other way. Reports claim that hundreds of Palestinians have left their homes to avoid attacks from nearby settlers. It’s revenge for the October 7 massacre, but it also fits into the extremists’ goals of forcing Palestinians out of their land so it can be seized by the settlers. These Palestinians, of course, had nothing to do with October 7.
The settlers are counting on two things: the support of the Netanyahu government for the settlement movement and its willingness to look the other way; and the distraction of the war with Hamas and the crisis on the northern border to distract everyone’s attention from what’s happening in the West Bank. But we have two big kinds of violence there that are both in danger of getting out of control: Palestinian terrorism, and Jewish settler terrorism. The Times of Israel reports that, since October 7, Israeli troops have arrested around 2,000 wanted Palestinians around the West Bank, of whom more than half are affiliated with Hamas. The journalist Ksenia Svetlova writes, “The combination of an emboldened Hamas, Israeli military raids, settler violence, a deterioration of economic conditions, incitement and pure desperation might plunge the West Bank back into the abyss.” The tension, anger, and frustration are thick enough to cut with a knife; we might just be one bullet away from a total explosion.
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It’s always hard to criticize your own side, even when you don’t associate with its most extreme elements. And so while there is a lot that Israel can’t do to effect change within and amongst the Palestinians, there is plenty it can do from its own side. Top of that is to rein in these fanatical settlers. Arrest, prosecute, and imprison all of those raining violence down on the Palestinians, from vandalism to murder. And there are other creative options: President Biden announced that the United States was readying visa bans and sanctions against settlers engaged in violence. However small this group may be, their extremism not only provides a ready excuse for Palestinian terrorism, but it is utterly wrong entirely on its own merits. That the hilltop youth enjoy the support, encouragement, and sympathy of Netanyahu’s government is a shame. And so the bigger picture must be a change in Israeli politics that returns these extremists where they belong: to the far and unacceptable fringes of Israeli society.
Of course it must be acknowledged that Hamas and its fellow travelers don’t really care about any of this beyond the convenient excuse it provides them. The settlements and the extremists are indeed an obstacle to peace and the two-state solution to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But Hamas and its allies have always maintained that their goal is the complete elimination of Israel and the Jews, regardless of the settlements or the occupation of the West Bank or any other consideration. And so the fight continues. The hostage deal fell apart at the last minute, and fighting has resumed. Israel is still in pursuit of its goals: eliminating Hamas’ ability to ever again attack Israel, and freeing the remaining one hundred-plus hostages.
As always I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and my email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening everyone. Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.
© Jason Harris 2023