A turning point for Palestinians

Hamas’s success in humiliating Israel has given Palestinians in the West Bank greater motivation to attack Israeli targets.

Fresh revelations about the magnitude of the terrible blow dealt to Israel by Hamas are fuelling anger, despair and a desire for revenge, making an all-out effort to smash Hamas increasingly likely.

But that would have its own dangers, morally and practically, and could reverberate far beyond the crowded coastal enclave of two million Palestinians.

While most concern is focusing on the possible participation of Hezbollah in the fighting, a ground offensive in Gaza could also cause a significant escalation among Palestinians in the already simmering occupied West Bank and enflame passions among Palestinian citizens of Israel, analysts have told The Jewish Independent.

A possible foreshadowing of this escalation occurred on Sunday, when seven Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops across the West Bank, including at the entrance to the town of Beita, near Nablus, according to the Bethlehem-based Maan website.

“Extreme violence in the Gaza Strip can escalate the West Bank and inside Israel,” said Menachem Klein, emeritus professor of political science at Bar Ilan University. “Brutality, boots on the ground and mass killing could push Palestinians to turn out.”

For Israelis, the shock and horror promise to continue, the more they learn about the disaster that befell them. Already unable to process the sheer scale of the killings and hostage-taking from Hamas’s invasion, they received confirmation on Sunday night that 260 young people had been shot dead by Hamas gunmen who opened fire during a party and that some of them had been shot again in the head to confirm their killing. At the time of writing, news reports said more than 700 Israelis had been killed, with the toll certain to rise.

But Palestinians were also being struck, by the Israeli air force, with the Hamas-run Ministry of Health saying 413 people had been killed, 78 of them children and youths, with that toll also expected to climb.

Israel’s leaders were building up expectations of heavy retribution for Hamas’s incursion, experienced by many Israelis as even worse than the shock and carnage of Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed: “We will take mighty vengeance for this wicked day” and President Isaac Herzog added that Israel will exact “an immense price from the enemy”.

But Menachem Klein warns that unbridled Israeli force can only make matters worse for everyone. “My assumption is [that] the Israeli cabinet has already decided to enter but they don’t have an exit strategy,” he said. “At this point, Israel is being pushed by the will to take revenge.

“If you have hot blood, you are highly motivated to push aside any limits. You say all of them are barbarians and you must crush them. This is a precondition for catastrophe.

“The goal is to shatter the Hamas administration and organisation all out. That’s a very radical goal. It can’t be implemented without large-scale civilian bloodshed,” he said.

At the same time, Hamas’s success at harming and humiliating Israel so severely is being celebrated as a major victory throughout the Islamic world, including the West Bank. This has given Palestinians greater motivation to attack Israeli targets, according to Said Ghazali, a veteran East Jerusalem journalist and former contributor to the British newspaper, The Independent.

“The resistance in the West Bank will increase because they think Israel is a paper tiger,” he predicted.

“Israel has cameras and technology while Hamas used primitive weapons and managed to enter its territory. This means a lot. It’s a landslide victory. People are writing on social media that it is an even bigger victory than Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal. They write that Egypt used bridges to cross and Hamas used motorcycles.”

Jihad Harb, former senior analyst at the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, told The Jewish Independent by phone from Ramallah that Hamas’s blow to Israel “will increase the belief among Palestinian youth that armed struggle is the best way. It will increase support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad at the expense of those supporting a political solution.

“Seeing that the Israeli army is weak will encourage youths to use arms against Israel,” he said. Harb expects more Palestinian attacks in the West Bank, especially in “places of friction” with settlers such as Huwara, near Nablus, which hundreds of settlers attacked in February after a Palestinian gunman shot dead two young settlers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv.

Nightly Israeli raids into villages and refugee camps, which the army says are needed to thwart attacks, together with the growth of Palestinian armed groups, have already made this year the deadliest since the second intifada ended in 2005. Settler violence aimed at driving Palestinians off their land is also peaking. This combustible mix appears set to get even more explosive.

“This is a turning point. Not only Palestinians, but people in all Arab countries believe it is possible to defeat Israel,” Ghazali said.

The popular jubilation in the Arab world over what Hamas has wrought highlights the fact that Israel established relations in the Middle East with regimes, not with peoples, he added. “These regimes oppress their own people. In fact, all these people believe the Palestinian cause is alive and that Israel was established at the expense of the Palestinians. They think that Hamas has the right to attack Israel because it’s on the Palestinians’ land.”

Ghazali echoed Klein’s assessment that high casualties in Gaza could fuel reactions in the West Bank. “If the Israelis kill 3000 people in Gaza and there is a massacre, it will agitate people in the West Bank, in Lebanon and other countries and maybe Hezbollah will join [the war].”

From a longer-term perspective, Ghazali blames Israel for bypassing and avoiding its responsibility for “Palestinian dispossession”, which he sees as the root cause of the conflict.

In contrast to Klein, Harb does not think it likely that Israel will mount a ground invasion to conquer all of Gaza. “There may be a limited entry but not an all-out ground invasion,” he said, citing high casualties among the reasons.

“It would be hard to oust Hamas and the Palestinian Authority can’t take over.” But Harb said he does expect massive destruction to be wrought from the air, which could set Gaza’s already decrepit infrastructure back by 10 years.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Palestinian citizens are extremely vulnerable now, says Thabet Abu Rass, co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives. “We know a lot of extremists in Israel are inciting and saying we are another front and collaborate [with enemies].

“There is a lot of incitement on social media, with people speaking of a second nakba. People are afraid to go to work. On the one hand, they’ll be fired if they don’t go. On the other, they are afraid to go.”

Violence flared in mixed Arab-Jewish cities during the previous Gaza confrontation in 2021, leaving scars on both sides and fuelling predictions by right-wingers that in a future war, Palestinians citizens would pose a major threat. Abu Rass predicts Palestinian citizens won’t participate in violence in the current war. “But they have the right to oppose and protest by all legal means.”

Photo: Hamas terrorists arrive back in Gaza with a captured Israeli tank (Abed Abu Reash/AP)