Gaza in the rearview, Israelis turn tanks and guns onto West Bank

Most attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past 15 months has focused on the Gaza Strip, given the devastating Israeli assault that has reduced most of that territory to rubble.

But the larger occupied Palestinian territory — the West Bank, along with what Israel has defined as East Jerusalem — never ceased to be on the front line of the conflict. During those same 15 months, more than 800 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by either the Israeli military or Jewish settlers, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The Israeli violence against West Bank Palestinians has increased since the start of the recent ceasefire in Gaza. The latest in a series of raids by the Israeli military has centered on the city of Jenin and was described by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “extensive and significant.” The Palestinian Health ministry reported that eight people were killed and at least 35 injured in just the first few hours of the operation.

Meanwhile, violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villagers and their property has risen sharply. In the year following October 2023, the U.N. office recorded more than 1,400 incidents of such violence in the West Bank.

The latest escalation of Israeli violence in the West Bank is connected to the Gaza ceasefire in multiple ways. Netanyahu has been walking a political tightrope in agreeing to the ceasefire while placating right-wing elements in his coalition who want a continued war. Stepping up military operations in the West Bank is one way to keep those elements satisfied while they await a resumption of the destruction in the Gaza Strip.

Increased military action in the West Bank also helps Netanyahu to divert attention from the failure to achieve his declared objective of destroying Hamas.

The availability of military resources is another connection. The Israeli military has been stretched by more than a year of intense operations against Gaza, not to mention Israeli offensives during the past year in Lebanon and Syria. The pause in Gaza enables some of those resources to be redeployed to the West Bank. It is worth remembering that Israeli vulnerability to Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was possibly related to an earlier redeployment of some security forces from southern Israel to the West Bank.

The West Bank always has been—certainly from the Israeli government’s point of view—more important than the Gaza Strip. Gaza has been the open-air prison where much of the Palestinian population could be confined, but the West Bank is a central and prized part of Israeli expansionism. More than 600,000 Jewish Israeli settlers are now living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, embodying both the expansionism itself and an Israeli determination to make establishment of a Palestinian state unfeasible.

During his first term, Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy by stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank did not violate international law. With his appointments as well as his rhetoric, Trump has indicated that his second administration will be at least as deferential to the Israeli government on these matters as his first one was.

One of his earliest post-election nominations was former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Baptist minister and self-declared Zionist, has said that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” He has repeatedly stated that the West Bank — a descriptor he avoids in favor of the biblical “Judea and Samaria” — belongs to Israel and that “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”

Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, New York Representative Elise Stefanik, refused to say at her confirmation hearing whether the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination. Stefanik said she agrees with the view that “Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.”

As with many of Trump’s early provocative actions, there is little or no sign of pushback from members of his own party in Congress. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, now chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, last month introduced legislation requiring official U.S. documents to refer to “Judea and Samaria” instead of the West Bank, with Cotton saying that “the Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes [sic] back thousands of years.”

Trump has most directly promoted violence in the West Bank by removing — as one of his Day One rescissions of dozens of Biden administration actions — sanctions on Israeli settlers who have committed violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Possibly for Trump, this was just another reflexive action to undo whatever his Democratic predecessor did, as well as to do anything that he or his followers could bill as “pro-Israel.” But the practical effect is to give a green light to perpetrators of lethal actions, ranging from shootings to arson, that have ruined lives and livelihoods. In most cases the only offense of the victims has been to live in the land where they and their families have lived for centuries.

All these U.S. and Israeli policies are a recipe for increasing the never-ending violence by both sides in the West Bank. Neither military raids nor settler intimidation will lead the Palestinian residents of the territory to roll over and accept their treatment. Resentment from subjugation and apartheid will be amplified by anger over death and destruction.

As with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, even sustained, large-scale military operations by Israel will not kill the will to resist. Hamas itself has called for a “popular mobilization” in the West Bank to oppose the Israeli military escalation there as well as to resist the violence by settlers. Also as in the Gaza Strip, the will to resist will mean recruitment of more fighters to replace the ones Israel manages to kill.

The ill consequences of the violence include still more suffering beyond what the residents of the West Bank have already endured. The violence also is an additional destabilizing factor in the wider region — especially in next-door Jordan, with its large Palestinian-origin population.

For the United States, the ill consequences include resentment and anger—which can take various forms, including anti-American terrorism—stemming from close association with inhumane Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The United States already is paying a price in this regard from being associated with the carnage in Gaza. The price will rise the more that the West Bank is swept into the same unseemly picture.