Why Israel is attacking the West Bank

News about offensive Israeli military operations has shifted, for the moment, from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.

A series of Israeli raids and attacks against Jenin and other West Bank cities began last week and is continuing. Although the carnage in Gaza during the past 11 months is larger and still deserves the most attention, the new operations in the West Bank are a further escalation of what already was, during this same period, accelerated violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

Since last October, at least 622 of those residents, including at least 142 children, have been killed, most by the Israeli military and the others by Jewish settlers. Fifteen Israelis died there during the same period.

The West Bank operations are a direct extension of what Israel has done so far in Gaza. Israeli foreign minister Yisrael Katz says that Israel “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. This is a war for everything and we must win it.”

The immediate ill effect of the newest Israeli operations — civilians suffering — also is the same as in Gaza though so far on a smaller scale. The suffering is not limited to the directly inflicted deaths and injuries. Many residents have been forcibly ejected from their homes. Medical care is impeded by a blockade of hospitals. Streets are bulldozed and other infrastructure needed for daily living is being destroyed.

Official Israeli statements, as is customary with Israeli statements, talk of “terrorists” as the targets, the elimination of whom is ostensibly the purpose of the military operations. But again, as in Gaza, most of the victims — directly when they become casualties, and indirectly from all the other consequences of the destruction and dislocation — are innocent civilians.

Undoubtedly there exist in the West Bank armed militants, deserving of the label “terrorist,” who wish to cause Israel harm. The Israeli military already has killed some of those militants and probably will kill some more. The presence of such individuals in the West Bank is unsurprising, given what in general leads people to turn to such violent ways and what specifically are the conditions to which Israel subjects residents of the West Bank. Over the long term — now more than half a century — the relevant condition is the oppression of those residents under Israeli military occupation of their homeland.

Added to this during the past year are the horrors that Israeli military operations have inflicted on their Palestinian brethren in the Gaza Strip. The outrage over those horrors underlies an increase in support of Hamas among West Bankers, although the prevailing sentiment is not love for Hamas but rather opposition to what Israel is doing to fellow Palestinians. The tragedy in Gaza undoubtedly provides additional motivations for the militants the Israeli army is hunting today.

On top of all that is now the intensified violence that Israel is adding to its occupation of the West Bank itself. Whatever armed resistance arises there is not dependent on Hamas or any other group but instead on the anger that naturally occurs in response to this deadly form of military occupation. The resistance will continue as a ready supply of recruits to the cause of resistance replaces any militants the Israeli forces are able to kill.

In short, what is happening in the West Bank today is another chapter in the long, tragic story of Israeli leaders choosing to live forever by the sword, bringing unending conflict to Israel itself and unending suffering to the Palestinian nation.

The West Bank offensive provides further cause — although nearly a year of carnage in the Gaza Strip was already more than sufficient cause — for observers in the United States and elsewhere not only to recognize but to speak frankly about exactly why Israel is following such a destructive course.

Israeli military operations — in both Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention elsewhere — long ago went far beyond anything that can be explained, much less justified, by reference to the inhumane attack that Hamas conducted against Israel last October.

A connection between that attack and current military operations in the West Bank was that an earlier transfer of military resources from southern Israel to the West Bank is part of what possibly made Israel vulnerable to what Hamas did. The episode was one of the many demonstrations of how Israel’s clinging to the occupied territories does not enhance Israeli security but instead diminishes it.

That fact seems lost in the rhetoric of U.S. politicians of both parties who repeatedly swear their commitment to Israeli security and to the right of Israelis to defend themselves. Also not found in the rhetoric is any explanation of why other people should not enjoy and exercise that right as much as Israelis should. Given what has befallen Palestinians especially during the past year, their right to defend themselves appears more in need of sympathy and support than just about any other people in the world.

The fundamental cause of this whole tragic story is the Israeli decision not to live peacefully alongside a state for the Palestinians — as was called for in the 1947 United Nations General Assembly partition plan that is the closest thing to a birth certificate for Israel — and instead to retain Palestinian-inhabited land that Israel has conquered through force of arms.

There should be no doubt about this anymore, notwithstanding past “peace process” rhetoric that has obscured this Israeli objective in the past. The move to the right in Israeli politics has overwhelmed internal questioning of the objective. The Israeli government and legislature have declared, formally and forcefully, their opposition to creation of a Palestinian state.

The West Bank figures into the objective even more than the Gaza Strip does. Although some Israeli religious nationalists are talking about returning Jewish settlements to Gaza, it is the West Bank — what Israel calls Judea and Samaria — and all of Jerusalem that play the largest role in fulfilling their objective.

Accompanying this objective is a bigoted view of Palestinian Arabs that is most apparent among the most extreme rightists in Israeli politics, including those in the Israeli government, but has taken root more widely in Israeli society. The malign attitude is sometimes reflected in the words of Israeli leaders, such as defense minister Yoav Gallant, in announcing a total blockade and siege of the Gaza Strip, which has affected everyone living there, saying that Israel was going against “human animals.”

More explicit bigotry can be heard from other opinion leaders, such as a former chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, who once compared non-Jews to donkeys and preached, “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the people of Israel.”

The attitude is also reflected in deeds, especially Israeli military tactics that show little or no regard for Palestinian life and employ rules of engagement that bear no resemblance to international humanitarian law and the laws of war regarding protection of civilians. If an operation has a decent chance of killing even one suspected Hamas militant, then killing a score of civilians in the process evidently is considered acceptable by Israeli commanders.

Too often, Israeli policy decisions show regard for Palestinian lives only when there may be an implication for Israeli lives. That is the situation today in Gaza, where Israeli agreement on a “humanitarian pause” for polio inoculations is motivated largely by a concern about, in the words of the prime minister’s office, “the spread of disease in the region,” with the possibility of infecting Israelis.

Put the land-retaining objective and the bigoted attitudes together, and this translates into the broader objective of destroying the Palestinian nation. Although a plausible case has been made that what the Palestinians are being subjected to is nothing less than genocide, one does not need to employ that term, burdened as it is with legal implications and comparisons with even more horrendous exterminations of the past. Ethnic cleansing is a less loaded term but still descriptive of what is happening to the Palestinians.

Exactly how Israeli leaders intend to complete this objective is probably not entirely thought through, and is more a matter of visceral antagonism than of careful planning. Deaths of individual Palestinians, as is happening wholesale in the Gaza Strip, is one way. A combination of intimidation and sufficient destruction of housing and infrastructure to make areas unlivable may compel others to leave and join the four million Palestinian refugees already living in other Middle Eastern countries. And an Israeli hope may be that those who remain will — like animals that have been broken, tamed, and penned — docilely submit to their subordinate status.

Many will not submit. There will continue to be resistance, including violent resistance, and perhaps enough of an uprising in the West Bank to be called a third intifada. But as former United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk observes, even more worrisome is the prospect of another nakba or catastrophe, in which Palestinians face the choice of extermination in place or fleeing to other countries.

U.S. policy, and the expressions of leaders of both political parties, do not recognize the above realities. Certainly the United States should support Israeli security and the right of Israel to defend itself, although without the occupation there really would not be much to worry about on that score, given Israel’s status as the most militarily advanced state in the region and national wealth sufficient to pay for maintaining that status itself.

Exporting defensive systems such as air defense weapons would be consistent with the declared objective, but not the export of ordnance that Israeli is using offensively with great death and destruction as the result.

Moreover, U.S. policy needs to reflect how much of what Israel is doing undermines rather than advances Israel’s own security. Retaining occupied land is a burden, not a boost, to the Israeli military. The deadly tactics on display in Gaza and now accelerating in the West Bank motivate more deadly resistance to Israel than they quell.

The United States has no positive interest in most of the Israeli behavior that U.S. material and diplomatic support has abetted. The United States has no positive interest in Israel holding on to the West Bank, or in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The relevant U.S. interests are all negative, in terms of the offense to human values, the instability that entails the risk of wider war, and more direct harms to the United States itself.

Those harms include the prospect of additional anti-U.S. terrorism motivated by anger over policies regarding Israel, and the impeding of U.S. diplomacy with foreign governments that are offended as much as their publics are by those U.S. policies.