How Palestinians in the West Bank became so vulnerable to Israeli settler terror

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. Then came the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the social force that had made the Intifada possible began to come undone — gradually at first, then much more rapidly after 2005. Oslo created the Palestinian Authority as an administrative body offering limited self-rule in Area A, the roughly 18% of the West Bank containing the main urban centers. Area B, the rural 22% where most villages and towns lie, was left under PA civil (but not security) control, while the remaining 60%, designated as Area C, fell under full Israeli civil and military control. In a way, this was Israel’s partial concession to Palestinians, an admission that Palestinian self-determination could not be repressed indefinitely. But that concession came with a price: the bureaucratization of the very grassroots forces that had made the concession possible in the first place. “In the Oslo era, the common tendency shifted from the logic of uprising to the logic of state-building,” Jebril Muhammad told Mondoweiss. “The PA replaced the social bodies that had led the Intifada. The idea that we were building a state meant that grassroots movements had to gradually turn into professional institutions, and this wasn’t limited to the bodies that were absorbed by the PA, but also extended to civil society.” What Muhammad refers to is the process by which civil society organizations transformed from grassroots institutions into NGOs beholden to foreign donors. “I was a member of one such movement that helped farmers during the Intifada,” said Jamal Jumaa, coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots Stop The Wall Campaign. “It operated through collective leadership based on consensus… and was run by members who were themselves farmers.” Those groups gradually began to change after Oslo, Jumaa says, as European “expert” delegations pushed local groups to professionalize into hierarchical structures, sidelining the farmers and workers who had once run them. Jumaa explains that this was part of the procedure for becoming eligible to receive foreign funding. It became the new way for Palestinian social groups — now NGOs — to fund their activities. Along the way, volunteers became professional employees, and local donations and the pooling of resources were substituted by foreign aid, while community volunteerism was displaced by service-oriented PA or NGO-supported social programs. Muhammad says that this trajectory deepened further after the Second Intifada, which ran from 2000 to 2005 and ended with the weakening of the PA’s authority following the disarmament of armed Palestinian groups that had fought Israel during the previous five years. “During the Second Intifada, Israeli military action targeted the PA institutions, undercutting its capacity to live up to its responsibility of reconstruction and social assistance,” Muhammad elaborated. “This made the PA leave the space for local and international NGOs.” In 2019, the EU added a further condition, requiring Palestinian NGOs to vet staff and beneficiaries against a list of groups it designates as terrorist organizations — effectively criminalizing broad swaths of Palestinian political life as a precondition for aid. This dependency on foreign funding was compounded by dependency on Israel’s own economy: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians relied on work inside Israel, access to which Israel revoked entirely after October 7, cutting off roughly 200,000 workers overnight. At the same time, Israel has waged economic warfare on the PA itself, withholding the customs revenue — more than 60% of the PA’s budget — that it collects on the PA’s behalf under Oslo-era economic protocols, driving a salary crisis that is collapsing public education and health services. All of this has unfolded without a unified Palestinian leadership. The PA under Mahmoud Abbas, which has remained committed to negotiations and security cooperation has lost much of its political relevance, while Hamas remains sidelined by international actors in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Before October 2023, most settler violence was confined to Area C. Today, attacks on Area B have become routine, most recently culminating in the events at Til, while Israel established the first military base inside Area A for the first time in two decades last month.The result is that Palestinians in the West Bank find themselves assailed on multiple fronts: an unprecedented economic crisis from direct strangulation, a merciless Israeli crackdown targeting any form of community organizing or social leadership, a fragmented leadership unable to offer a political horizon, a civil society rendered ineffectual by three decades of bureaucratization and institutional inertia, and an escalating two-pronged Israeli assault through settler pogroms and military raids. Redefining Sumud These conditions were clear when Bezalel Smotrich first introduced his “decisive plan” to annex the entire West Bank in 2015, which he hoped to achieve by “extending Israeli sovereignty” over the territory, thus ending any chance for a Palestinian state. This included expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land and cornering Palestinians in as little territory as possible in isolated urban centers — namely Area A — while gradually driving them out of Areas C and B as a result of deteriorating life conditions that would push them to “voluntarily” leave.The plan’s linchpin has been the settler movement, whose campaign of new outposts since at least 2020 has been funded and enabled by the Israeli government and met with little more than toothless condemnation from Palestinian, Arab, and international actors. Settler attacks, as a consequence, became more frequent and violent, leading to the erasure of entire Palestinian rural communities since October 2023.The “decisive plan” is no longer an eventuality. “We are in the midst of it,” says Khaled Odetallah, the founder of Palestine’s Popular University and one of the co-editors of Al-Janub: The Palestinian Journal for Liberation Studies. For Odetallah, the main thing Palestinians need to consider is how to remain on their lands and resist the unrelenting pressures that Israel is exerting upon Palestinian communities to pack up and leave. Palestinians have called this strategy sumud, or “steadfastness.” But Odetallah doesn’t consider it a passive position. “It is an effort to sustain people’s capacity to stay and live as a collective,” he explained. “This steadfastness requires a lot of work, socially and economically, and a lot of support, too, especially since the current ‘decisive’ offensive doesn’t show any sign of stopping.” One form of reviving steadfastness, which Palestinian factions have continuously called for, is the activation of “popular protection committees.” These are grassroots groups of local civilians, similar to volunteer neighborhood patrols, that guard against settler attacks and serve as early warning systems for villages targeted for pogroms. Mondoweiss has recently reported on some of these committees, but they are facing an uphill battle due to Israeli military repression and arrests of organizers, in addition to a general lack of institutional support, including by the very Palestinian factions who mention them at every statement. This stands in stark contrast to how the Israeli security establishment paints these committees, which it describes as a network of some 70 PA outfits that pose the threat of increased friction with settlers, according to unnamed security officials who spoke to Haaretz. But these committees are far less influenced by the PA and more akin to organic grassroots initiatives, composed of ordinary civilian residents with no tools and no support, attempting to revive the sumud of the 1980s. Yet the reason they haven’t achieved wider relevance is precisely because of the lack of institutional support that Israeli sources claim they enjoy. The strategy doesn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch, Jamal Jumaa says. “There is already a basis for resilience and steadfastness in Palestine at the local level — in every village and town,” he stressed. “The Palestinian people have always demonstrated their capacity to stand strong, and Palestinians are currently standing strong in the West Bank, facing the Israeli assault.” But these local efforts, Jumaa stresses, require a national leadership that people can rally around. “That is missing,” he noted, adding that “we also need to rebuild popular forms of social solidarity on a national level, and provide them with every support possible.” Only Palestinian sumud, he says, can deliver results, but only when unified and supported. Qassam MuaddiQassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.