In the West Bank

On August 28, Israel launched its largest military assault on the West Bank since the Second Intifada more than two decades ago. Targeting Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas—three cities in the north of the territory—“Operation Summer Camps” has killed thirty-nine Palestinians. The military also injured 150 people, arrested dozens more, and demolished critical infrastructure. Stretches of roads were torn up, storefronts were bulldozed, and water and electricity lines were destroyed.

Statements from Israeli security officials indicating that the raids might be the beginning of a protracted military operation have given way to their withdrawal from some of the northern cities. Meanwhile, troops remain active, with raids and arrests reported over the weekend in Nablus and Hebron. (The Israeli military also killed an American-Turkish activist at a demonstration in a village south of Nablus last Friday by shooting her in the head.)

The latest dramatic ground operation and aerial bombardments are less an opening of a new front alongside Gaza and the Lebanese border, and more of an escalation of Israel’s military activity in the territory. Israeli forces enter the occupied West Bank at will, often with the stated objective of targeting Palestinian resistance fighters. Since October 7, over 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, over 150 of whom were children. Just days before Operation Summer Camps was launched, settler-soldiers attacked Wadi Rahal, a village near Bethlehem, and killed a Palestinian man; two weeks before his murder, settlers waged a pogrom in the village of Jit—burning homes and murdering another man. Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the West Bank.

These developments have taken place in the context of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, and in the context of a military occupation by Israel in effect since 1967. The latter, widely considered illegal by the entire international community, grows more entrenched and violent each year.

The morning after these recent incursions into the territory began, we spoke with Fathi Nimer about the raids, conditions in the West Bank since October, and the history of annexation and occupation. Nimer has worked at the Arab World for Research and Development, Birzeit University, and the Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies. He is currently Palestine policy fellow at Al-Shabaka.

An interview with Fathi Nimer

JACK GROSS: Last night, the IDF launched an attack on several locations in the West Bank, with reported air strikes in Nur Shams, bombing in Faraa, raids in Beit Fajjar, and a siege on Jenin. What do we know about what’s happened so far? Is this a limited operation or a more sustained escalation?

FATHI NIMER: Rumors of a more intensive operation in the West Bank have been circulating for the past few months, and really the last two to three years. One reason for this is the rise of different resistance groups, particularly in the refugee camps, which are among the only areas where Palestinians are able to organize themselves with relatively less interference from either the Palestinian Authority (PA) in its role as security coordinator or Israel’s intelligence apparatus.

These areas have become centers of the new armed resistance groups—which Israel thought it had wiped out. Since the genocide began, groups in the West Bank have sought to divert IDF resources from Gaza. We can have some sense of the threat these groups pose because for the first time in almost twenty years, Israel is resorting to bombing these camps from the air. They cannot costlessly pursue ground incursions; the typical strategy is to bluntly arrest, assassinate, and bomb. They’ve been doing this for ten months now in the West Bank, but it hasn’t achieved the desired results. By means of a big attack, the IDF thinks they can inflict enough damage to deter further resistance.

There is significance to where the IDF is attacking. Jenin has been known as a site of resistance since at least the Second Intifada, and it has in the past been subject to extended curfews and more targeted killings than other West Bank cities. But some of the places under IDF assault right now—Jericho, for example— are not typically associated with armed resistance. The situation in the West Bank has deteriorated so rapidly over the past years, and accelerated still more since October, that even areas that haven’t previously participated in armed attacks are becoming embroiled.

While the current focus of the IDF is in the northern West Bank, it’s also not the end of the story. Concurrently, there is a big so-called security campaign being carried out by the PA in Nablus. It’s not always clear in these kinds of operations in the West Bank what the difference is between the Palestinian National Security Forces and the Israeli Defense Forces, as they work in tandem with the shared goal of neutralizing armed resistance and anything that challenges the monopoly of power held by the PA.

It’s important to keep in mind that events have been leading up to this for years. I think October 7 put it on a faster track, but we were always headed toward this level of escalation because Israel’s policy is, as always, to hit as hard as possible without addressing underlying pressures. When the root causes remain unchanged, there’s definitely going to be perennial resistance.

Another thing to note is that, evidently, Israel can blockade and genocide Gaza without any local repercussions, but there are hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank. The West Bank is a small territory, with settlers criss-crossed throughout it—by design and by necessity, the settlements are constructed to prevent contiguous Palestinian territory that could become a state. Palestinians are surrounded by Israeli settlers, and Israeli settlers are surrounded by Palestinians. This means, for all intents and purposes, a total lockdown is impossible.

Israel’s strategy may be to “live by the sword,” but the sword is extended to three active fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, and now the West Bank—and with periodic engagement from other groups in the region. In this situation, can Israel deploy groups of soldiers to each settlement, putting a tank on each corner? This would affect their battle readiness on these other fronts.

You won’t see this analysis from the political leadership, who exclusively peddle bravado. But among the military leadership, there is an understanding that if the West Bank actually does cut loose and a rebellion breaks out, it will be a bigger problem for them than any other front that they’re worried about, because we are just too intertwined as populations at this point.

DYLAN SABA: In the West Bank, as you mentioned, there has been increased resistance activity over the past several years—most notably in what was being called the Unity Intifada in 2021. Something characteristic of that moment and the years since is the emergence of Palestinian resistance groups that aren’t affiliated with the historic factions of Palestinian politics. Is that still the case, or is there a return to factional resistance politics in the West Bank?

FN: My impression is that this is still the case. Young people especially are disillusioned, generally speaking, with formal party apparatuses. If we’re being honest, most of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) factions have been in large part demobilized. Fatah remains aligned with the PA, and is therefore not interested in escalation—this isn’t true of all currents within Fatah, but the pro-resistance factions have been heavily marginalized since the end of the Second Intifada.

In the 2000s, we even had an American, General Keith Dayton, come and preside over what was called a security sector reform. The details of this episode are complex—involving tensions within the US and Israeli governments, and cooperation with Jordanian intelligence and Egyptian military—but what it basically did was create a new cadre of American-trained soldiers loyal to the leadership of the PA, but not to Fatah as a political party per se. The old security force was dismantled, and this new, US-trained force took its place. These are the same forces repressing protests, including with lethal means, throughout the West Bank.

And it makes sense—most any protest inevitably turns into an anti-PA protest, because this is the quasi-government participating in direct repression of Palestinians. The stifling political atmosphere in the West Bank gives rise to a lot of fear of the mukhabarat, the intelligence state, in a now-typical Arab fashion—but here in the West Bank we just have the repressive capabilities of the state, without the actual state.

Back to your question about the resistance groups today. It’s important to understand that they cut across factions; the youth claim affiliations with different party groups without the official sanction of those groups. I think this is a major reason they’ve been difficult to repress and co-opt. They aren’t easily taken in through frontal repression, or through bribery. This was very obvious with the Lion’s Den, a group from the Old Town of Nablus that gained some prominence in 2021. The PA failed to bribe them with jobs in the security apparatus, and Israel conducted a year-long campaign to assassinate every leader in that group—but it failed to completely dismantle the group. It’s possible this is part of why the Israeli attack is so harsh, and so devastating. The intended message is that their power is utterly overwhelming, and that resistance is ridiculous. And I believe that intended message explains much of the Israeli “security” policy in the West Bank.

DS: You’ve pointed to a number of different threats that Palestinians in the West Bank are facing and have faced since before October 7—threats from Israeli military incursions, from settler violence, and from the PA. How do you understand the relationship between these different repressive forces in the West Bank?

FN: The colonization aim of the Israeli state is maximum Palestinian land, with minimum Palestinians.

Even when it goes unsaid, that imperative still animates the mainstream of Israeli politics. Each of the oppressive forces you named are oriented toward that aim. In the case of the settlers, they are essentially outsourced troops carrying out the colonization of the West Bank. It is a mistake to look at settlers and the state as separable.

When settlers go and harass Palestinians, they are protected by the Israeli army, which, being a conscript army, also includes enlisted settlers. In fact, there are entire units that only include settlers. (One such unit, as you may remember from a few months back, was supposed to have sanctions placed on it by the US, but the US then backtracked, because even that symbolic gesture of applying the Leahy Law was too far for the Biden administration.)

So these forces kind of work hand in hand. Settlers are more direct in their land theft, and they see the army as being too slow and cautious in their method of annexation. The army looks at the settlers as perhaps an embarrassment internationally, but at the end of the day, they both have the same goal, which is to maximize possession over Palestinian land.

There are many methods of expropriation, and expansion by settlements is only one form of annexation in the West Bank. Nature reserves were used to annex a lot of Palestinian land, and in the South Hebron Hills, they designated an entire swathe of land as a “closed-military firing zone”—annexed ostensibly for military purposes, but which encouraged illegal settlement.

Notwithstanding Israeli rhetoric to the contrary, an assessment of the post-Oslo period suggests the Palestinian Authority was one of the best investments Israel ever made: they get to maintain control of the borders and the airspace while the PA gets to take care of all the “dirty work,” such as education, trash pick-up, healthcare, Israel’s security concerns, and all the nasty, basic administrative stuff that comes with occupation that, under international law, the occupier should provide. And they must do so under extremely restrictive conditions.

The PA was created in theory as an interim body to establish a Palestinian state within five years. It resulted from the Oslo process and more specifically Oslo II. But the parameters of the PA’s power were very limited, then as now. The PA lacks any actual autonomy or sovereignty. It’s a glorified administrative body at this point. One of the aspects of Oslo II is that there was something called the Paris Protocol, which is the economic system of the PA and how it would run its economy and what relation it would have to the Israeli economy, because for all intents and purposes, the Israeli economy swallows the Palestinian economy. And that was also by design, through a process of de-development that started from the very beginning of the occupation, where they instated all these laws to prevent Palestinians from competing in any way with Israelis and to flood the Palestinian markets with Israeli goods. Palestinians are in this way a captive consumer base, and also a captive workforce—within Israel’s borders and on settlements in the West Bank.

JG: Can you elaborate on how the West Bank is carved up in legal, military, and infrastructural terms? What are Areas A, B, and C, why do these distinctions exist, and what do they mean for Palestinians living under occupation? To what degree have restrictions on movement and economic activity on Palestinians in the West Bank intensified since October 7?

FN: As part of the Oslo framework, the West Bank is divided into Areas A, B, and C. Area A is the smallest. It’s completely under Palestinian control, theoretically—there’s nothing under actual Palestinian control. In Area B there is shared control, supposedly, between the PA on the civil affairs side and the IDF on “security.” Area C, which comprises most of the land area of the region, is completely under Israeli control, and forms the bulk of what was supposed to be the “Palestinian state,” following the peace process. It is in this context that the Palestinian Authority maintains their two-state solution driven political program.

Palestinians are not allowed to have their own currency or collect their own taxes. Israel collects taxes for everything, particularly VAT and import taxes, which means that if Israel wants to freeze or appropriate those revenues, then they can do that. They do it often when they want to put any kind of pressure on the Palestinian Authority. It means that we’re not even allowed to change our tariffs, our taxes, or anything else. We have a tax union but we’re also not allowed to change any of that. There are also projects like the Joint Water Committee, which determines how water is distributed—a nominal reformulation of what it was before the PA—which provides veto power to the Israeli army concerning anything related to water. It is Israel at the end of the day that determines which Palestinians get water, because they grant the permits.

For example, we’re not allowed to dig for water beyond a specific depth, and if they do catch you doing that, they’ll come and pour cement into the well. If you want to dig for water, you have to apply for a permit. Of course, permits have over a 98 percent rejection rate. This takes place even in Area A, which is supposedly under full PA control.

We can draw a parallel between the water system and many other restrictions on resources in the majority of the West Bank because this system of control affects everything. Even if you want to build a house, you need a permit. You don’t apply to your government, the PA, for a permit. No, you apply to the Israeli army’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). And good luck ever getting one. This is why we hear so much about house demolitions, which aren’t only exercised punitively against people convicted of “terrorism,” but against families subject to Israel’s permit regime. Terrorist convictions, by the way, also occasion a very interesting insight into Israel’s military courts, in that 99.7 percent of cases end in conviction. They could basically accuse you of, who knows, growing a tree on your head, and you could still get convicted because the system just works that way. There’s no way to actually appeal anything, if you get a trial to begin with at all. In the case of administrative detention, you don’t even get a trial or due process. Over 3,600 Palestinians are currently held in this way. You just get put in prison for six months, it could be repeated indefinitely, and in many cases the lawyer isn’t even aware of what the charge is. A lot of people have spent ten or twenty years in administrative detention without knowing why.

So all of these different systems make living in the West Bank very difficult, and especially in Area C, which is under complete Israeli control. Area C is predominantly rural, and the goal is for as many Palestinians as possible to move from these rural areas, where their habitation obstructs access to various resources, and into the urban centers, which are contained in Area A—the major cities such as Ramallah, Nablus, and most of Al Khalil.

What is happening now, since October 7? Life, as I’ve described, is already difficult in these areas. But since October, things have been much more difficult, and much more unpredictable.

You may have seen images of Ben-Gvir handing out rifles to settlers. Over 100,000 guns have been distributed since the beginning of the war, and settlers use these guns to harass, attack, and shoot Palestinians in the West Bank without much rhyme or reason. The army, of course, escorts them.

Over 150,000 Palestinians work on the other side of the Green Line, and all of them were banned from crossing to earn their income after October. Just as an example of a change, my family has a small farm in a village called Kufr Ein, which is thirty minutes away from Ramallah. Ever since October 7, with the settlers going all over the place and the closure of the checkpoints, it takes us over an hour to get there now, because we have to take a very circuitous route on small roads and through Palestinian villages that don’t have the infrastructure for this kind of traffic. Even before October, it was estimated that 60 million work hours are wasted every single year by movement restrictions on Palestinians. Movement restrictions include checkpoints, bypass roads, the separation wall, the permit regime, and other various difficulties.

All of these difficulties prevent us from even adapting to the system of occupation that we live under, because they don’t want an actual Palestinian economy or self-sufficiency for Palestinians. A stark example of this is the case agricultural cooperatives, once the backbone of the economy of Palestinians in the 1980s, were targeted by Yitzhak Rabin, who was serving as Minister of Defense at the time. Rabin instructed the army to impose curfews on Palestinian villages during harvest times so that their crops would rot in the field.

In the 1960s, Moshe Dayan said that if Israel can pull the plug on Hebron’s electricity, that’s a much more efficient means of control than a thousand riot dispersals. And he was right. The choice on offer—for example, to move away from your family’s village to earn a wage across the Green Line, meaning fewer Palestinians in areas where Israeli settlers are looking to set up outposts—is between deprivation or becoming a more obedient part of the system.

JG: Beyond direct military control over Palestinians and their livelihoods in the West Bank, there have been efforts to transfer some of that military control to Israeli civil control. In Spring 2023—following a 2017 Likud party vote to pursue the formal and complete annexation of the West Bank—an agreement between Smotrich and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant began transferring a number of powers from military control to civilian control, a clear step towards de jure and not just de facto annexation. This transfer of authorities has accelerated over the past year. Can you tell us about these moves, what they represent both as a matter of Israel’s colonization policy and on the ground for Palestinians in the West Bank?

FN: Whenever Israel does something de jure, it’s typically already been established de facto.

We saw this with East Jerusalem, which was treated as a part of Israel for decades, in clear violation of international law. And then in the 1980s, it was like, “you know what, let’s just do it de jure,” and they passed the Jerusalem Law, which declared a unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The backlash from that move has died down, nobody cares anymore. That’s also how they’re going to shift the status quo with regards to the Noble Sanctuary. They’ve denied any intention of changing its status for a long time but they are doing it right now.

The annexation of the West Bank has been an open objective of the pro-settlement bloc for a long time. It’s also just a typical right-wing position in Israel in general.

However interesting, discussing statehood scenarios is an academic exercise at this point, because facts on the ground are determining everything. Some powers to issue permits, as you brought up, have been transferred to a civil authority, which is a huge violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the law of occupation. For an occupation to be legal, it needs to be temporary, that’s a fundamental concept of international human rights law, and one frequently repeated by Israeli courts. But given the transfer of hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied territory, it’s clearly a delusional pretense to call the occupation temporary. You just do not invest billions of dollars into an area or build permanent infrastructure to exercise permanent control if it’s temporary. And you do not transfer control to a civil authority if you are carrying out a temporary military occupation. There is very clear evidence for decades now that they intend to annex the West Bank.

So what will these new moves mean for Palestinians? I think the biggest effect it’s going to have on Palestinians is that instead of there being a 98 percent permit rejection rate, we’re going to see a 100 percent rejection rate—a different of degree, or of speed. But the question remains, what does de jure annexation look like? I don’t think that they want to take control of Area A completely. I think they’d rather have an even further diminished Palestinian Authority, maybe ruled by somebody like Mohammed Dahlan, in Area A, while they take complete control of Area B and Area C.

They’re already starting to weave settlements into Area B, which was a big news item when it happened for the first time a decade ago, but is now normalized. The Oslo Accord parameters have been slowly collapsing for a while, but I think it is safe to say they’ve ruptured completely.

Even if a ceasefire is accomplished, we’re not going back to how it was before. Not even the West Bank or Gaza, or even within ’48, where Palestinian citizens of Israel are basically living under the rule of a military state at this point. Some colleagues who live inside Israel describe a level of censorship akin to how it was before 1967, when they lived under military rule.

After the withdrawal from Gaza in the 2000s, nobody wanted to entertain the possibility of reoccupation. Israelis were glad to be free of the burden. But now you have people actually calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, to empty it and reestablish settlements there—this is a radical departure from the last decade or so. If a return to direct colonization is feasible again in an area like Gaza, that is a significant threat to the West Bank. The status quo here will not hold. Just this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz suggested evacuating Palestinians from the West Bank to deal with the armed resistance. So despite the extensive continuity and precedent I am describing, I also think we are not prepared for what’s coming.

A thousand red lines have been crossed. The only way that Israel would stop any of this is if there were a price—politically, economically—for its policies.

DS: You’ve described the intertwined populations of settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. The number of Jewish Israeli settlers in the occupied territories after 1967 has gone from a couple of thousand to nearly 500,000 (with 230,000 in East Jerusalem, and 25,000 in the Golan Heights). How has that settlement been encouraged, ideologically and economically?

FN: It is very strongly encouraged to move to settlements because settlers have a lot of subsidies directed toward them, and they have a lot of security. There are six government ministries providing benefits for education, housing, investment, social work, and tax breaks for individuals and companies.

Settlements are declared as national priority areas, which means that they receive subsidies for rent, for education, even improvements on their credit ratings. What this means is that even the nonideological would-be settlers can be motivated to move to the illegal settlements, where you can enjoy the privileges of Israeli citizenship, and where everything is just as available as it would be inside the Green Line, but cheaper.

Settlements are not just remote outposts; their erection requires a network of infrastructure, water, electricity, fences, and military protection. Roads require annexing and cutting up more territory, which requires building security cordons, which requires more annexation. We’re talking about water, we’re talking about electricity, we’re talking about fences, we’re talking about an army presence. So an army presence also needs roads. Roads require annexing more territories, and then they have a security cordon around the area, which requires the annexation of more territory from Palestinians.

JG: One origin point that is frequently discussed for the annexation of the West Bank is the Allon Plan. Given that mainstream accounts of the settlement project tend to associate it—especially now with figures like Smotrich—with the far-right wing of Israeli politics, could you speak a little about this history?

FN: The original Allon Plan was drafted by Yigal Allon after the 1967 war and Israel’s seizure of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the West Bank. Its purpose was to outline the next steps for Israel’s expansion. It underwent many revisions—Gaza was originally supposed to be annexed completely, for example—but its designs for the West Bank have remained remarkably consistent, identifying the Jordan Valley, the areas around Jerusalem, and the areas to the south of that.

If you look at the map of Area C and the map of settlement construction today, it looks remarkably similar to what Israel was hoping to do after 1967. The Allon plan’s agency was to create this little small autonomy zone between Nablus and Jenin for the Arabs to “rule themselves.”

The mainstream interpretations of the Allon Plan weren’t actually fulfilled, but the maps, the logic behind them, the areas that were annexed, and the proposals for settlement construction, are all the same. This puts into question the association of the settlement enterprise with the right-wing, or the extremist Hilltop Youth organization, or really any specific government or political current in Israel. The foundational logic remains the same, and the association of annexation and colonization with the right is a very recent phenomenon, out of step with the historical record of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

DS: I’d like to turn to international law and the strategy of pursuing a rights-based approach through appeals to international institutions. There’s a broad international consensus that the Israeli settlement project in Palestine is illegal, but, as you’ve alluded to, that recognition is almost never accompanied by action or by any consequences.

Last month, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring the settlements in all of occupied Palestine to be illegal in the occupation itself, stating that Israel has a legal obligation to evacuate the settlements, pay restitution to Palestinians, and honor the right of return. How is this opinion received by Palestinians in the West Bank? How has the Abbas strategy in general been received in the West Bank both before and after October 7? And do you think that this opinion, or this approach, opens up any new pathways for advocacy or otherwise shapes the Palestinian demand for self-determination?

FN: There is some utility, especially with public relations. There’s utility for advocacy because, for a lot of people around the world, the idea of international law still holds some kind of weight. If a country is violating international law, then you have something to stake your moral claim in. There’s no disagreement, let’s say among Palestinians on the street, that our rights are being violated, that the Geneva Convention is being violated—the question is rather: what does that bring us?

And when it comes to realpolitik, I don’t think, so far, it actually influences how states think. Just a couple of months ago, the US declared that a Security Council resolution is nonbinding. So it’s like, what is left? That is the whole international order you just upended.

The question of how the ICJ ruling can impact the situation needs to be asked in the context of the failure of post-Oslo negotiations, which simply cut international law out of the equation. In each step, Palestinians are pressured to give up their rights so that negotiations can move forward, and if the Palestinians say no to a bad deal, then all Palestinians are instantly regarded as rejectionists who don’t want peace, and that characterization justifies more occupation and annexation, because we supposedly can’t be reasoned with.

This has been the modus operandi for thirty years, with catastrophic results. The Palestinian Authority, we learned through the Palestine Papers a few years back, has basically given up on the right of return enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No one consulted the refugees about it, but that was sacrificed to move negotiations forward. When you look at the negotiation positions, the compromise for Israel is merely a promise to comply with international law.

JG: Another striking element of the ICJ opinion was the idea that the settlements need to be depopulated, given their illegality, which is clearly a logically necessary step towards a two-state solution, but also clearly in contradiction with the facts on the ground and the immense political significance of settlers in Israeli politics and society.

FN: When Israel removed its settlers in Gaza, it triggered enormous public outcry—including Netanyahu’s resignation from Sharon’s government. There’s still a huge movement, the Orange Movement, that protests disengagement from Gaza.

Then, only about 8,000 people were relocated. How would Israel politically survive relocating over half a million settlers away from their illegal posts? The Palestinian Authority even offered land swaps—trading Israeli territory for settlements. It was a bit ridiculous, the product of desperation for the two-state solution, but it was useless because there was no will on the Israeli side to allow for a Palestinian state. We see that complete opposition to a Palestinian state daily in the comments of Israeli rulers. And so in my opinion the two-state solution—whether spoken about as the position of the US government, or among analysts and activists—is a completely abstract discussion, a blinder distracting from the facts on the ground.

For Palestinians, the number of states isn’t the issue—it’s the sovereignty. Through Camp David, we were offered a sham of a state with no control over our borders, our airspace, our water. In our supposedly sovereign state, we have no military nor control over the majority of East Jerusalem, designated as our capital. That’s what’s been offered to Palestinians, and it appears as complete nonsense. But what Palestinians need or want is not part of the equation, and the United States—with daily weapons shipments and immense dominance in international fora, without which Israel cannot sustain itself—is not a neutral third party acting towards meaningful resolution.

The progression of the ceasefire negotiations can be read as a rough and brutal analogy for how previous administrations talked about moving towards a two-state solution: constant reassurance that diplomacy is hard at work behind the scenes, on the verge of a breakthrough, while the annexation and killing continues with unbroken support.