Palestine: occupied West Bank “ready to ignite”

Reprinted from the UK social website Left Horizons

By John Pickard.
26 October 2023

There are no armed Hamas militants in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but the Israeli government is doing its level best to increase support for the Hamas political wing. In “defending itself”, the Israeli state has killed over a hundred Palestinians and injured hundreds more on the West Bank.

They have detained more than 1,200 without trial, keeping them in brutal, inhumane and insanitary conditions. Two prisoners have already died in custody. By these means, whatever their intentions, Israel is guaranteeing an increase in support for Hamas in the occupied West Bank.

Since the Hamas attack in Israel, which killed over 1,400 people on October 7, the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force have increased their incursions into Arab cities and refugee camps in the West Bank, demolishing the homes of ‘suspected’ Hamas sympathisers or any other well-known activists.

It is inevitable that there will be widespread sympathy for the beleaguered population of Gaza, trapped in a tiny enclave with minimal food, no water and no energy supplies. The collective punishment handed out to the Gaza population has resulted in over 6,000 deaths, the overwhelming majority of them non-combatants and many of them children.

But the Hamas atrocity has given the IDF and armed Jewish settlers a green light to go after Arabs in the West Bank. In an interview in the Guardian (October 24), some Palestinian residents described their ordeal. “The Israelis are coming almost every day since 7 October”, one resident told a reporter. “They want revenge.”

Upsurge in Arabs being displaced from their land

For the first time, the Israeli air force has used drone strikes against Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and the local population fear that the regular bombing of civilian areas in Gaza – with its inevitablly huge death toll – may become a feature of life in the larger cities on the West Bank, where all of the nineteen refugee camps, first set up after the Naqba seventy-five years ago, are situated.

Away from the larger Palestinian cities, at least eight communities have been forced to leave their land, faced with a growing number of attacks from armed Jewish settlers. Vandalism, theft and attacks by settlers on Arab farms and villages were becoming a generalised feature of life on the West Bank even before October 7, but they have been significantly ramped up since then. There are widespread assaults by armed settlers, to whom some of the Palestinian deaths are directly attributable, often with a nod and a wink from the IDF.  

Large areas of Gaza have been reduced to rubble. The population of West Bank cities fear that this may be their fate in the future

A report in Al Jazeera noted that Wadi al-Siq, was among the Palestinian villages where locals were being  forcibly displaced, according to Israeli rights organisations. “Heavily armed Israelis from illegal settlements attack these communities on a daily basis – concentrated, organised attacks that go unimpeded and sometimes aided by security forces, according to witnesses and human rights organisations. While this has happened for years, it has increased in intensity and frequency as the world looks away, focused on the horror of the Israel-Gaza war that began on October 7”.

IDF soldiers and settlers abusing Palestinians

According to the same report, Area C, which is a part of the occupied West Bank with Palestinians under military control, but where Jewish settlers enjoy civil control, “has seen about 545 Palestinians forcibly displaced from at least 13 communities since October 7”.

In a village near the city of Ramallah, the Guardian reported, “soldiers and settlers detained three Palestinians, stripping them to their underwear before beating them, urinating on them, extinguishing cigarettes on them, and sexually assaulting them”. The paper reported that the IDF has “opened an investigation”, but that is little use, because everyone knows that it will go nowhere.

The Israeli Cabinet, the most extreme right wing in the  history of the state, includes anti-Arab racists who would dearly love to expel all of the three million Arabs in the West Bank to other states, notably Jordan and Egypt. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, has boasted that he is sourcing as many as 10,000 more weapons, mostly assault rifles, to distribute among Jewish settlers. He has been known to carry a handgun himself and to threaten an Arab with it during an altercation.

This is a government minister and these are the kind of pogromists who are dictating Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. They make a virtue and a policy of ethnic cleansing and they boast about it openly. We wait – but with little expectation of any satisfaction – for these West Bank outrages to be on the lips of Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak, or to be featured in the headlines of mainstream newspapers.

If the Israel government imagine that these policies will undermine support for Hamas in the West Bank, they are living on another planet. The experiences exposed in these newspaper interviews can be repeated a hundred times across the West Bank, where Palestinians face a daily barrage, at the very least of abuse, humiliation and harassment, and at worst, of brutality and murder.

The West Bank is a powder keg about to explode

Even before this month, the West Bank was a powder keg, but now it is far worse. Given the events in Gaza, and the Israeli’s brutal suppression, it is a powder keg about to ignite.

If Hamas, or organisations like it, gain more support among the youth of the West Bank, it is as a direct result of Israeli oppression. There is a new generation of youth, who, like their cousins in Gaza, feel they have no future and no alternative but to hit back. With nothing to lose, many are prepared to fight and, if necessary die, for Palestinian rights.

The corrupt Palestinian Authority, headed by the 87-year old Mahmoud Abbas, has so little political influence among Arabs on the West Bank that it has been afraid to hold elections for the past fifteen years since they were last due. Its security arm, Fatah, is seen as simply an ‘outsourced’ wing of the Israeli state, there to keep ‘order’ and protect Mahmoud Abbas, whose main function in life is to give a cover to Western and Arab political leaders, so the latter can meet Abass and then claim they are ‘talking to Palestinians’.

When the populations of the big cities engaged in demonstrations last week in support of those facing the bombs in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority security forces responded with teargas and rubber bullets. Al Jazeera reported that a 12-year-old Palestinian girl was shot and killed by PA security forces. If and when the West Bank really explodes, the Palestinian Authority and its security apparatus will be blown away by events.

Nonetheless, even some of the Fatah people can see which way the wind is blowing. “Sooner or later”, a member of the Palestine National Council told the Guardian, “the situation in the West Bank will ignite,”

The West Bank is braced for the most serious upheaval in generations, since its occupation by Israel in the war of 1967. There is a widespread expectation that Arab solidarity with Gaza and the West Bank will be expressed by the Arab population within Israel itself. Not only that, but there could be a wider war involving Hezbollah in Lebanon, a militia ten times more powerful than Hamas. “This time is different,” a 38-year old Palestinian barber told the Guardian journalist, “Every generation, you see it get worse and worse. But nothing will be the same after this.”

But what the right wing of the Israeli Cabinet want to do and what they can get away with are not necessarily the same thing. Israel, more than any other country in the world, relies upon its its international prestige,  and on the diplomatic and financial support of governments and populations elsewhere.

Now, the tide of public opinion – first of all among workers and youth, but later at a higher level, especially in the Muslim world – is swinging rapidly away from Israel and in support of the Palestinian people. Despite bans on pro-Palestine flags and demonstrations in many parts of the world, expressions of support will only increase one way or another. Indignation and outrage will not be suppressed.

If the West Bank explodes and Israel responds with the same savagery that it is showing towards the Arabs in Gaza, that tide of shifting opinion will become a tsunami. Israel has military power bigger than its next four or five Arab neighbours all put together. The USA is sending thousands of tons more in ships and large aircraft as we write.

A military victory may be a political and diplomatic defeat

But a bloody military victory for Israel could also be an unprecedented political and diplomatic defeat. There is no possibility of Israel establishing ‘peace and security’ for its population by military means. We must hope that that realisation at last begins to dawn on those parts of the Israeli Jewish population who have voted for successive right-wing governments over many years, largely based on their promises of ‘security’ through ‘strength’.

But the same argument holds true for the Palestinian struggle. Given the preponderance of Israeli arms, there cannot be a resolution to the problem of Palestinian rights by military means. The Palestinians have suffered for decades from a double tragedy: from the ongoing oppression by Israel, but also from the utter inability of its ‘leaderships’ – the PLO (mostly Fatah) and Hamas – to offer a viable way forward.

There was a letter in the Guardian this week (Oct 25) on Gaza. In part, it read, “The Israelis don’t understand the Palestinians’ anger. The Palestinians don’t understand the Israelis’ existential terror.” The problem with this, is that it is largely true of the political leaders and to be more precise, it is not so much those leaders’ inability to understand as their wilful refusal to do so.

The letter ends with a hope, that “one day, they will be able to see each other for what we all are: just people.” For socialists, that should be more than just a hope; it should be a political progamme.

By “people”, we understand the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and Israelis who are working class, who do only want peace, security, a decent standard of living, good health and education systems and a future for their children. All these things are possible, but not on the basis of a life or death struggle between Jews against Arabs, and not on the basis of capitalism which thrives on divisions and on the exploitation of one person’s rights at the expense of another’s.

After this war, which may yet have a long way to run, nothing will be the same again in the West Bank, in Palestine as a whole, in Israel, or anywhere else in the Middle East. We have a grim scenario opening up before us.

But we must hope that the influence of the international labour movement can make a difference, in developing a political movement and a political leadership in the region that can reach out to the mass of Palestinians as well as to Israeli workers, so that entirely different opportunities can at last be opened up.