Israel Expands War in West Bank
Another step closer to a regional war.
What appears from my vantage point to be a major escalation in the Middle East conflict is not exactly getting front-page treatment in the major American press.
NYT (“At Least 10 Killed as Israel Begins Major Military Operation in West Bank“):
Hundreds of Israeli troops launched major overnight raids in the occupied West Bank, Israeli officials said on Wednesday, targeting Palestinian militants after what they called months of rising attacks. At least 10 people were killed.
The operation was concentrated in Jenin and Tulkarm, two cities that have become militant strongholds, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters. He said the operation was continuing. A Palestinian armed group based in Jenin said it had fired on Israeli forces in two villages on the city’s outskirts, and Palestinian residents in both cities described hearing intermittent gunfire.
The raids on Wednesday appeared to be the largest since July 2023, when about 1,000 Israeli soldiers carried out a 48-hour incursion in Jenin that killed 12 Palestinians, at least nine of whom militant groups claimed as members.
The operation followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory, where nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule. Israel has arrested thousands of Palestinians suspected of involvement in armed groups since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, an increasingly deadly campaign that has unfolded alongside the war against Hamas in Gaza.
At least 628 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, in violence involving both the Israeli military and extremist Jewish settlers.
The Israeli raids have failed to tamp down the armed groups. They have also devastated Palestinian civilians in the territory, who saw Israeli bulldozers tear up roads early Wednesday and feared being caught in the crossfire.
AP (“Israel kills prominent militant as it wages its deadliest West Bank raids since the Gaza war began“):
The Israeli military said it killed five more militants, including a local commander, early Thursday in the West Bank as it pressed ahead with what appeared to be the deadliest military operation in the occupied territory since the start of the war in Gaza.
Israel says the simultaneous raids across the northern West Bank — which have killed a total of 16 people, nearly all militants, since late Tuesday — are aimed at preventing attacks. The Palestinians see them as a widening of the Israel-Hamas war aimed at perpetuating Israel’s decades-long military rule over the territory.
The Islamic Jihad militant group confirmed that Mohammed Jaber, known as Abu Shujaa, was killed during a raid in the city of Tulkarem. He became a hero for many Palestinians earlier in the year when he was reported killed in an Israeli operation, only to make a surprise appearance at the funeral of other militants, where he was hoisted onto the shoulders of a cheering crowd.
The military said he was killed early Thursday along with four other militants in a shootout with Israeli forces after the five had hidden inside a mosque. It said Abu Shujaa was linked to numerous attacks on Israelis, including a deadly shooting in June, and was planning more.
[…]
Hamas repeated its calls for Palestinians in the West Bank to rise up, calling the raids part of a larger plan to expand the war in Gaza. The militant group has called on security forces loyal to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which cooperate with Israel, to “join the sacred battle of our people.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has also condemned the Israeli raids, but his forces were not expected to get involved.
[…]
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to mediate a cease-fire that would see the remaining hostages released. But the talks have repeatedly bogged down as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed “total victory” over Hamas and the militant group has demanded a lasting cease-fire and a full withdrawal from the territory.
CNN (“Israel launches large-scale West Bank raid as minister calls for Gaza-style operation“) adds:
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the operation had been staged to “thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructure,” claiming that Iran was working to establish an “eastern front” against Israel.
“We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required,” he wrote on social media. “This is a war for all terms and purposes and we must win it.”
The operation comes as Israel steps up its military operations in the West Bank, where clashes have become more frequent since Israel began its war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7.
The IDF’s international spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said in a briefing that Israel had identified “a systematic strategy in Iran” of smuggling weapons and explosives into the West Bank.
“Specifically, about Jenin and Tulkarm, we’ve seen over 150 shooting and explosive attacks originated from these areas alone over the past year,” Shoshani said on Wednesday.
Whether this latest incursion was tactically desirable is hard to say. There’s little doubt that Iran is backing anti-Israeli forces in the West Bank and elsewhere and there have been repeated attacks from that territory into Israel since the Hamas war began last October. Thus far, the ratio of militants to civilians killed has been almost surgical—certainly in comparison to the larger war effort.
At the operational level, this seems like an expansion of the war aim from simply “destroying Hamas” to a larger effort to weaken Palestinian forces of any stripe. And, strategically, this seems rather obviously to increase the likelihood that the slow-simmering set of proxy wars between Iranian-backed forces throughout the region and Israel escalates into a full-scale conflict between Israel and Iran.
Already, Israeli forces are mired in multiple conflicts. It’s not clear to me that they can sustain a war effort of that magnitude.
There’s equally little doubt that Israel has been funding terrorist attacks against Palestinians living in the West Bank so that it can annex additional territory
Assuming Israel’s government is acting rationally (a big if since there are currently a bunch a “greater Israel” fundamentalists in key position), the goal is likely to do enough to provoke a disproportionate response from Iran and its proxies in order to get the US involved. Which – presumably – would then allow Israel to annex the occupied territories and expel the Palestinians.
Trump would likely go along. Due to domestic considerations, even Biden can’t tell the Israelis to go pound salt in every circumstance.
It would be a gamble (to say the least), but Netanyahu could find himself in jail if he loses power. Moreover, he is governing together with a bunch of crazy fundamentalists who undoubtedly believe that God is on their side.
One more roll of the dice and a glorious future awaits!
It is only hard to say if you remain unwilling to see that the long term and increasingly explicit goal of the Israeli government is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. As Stormy says above, Israel has been using settler violence and land confiscation to accomplish this for decades. The Israeli strategy has been a long term, death by a thousand cuts, confiscation of Palestinian land while making life in what Little remains for the Palestinians untenable. This strategy has been successful. So as a tactic in pursuit of this strategy this latest incursion into Palestinian territory is absolutely desirable and it’s not a hard call. The fact that this tactic once again reveals Israel as just another morally bankrupt, squalid Mideast country is an unintended but inevitable outcome. But there are none so blind as those that will not see.
I said this last October and I’ll repeat myself. It may just reflect my binary, black and white view of things but there can only be two outcomes: Complete Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Gaza with full citizenship rights for all people residing there, or two, a Palestinian state with removal of all the settlers. I see no other end state.
@Scott: There is most definitely at least one other end state: The Israelis drive the bulk of the Palestinian population out of what the settlers refer to as Judaea and Samaria and into Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or some combination thereof. I wouldn’t place bets on any particular outcome, but if I had to chose that seems the most likely to me.
@MarkedMan: Yeah, it will be called the Palestinian Diaspora.
@Scott: It already has a name, and has had since 1948: Nakba.
“the ratio of militants to civilians killed has been almost surgical”
I certainly didn’t see any information about that ratio in the reports (I may of course just have missed them).
As I said from the start, there is no solution to this problem. Or at least no solution that anyone is going to like.
There is not going to be a Palestinian state for a multitude of reasons, including the obvious geography issue of two widely-distanced segments, the economic non-viability of any such state, the inevitability of a Hamas-PA civil war should a state be declared, and the fact that absolutely no one in the region wants to see a Palestinian state. If you’re the king of Jordan, who do you really want running the West Bank? 150,000 Palestinians work in Israel. If the West Bank becomes more of a problem, Israel will cut off those jobs, plunging Palestinians into even deeper economic distress, and bring in workers from the Philippines etc.
Palestinians have made yet another in a very long series of self-destructive decisions, the latest being to ally themselves increasingly with Iran. That connection frees the Arabs to write them off. Not one Arab ruler wants to see Iranian missiles in the West Bank.
The likely future is a slow emptying out of Gaza, and the West Bank remaining what it essentially is now: an analog to our own Indian reservations. In keeping with that analogy Israel will start the salami-slicing of Gaza. First a buffer zone, then strategic settlements.
At this point it doesn’t matter who is Israel’s PM, the sides are set: it’s Israel, the Arabs and the US vs. Iran. Iran is the unifying force.
This looks mostly like an attempt to take over more control or total control of the West Bank. My bet is that they force a lot of people to leave and those left will be permanent second class citizens.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds: As Netanyahu arrests and/or undercuts everyone who takes non-extreme options while explicetely refusing to progress on the Palestinian state (and while openly backing annextionist Settlers), blaming this on ‘the Palestinians’ rather than being in fact engineered by the occupying state (Israel) is rather rich.
the global understanding of htis is not your American Indian reservations, it is Apartheid with all that implies.
@Scott:
Take out “citizenship rights for all people residing there,” and you get what Bibi and his crazies want.
That this would turn Israel into a pariah state, doesn’t seem to trouble them at all. Apartheid has never been popular globally.
@Lounsbury:
I’m not blaming it on Palestinians any more than I blame Boris Spassky for losing to Bobbie Fischer. I’m saying they’ve made serious mistakes, which you cannot afford to do when in conflict with a more powerful foe. Even if we wished to cast Palestinian side as angels, it doesn’t alter the fact that their leadership have always been idiots. Let’s posit for the sake of the discussion that Israeli leadership are also idiots – they’re idiots with tanks and jets.
Israel will do what’s is going to do but we do need to be complicit. Your Indian Reservation is very interesting. The truth is that our Native Americans indeed control large swaths of uninterrupted land with their own governance including policing. However, I don’t think that model would work if they were 300 million Indians. The truth is that Palestinians have very little control over their land so the analogy is inapt. Eventually, Palestinians will need to be given self-determination and if the whites in South Africa were able to see this so will the Israeli population.
@Michael Reynolds: You are in fact pointlessly blaming “The Palestinians” for a situation that the non-Jewish population of West Bank in particular have zero control over.
This is not 1970 nor 1980 nor even 1990. Going on about “their leadership” being idiots is geriatric time-warp.
Angels has fuck all to do with it mate and that’s a pathetic strawman as I rather clearly made no characterisation of the goodness or not of The Palestinians nor leadership – it is a matter of control. The Palestnians groups have none – not even the agency to effectively organise.
ISrael has rather effectively trundled off the moderate-and-competent to jail, while rather openly promoting Hamas relative to Gaza – undercutting the Autority.
The Israeli leadership of the Netanyahu colour are not idiots, they are ideologues with an agenda – and quite good at that agenda for all that it is in the end a dead-end nihilistic ending. But then the Boer leadership was quite good at their game playing it until it was utterly unsustainable unwilling to admit they had taken the wrong path. Not incompetent but misjudged.
The Israeli Left opposition are bunglers, but that is par for the course for better or worse with the Left, namby pamby bungling. Hopefully agaisnt all hope however they will eventually get enough together to oust Netanyahu, the master of manipulation.
@Lounsbury:
All irrelevant. You want to blame Israel, fine. But I’m surprised by your reversion to moralism. I thought you were a pragmatist.
Do you think I’m wrong? Do you think there will be a Palestinian State? Do you think I’m wrong that Arab governments don’t want an Iran-aligned Palestinian State? Do you think Abdullah wants a PA/Hamas state next door? Do you think a Gaza/West Bank state separated by miles and miles of Israel will ever make sense geographically or economically?
Don’t deliver me condescending lectures when you know goddamn well I’m right.
@Michael Reynolds: All irrelvant? Irrelevant because …. they facts do not fit your 1975 era narrative of Bad Palestinian Leadership (which indeed is a historicla truth, but it is again not 1975 nor 1985 or 1995)? Or what is the ‘irrelevancy’ basis? Really, as asserting irrelevance on basic facts: Israel has an effective and concentrated campaign of jailing Palestinian leadership that are moderate and effective; the current Israeli government explicetely closes the door in public to all moves on Two State – thus completely undercutting the attempts at a moderate West Bank government; has until the October events rather indulged Hamas – and hardly deniable, Netanyahu has made open statements about their utility in undercutting Fatah
There is zero moralism involved here, pure cold pragmatic understanding of the dynamic set up by Netanyahu.
I don’t know you’re right on the contrary what I see is an old man parroting outdated ideas in geriatric reproduction of same-old-same-old smoke screen to blame purely the Palestinians for what has become really an Israeli domestic political game.
The neighbouring Gulf and bordering states Arab governments indeed have zero desire to see a Hamas – and have de facto long, decades long, abandoned both old Nasserist pan-Arabist pretence – however these are not arguments about the Palestinian leadership and ‘The Palestinians” own decision, which is what I commented on which is the deliberate and effective manipulation by Netanyahu faction to completely undercut any Palestinian moderate path, entirely separate and independent- so let us drop the red herring.
As for the coherence of West Bank and Gaza, a lot of things depend on end facts, unlike any of you I would rather suspect I have historically been there and even been in PE investment in the area. Microstates can function – Luxembourg, Andorra – it all depends on what the end configuration is – whether some extension of Israeli dependency (a more plausible route) or turn to Jordan and Egypt for trading (rahter less plausible although not impossible). So in fact yes, a West Bank- Gaza state in the modern era can operate economically so long as it has free trade and is not locked down by Israeli sanctions. That is fact, one can see other choices as in S. Asia and non-fully continguous states. Ideal hardly not, but improvement over the current situ, yes quite possible.
Zero moralism involved here. Pragmatism, a pragmatism that says that the Netanyahu game however competently executed is one that has engaged in massive self-deception about its plausibility of end result, rather like the old Boer’s game.