‘The Israelis have their boots on our neck’: Anger growing across West Bank as US fails to rein in Israel
As Ramadan begins with no Gaza ceasefire in sight, Kim Sengupta speaks to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank about their lack of trust in Western nations to help them as violence spikes and the death toll continues to spiral
The operation had been meticulously planned. An Israeli army post came under fire by gunmen who then appeared to flee in panic without causing much damage. But then came the ambush, a hidden explosive device detonated, injuring seven pursuing soldiers.
Islamic Jihad put out video of the assault they had carried out on Friday at Silat ad-Dhahr, vowing more such “acts of liberation”. The footage was widely shared, gaining rapid and large circulation, particularly across the occupied West Bank.
Around 100 Palestinians have been killed every month in clashes with Israeli security forces and settlers since the Hamas attack on 7 October, and farmers have had their homes destroyed and been forced from their land in an attritional campaign. In this atmosphere of great rancour, the Islamic Jihad raid was seen as overdue payback.
There have been other recent attacks on Israelis in the West Bank. Two civilians, Yitzhak Zeiger, a 57-year-old rabbi, and 16-year-old Uria Hartum were gunned down as they were filling their car at a petrol station near a settlement at Ayli, between Ramallah and Nablus. The killer, a Palestinian Authority (PA) policeman, Muhammad Mansara, was then himself shot dead by the owner of a nearby restaurant.
The rise in violence has added to concern about the start of the first Ramadan since the Hamas massacre, and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza. Hopes of a prolonged ceasefire raised by US president Joe Biden and others have faltered, with talks reaching an impasse after Israel rejected the main Hamas demands.
As is usually the case with Palestinians who have carried out acts of serious violence, Mansara’s home will be demolished by the Israeli authorities: his family will have to find refuge with relations. Three generations of them have lived in the Qalandiya refugee camp which was set up in 1949 for Palestinians displaced in the strife surrounding the birth of the state of Israel.
Qalandiya has been raided by the Israeli military a number of times since the Hamas attack, with one resident killed and several dozen injured. The mood in the streets, blackened by fire, is one of sullen anger and hopelessness, especially among the young men.
“The Israelis have their boots on our neck, they want to keep us down. They have no respect for our homes, our schools, our mosques, they do what they want, shoot people, take them away,” said 20-year-old Khaled as he sat with a group of friends on plastic chairs outside his home. “So, of course people are angry; they see this happening all the time and they know this will continue happening.”
Khaled and his companions did not want to talk publicly about why Mansara the Palestinian policeman had turned on the Israelis. Showing such knowledge, muttered one, would make them targets of the Israeli security forces.
I had met Khaled before – at a funeral for two young men, Mohammed Aliyan, 20, and 21-year-old Mahmoud Makleh, who were shot dead at another camp, Jalazone, north of Ramallah. He was among those carrying the Hamas flag at the time. The green of the Gaza-based group matched the numbers of the yellow of Fatah, the main party in the West Bank. Also present, though less prominent, were the black flags of Islamic Jihad.
“Hamas are still fighting, the Israelis have not defeated them have they? It is not like here, where Fatah do not do much but talk. We have Ramadan... there’ll be marches, here in Jerusalem, we’ll see what happens, what the Israelis do,” said Khaled.
Clashes have taken place on many occasions over the years between Palestinians and Israeli security forces during the Muslim holy month. Hamas called their 7 October attack “Operation al-Aqsa flood”, a reference to violence in the previous two years outside al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites.
Around 1,200 Israelis were killed by Hamas and several hundred taken hostage when Hamas went across the border in what became the catalyst for the current conflict. More than 30,000 have been killed so far in the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Abu Obeida, a senior Hamas official, has declared that Ramadan is going to be “the month of victory, the month of jihad ... We call our people to march on Jerusalem.” He continued: “As Muslims worldwide prepare to welcome Ramadan, we have offered a sacrifice to Allah – a cascade of pure blood and souls.”
Israel’s hardline security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, had called for additional restrictions on al-Aqsa for Muslims. To stop, he said, Hamas “celebrating victory” while Israeli hostages remained captive in Gaza. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office overruled Mr Ben Gvir, but has left the door open for restrictions to be put in place, saying a “situational assessment around security and safety” would be made every week and “a decision will be made accordingly.”
Only men over 60, women and children among the Palestinian residents of the West Bank will be allowed through Israeli checkpoints to reach the religious sites in Jerusalem during Ramadan, while security measures will be significantly enhanced in the West Bank.
What is unfolding is sending reverberations across the region. As Ramadan started, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi that restrictions imposed by the Israeli government on worshippers at al-Aqsa were an attack on freedom of worship, and pushing the situation towards an “explosion”.
Meanwhile one of the key reasons behind Palestinian resentment, the spread of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, is being speeded up.
The Israeli government announced last week that it was fast-tracking plans to build 3,400 new homes in the settlements Maale Adumim, Kedar and Efrat. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, another hard-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition government, who has advocated annexing the West Bank, said that the construction was a direct answer to the petrol station deaths.
It was, he said: “An appropriate Zionist response. May every terrorist planning to harm us know that lifting a finger against Israeli citizens will be met with a death blow, and destruction in addition to the deepening of our eternal grip on the entire land of Israel.”
The ever-spreading settlements, and the associated violence, has been criticised by Western states including the US and UK. The Biden administration has said that the forced placing of more and more Israelis into Arab land is “inconsistent” with international law.
Last week, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk, said that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories have expanded by a record volume, further damaging the possibility of a Palestinian state being created. What is happening, he said, is the transfer by Israel of its own population on to occupied land, which he called a “war crime”.
Turk, who will present a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva later this month, said: “Settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state.”
While there are now more than 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and east Jerusalem (Palestinian officials and Western diplomats say the real figure is around a million), very few of the three million Palestinians in the West Bank have been allowed into Israel since 7 October.
This has had an extremely damaging economic impact on the West Bank, from where around 170,000 workers usually travel to Israel to make a living. After pressure from an Israeli business community facing a labour shortage, 8,000 workers have been allowed to return to their jobs. There is no sign of that increasing, and the government is at present scouring for replacements from south and east Asia.
Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research think tank, spoke of a steady rise in aggression by settlers and Israeli security forces in the last two years, with a major spike after 7 October when extremist settlers began to act with seeming impunity. Ben Gvir handed them 10,000 M-16 assault rifles and loosened overall rules for gun permits, with the exhortation for Israeli society to arm itself.
“We have the issue of settler violence, we have the issue of the Israeli army and police really doing nothing to control them, and then we have what is seen as the inability of the Palestinian Authority [in which Fatah is the largest party] to protect them,” Professor Shikaki said.
“We have seen a major shift in the polls we conducted before and after 7 October, when violence from settlers and security forces went up. In the one before, 30 per cent said we should deploy the Palestinian [PA] police for protection [and] 15 per cent said we should ask the Israeli army to help. In the second, backing for the Palestinian police dropped to 15 per cent. Now we have 56 per cent saying that communities should form armed groups to defend themselves.
“We then have the economic issue, families who were dependent on family members going to Israel to work now have a big problem. It is not just barring people from work in Israel; the Israeli army have put up so many roadblocks that it is very difficult for Palestinians to travel around the West Bank. There are iron gates leading to towns which are hardly ever opened. The reason often given for blocking routes is that they overlook roads used by settlers.
“So staff can’t get to work. We have been trying to pay our taxes for months, but people dealing with it can’t get through to the PA offices. Businesses, schools, colleges are hardly functioning. All this of course has added to the distress and frustration, and helped raise support for action.”
A senior advisor to the PA leadership, Elias Zananiri, said, however, that people should be very careful of what they wish for in these incendiary times.
“I know someone who has just come out of jail after 16 years for being a member of the al-Aqsa Brigade [a Palestinian militant group] who was angry because, he said, we weren’t doing anything,” he said.
“He was saying that Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president] was a lousy leader, he should give the green light and we should all join up and start a war. I asked him: ‘Are you prepared to accept the kind of destruction that Israelis are doing in Gaza, the number of deaths, all the buildings destroyed? Then I’ll send an assessment paper to the president with your name on it.’
“Of course, this guy wasn’t prepared to see Ramallah destroyed, his family killed, [so] he backed down. Mahmoud Abbas is doing what he needs to do, what the PA needs to do, mobilise international opinion to put pressure on Israel. That is the only way; that is being realistic.”
But Khaled and his friends in the camp see a different reality. Ahmad, 22, and his 27-year-old brother Tariq had labouring jobs in Israel. That income has stopped, and the family is dependent on the paltry earnings they can get in casual work, and sales from a small vegetable stall their mother runs.
“There are no jobs here. The plan of the Israelis is to make us so poor that we will go to Jordan, Lebanon, anywhere out of here, so more Jewish people can come in,” said Ahmad. “We hear the Americans, the Europeans, asking the Israelis to let more people work, but nothing happens.”
Khaled shook his head. “You really think the foreign governments can make a change? The Americans, the British, the French say they are telling Netanyahu to stop the bombing, but he doesn’t care, and the Americans keep giving him weapons; they always have done.
“We are just getting on with our lives, but it is not a normal life. We have Ramadan, but it will not be a normal one with what is going on in Gaza. We’ll pray for all those who have died and are suffering. But we are also prepared to defend ourselves.”
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