How Palestinians in the West Bank Became so Vulnerable to Israeli Settler Terror

Israel’s “decisive” plan to annex the West Bank is coming to a head as the Israeli government pushes to depopulate Palestinian villages throughout the territory. Once a hub of resistance, the West Bank’s Palestinians now find themselves defenseless.

By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss

Palestinians in the West Bank are at their weakest point in history, and today they’re staring down Israel’s accelerating campaign to ethnically cleanse the rest of Palestine, with the ghost of a second Nakba looming over the territory’s villages.

Israeli settler pogroms reached an all-time high late last week as settlers terrorized Palestinians across villages and towns from Nablus in the north to Masafer Yatta in the south, including in areas under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Time and again, the Israeli army — present at most settler rampages — has made clear that intervening to halt settler violence is not among its functions. If anything, it is ready to inflict harsh collective punishment against any Palestinian community that dares to defend itself in response. Now the army is gearing up to launch a wide-scale military operation across the entire West Bank in tandem with the ongoing pogroms.

These escalations come days after a settler raid on the Palestinian village of Til, south of Nablus, left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead after one Palestinian resident snatched a rifle from one of the attacking settlers and shot him, while nearby Israeli soldiers also opened fire. It remains unclear whether the second settler killed in the same melee died at Palestinian or Israeli hands.

Yet immediately after the events at Til, the Israeli government and several Israeli politicians rallied public opinion behind the narrative that the settlers were killed in a Palestinian “terrorist attack” on Israeli “hikers,” demanding large-scale military action to “dismantle terrorist infrastructure” across several Palestinian towns, according to a joint statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.

On Monday, Katz said he had instructed the army to prepare to raid “another refugee camp” in the West Bank — left unnamed — the same way it had raided Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams over the past two years, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians who still wait to return home. A larger-scale operation has been postponed until after Netanyahu’s return from meeting President Trump in Washington, Israeli media reported Sunday. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who also heads the Civil Administration governing Palestinian life in the West Bank — said Palestinians in the villages around Nablus should meet the same fate as Jenin and Tulkarem, casting Israel’s emptying of those camps as a blueprint for depopulating the West Bank countryside.

As Palestinians brace for the darker days ahead, they continue to endure daily terror inflicted by the settlers with no protection and no capacity to push back against the advancing offensive.

Palestinian society in the West Bank wasn’t always so defenseless. But as Palestinian vulnerability has reached a historic peak, so has Israel’s tightening of the noose — the rollout of a historic effort to ethnically cleanse what remains of Palestinians’ homeland, with the immediate aim of thinning out the countryside beyond the main cities. Historically, this campaign proceeded gradually, meeting resistance at every step. Now the inverse is happening: land grabs and expulsions are accelerating rapidly, and Palestinians are left with scant tools to fight back.

What brought Palestinians in the West Bank to this point? And how did their efforts to resist colonization grow so weak that their very existence on their land is now at risk?

Taking apart the infrastructure of resistance

Forty years ago, the West Bank looked very different. By the time the First Intifada broke out in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp in December 1987, the West Bank was already in the grip of protests and general strikes mobilizing thousands of people, organized through a dense web of political parties and local committees that had spent the previous decade building capacity — from spontaneous youth groups doing community service, as researcher Jebril Muhammad documents in his account of these movements — to farmers’ unions, women’s associations, and legal aid organizations. Many of these bodies functioned as a substitute for the Israeli military administrative bodies that ruled over Palestinians, allowing them to boycott the occupation’s own institutions for years. This infrastructure, backed by the exiled PLO leadership under Yasser Arafat, fundamentally eroded Israel’s grip on Palestinian life.