Fear and anger rise on the West Bank

FOR MONTHS fears have been rising in Israel and among foreign governments that a surge in violence is in the offing in the West Bank. It is the area that Palestinians view as the core of a would-be state, which for decades has been occupied and overseen by Israel’s government in tandem with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the nearest thing to a local Arab administration. It was thought that the increasing brutality shown towards Palestinians by Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank might spark an uprising, or intifada. Now the war in Gaza adds a new dimension to the situation: Hamas says one motivation for its attack on Israel is to inspire a broader uprising across the West Bank that overthrows the feeble pa.

On October 12th Israel’s government told roughly 1.1m Gazans, half of the territory’s population, to flee to its southern half. It is widely assumed that this heralds a military invasion of Gaza’s northern half. That could catalyse more outbreaks of unrest on the West Bank. After Hamas’s initial murderous assault on October 7th, tensions soared. On October 11th and 12th Israeli settlers shot dead six Palestinians in the West Bank village of Qusra. In clashes on the West Bank, Israeli security forces and settlers have shot and killed a total of 52 Palestinians since the Hamas attack. Though the bloodshed is nothing like as extreme as that around Gaza, the death toll is already high even by the West Bank’s grim standards. The situation there is not yet out of control, but it is edging that way.

Even as Hamas’s assault from Gaza was still unfolding, celebrations erupted in the West Bank’s cities. Hundreds of people paraded through the centre of Ramallah, waving the green flags of Hamas. This is the seat of the PA, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and his secular Fatah party, which is Hamas’s sworn rival and was kicked out of Gaza by it 16 years ago. In Nablus and Jenin, two of the West Bank’s other main cities, masked militants and civilians in their hundreds gathered in the streets to praise the attack. Some handed out sweets. Others posed for pictures with rifles.

The key question is how the Palestinians of the West Bank will respond to the mounting bloodshed in Gaza, as Israel bombs it from the air and prepares for a ground attack into the densely populated enclave. Most West Bank Palestinians sympathise with the plight of their Gazan cousins. Hamas remains stubbornly popular in both Palestinian territories. Tension in the West Bank tends to rise whenever clashes with Israel forces erupt in either territory. “We’d prefer Hamas not to do it [attack Israel],” says a PA official. “But when Israel responds, it is not seen as an attack against Hamas, but as part of a 75-year-long war on the Palestinian nation.”

Israel is trying to keep a lid on the West Bank with heavy policing. Even the short drive between Nablus and Ramallah is now pocked with checkpoints. Yet Israel’s armed forces are already stretched thin across several fronts: not just around Gaza but also on the border with Lebanon. There the Israelis have already exchanged fire with Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed militia that is armed with well over 100,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel. A wide eruption of violence and unrest in the West Bank on the scale of the last major intifada there, which lasted from 2000-2005 and claimed about 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives, would stretch Israel’s forces even more thinly across a third front.

The more than 3m Palestinians who live in the West Bank are wealthier and have much more to lose than those in Gaza. Few of those who lived through the last intifada want to see a repetition of its death and destruction. Many Palestinians in the territory rely on the salaries of family members who work in Israel, with which the West Bank’s economy is entwined. Hence the Palestinians of the West Bank have shown little desire to confront Israel directly, however much they may loathe the Israeli occupation.

In the past couple of years new militant groups have emerged from the West Bank’s hotbeds of discontent, especially in Nablus and the Jenin refugee camp. They have come out vociferously in support of the Hamas attack. But they have not yet sent out their fighters in force against Israeli targets in the West Bank, partly because they are conscious that Israel still has very much the upper hand there. Still, a wave of attacks or killings of West Bank Palestinians by Israeli settlers, such as those that occurred in Qusra, might well push large numbers of Palestinians and their new militant groups into open revolt.

The PA is desperate to avoid this third intifada, because it would undermine its very existence. The PA’s survival depends largely on its co-operation with Israel on almost every matter, ranging from security to the granting of work permits to Palestinians in Israel. An open confrontation with Israel could destroy the PA. Yet on the other hand it cannot bring itself to condemn Hamas’s recent onslaught. The PA fears that doing so would be seen as opposing what the Palestinians hail as their resistance to Israel’s occupation and would drain what little credibility it still has on the Palestinian street.

A vacuum may beckon

Even before the Hamas attack, the sclerotic PA was in crisis. Donor fatigue and local mismanagement have left it struggling to pay the salaries of public employees in recent months. Mr Abbas has repeatedly cancelled elections, further reducing his legitimacy. And the PA has been unable to protect Palestinians from Israeli settler violence, which has increased since last year’s formation of a far-right government by Binyamin Netanyahu. Last month 87% of Palestinians told the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah that the PA was corrupt.

The bloodbath caused by Hamas will add to the PA’s woes. On October 9th the European Commission said it was reviewing annual funds worth almost €691m ($728m) that it gives to the Palestinians. The governments of Austria and Germany announced similar reviews of their aid. One of the few cards Mr Abbas has to play is his recently warming relations with Saudi Arabia, something Palestinian officials have put much hope in. On October 10th Mr Abbas telephoned Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler, urging him to become a mediator in order to protect civilians in Gaza. A day later the prince spoke for the first time to Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi. The prospect of Saudi Arabia getting involved as a mediator is, however, a long shot.

If Mr Abbas fails to get support from European donors or the Saudis, let alone the Israelis, the PA could face a financial crisis so deep that the PA’s security forces, which are supposed to police parts of the West Bank, may collapse. The result would be chaos and perhaps even open the door to a takeover of the West Bank by Hamas or other militant factions. It would also mean an end to the PA’s security co-operation with Israel, which would lead to more frequent Israeli raids, a more intrusive security presence and probably much greater bloodshed.

The war in Gaza marks a watershed for the PA. It has no easy choices. Either it can maintain its current refusal to condemn Hamas and risk being cut off by its foreign donors and friends, which could lead to its total collapse. Or it can come out firmly against it in the hope of regaining international support but at the risk of enraging so many Palestinians on the street that they sweep the PA aside. Mr Abbas tends to avoid making decisions, let alone such tough ones. The odds are that he will try to muddle through with equivocation, hoping that the PA can survive long enough to see Hamas, its main rival, crushed in Gaza by Israel. ■