Last week, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report on the “rapid deterioration” of conditions in the West Bank following Hamas’s October 7th attack. Israeli security forces have killed nearly three hundred Palestinians, sometimes using “unnecessary or disproportionate force”; thousands of Palestinians have been arrested for minor incidents; and Israeli settlers have forced more than a thousand Palestinians from their land. The report called for the Israeli government to hold settlers and security forces accountable for violations of human rights. (As the report notes, settlers have only rarely been charged with crimes for attacks on Palestinians.)
To understand how the current situation in the West Bank will shape the future of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, I recently spoke by phone with Ibrahim Dalalsha, the director at the Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, a think tank in Ramallah. He previously worked as an adviser at the United States consulate in Jerusalem for two decades before it closed, in 2019. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Palestinians viewed the attacks of October 7th, whether Israel has a real plan for either the West Bank or Gaza, and how the violence visited upon Palestinians manifests itself in Palestinian politics.
What does the current state of the West Bank tell us about the Israeli government’s understanding of the conflict with Palestinians right now?
If you go back to 2021 and 2022, for the past two and a half years in the West Bank, things were not calm. In fact, there was a lot of concern about the security situation in the area. There were intensive Israeli military operations with a lot of focus on local militant groups. There was an Israeli narrative that Gaza had been contained, but the West Bank had not. So the West Bank, as such, was never calm before October 7th.
Now, after October 7th, obviously the scale of what has happened both in Israel and subsequently in Gaza has eclipsed the level of deterioration that we have seen in the West Bank. But there is something that we feel as Palestinians, and I’m not sure that it’s actually felt elsewhere: If you don’t have really big numbers or spikes in Israeli fatalities, the situation is considered to be calm.
As you say, there has been a lot of violence in the West Bank for the past two and a half years. What has happened since October 7th? And what is the political impetus behind it?
I want to tell you one personal note. I’m a guy in my mid-fifties. I have two granddaughters in Jerusalem because my daughter lives in Jerusalem. I’ve had entry permits to Israel for about twenty years. I used to work for the U.S. government. I had never been cut off from entering Jerusalem. And, on October 7th, there was a total closure imposed on the West Bank, in which two hundred thousand workers have been denied access. All Palestinian West Bank I.D. holders like myself, including those with permits and special permits, have been denied access, and I have not really been able to visit my family and my granddaughters in Jerusalem since then.
Am I Hamas? No. This is just a collective measure that has been applied to all Palestinians. That’s one of the things that the U.N. report was talking about, but it’s not really highlighted enough, because the level of frustration that comes out of that goes way beyond what’s described. In the West Bank, we feel that Israel is punishing the entire Palestinian people. Before October 7th, they would check you and, if you had no security background, they would give you a permit, and you would enter. But, after October 7th, it doesn’t really matter.
Now, a smart Israeli might tell you, “Well, we’re doing that because we want to minimize friction between Palestinians and Israelis.” And of course the answer to that is: If that were the case, they would actually stop settlers from entering the West Bank to minimize friction. The West Bank has been under a series of Israeli restrictions since before October 7th. Attributing everything to October 7th is not really accurate, because we had settlement expansion before then. We had settler violence before then. We had I.D.F. raids, and detentions, and arrests throughout and across the West Bank. Life was not great on October 5th and 6th. There wasn’t a different Israeli strategy that was seeking to hold agreements and take measures to actually alleviate the suffering of people in the West Bank and trying to get them on some sort of political path.
So there was frustration, helplessness, hopelessness, and an Israeli strategy that was meant to capture as much West Bank land as possible, with total disregard to any political path. If you take October 7th and beyond as an isolated period, then you would lose the big picture.
Let me try and rephrase my question: I wasn’t trying to say that the fundamental reality for Palestinians in the West Bank had changed because of October 7th. What I was trying to understand is whether looking at how bad the West Bank situation has become can help us understand what the Israeli government is thinking and what it intends going forward.
I think your question is right and objective. My point is that it’s very important to actually lay out the before and after. So, yes, it got even worse after October 7th, but it wasn’t great beforehand. You have two Israeli governments now: the war cabinet and the regular cabinet. You have people like Benny Gantz in the first, and you have people like [Minister of Finance] Bezalel Smotrich and [Minister of National Security] Itamar Ben-Gvir in the second. So the Israeli government is totally confused; it’s set so many different goals that vary even in terms of how they’re presented to the Israeli public and to the world. It actually started talking first about collective punishment, and then trying to rephrase that so it would sound like it was just waging war against Hamas. But what we have seen so far in Gaza is a death toll of more than twenty thousand, and seventy per cent of the people killed are women and children. This is not collateral damage. There were huge, indiscriminate bombings in Gaza.
Hamas in Gaza is three things: You have Hamas, the government, that was basically governing Gaza until October 7th. You have Hamas, the military wing, which is roughly thirty or forty thousand gunmen. And then you have Hamas as a political organization, which some politicians refer to as ideology. I think getting rid of the first—and saying, “Hamas will never govern Gaza again”—would have been a measurable and achievable goal. But the Israeli government instead went about it holistically, saying, “We will eliminate anything that has to do with Hamas or stands for Hamas.” It forgot that a political organization like Hamas has public support because Hamas stands up when Israelis apply collective punishment and discriminate against an entire population. By going against the entire Palestinian population, both in the West Bank and Gaza, they pushed all Palestinians to one side.
Now, whether this was the intent of the Israeli government or the unintended consequence of its policies and practices, I don’t know and I don’t care. But what I do care about is the actual result.
You were saying that the Israeli response has been confused, but is there some intentionality there? It seems to me that it’s in Netanyahu’s interest to keep the war going, because he may fall from power as soon as it ends; it may be beneficial to Israel to set uncertain goals because then it has more maneuverability with respect to how long it can continue the conflict.
Before October 7th, I think Palestinians used to think of Israel as sophisticated, and now we see it as confused. It may have to do with the collapse of Israel’s defense and intelligence. I think there is a collective sense here that the Israeli government, the right-wing part with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu, has an interest in prolonging the war for as long as it takes. People in his government in the extreme right wing who want to, as they say, break Palestinian national identity, aspirations, and subjugate Palestinians, and maybe expel them, if they can. They’re trying to get away with it through the bombing, the intensive killing of civilians, so that they can push, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the population out, and also subject the West Bank to so many different collective measures and punishments that would get people to think about leaving, or at least break their will.
But I think there are ministers like Gantz and others who actually belong to different schools, and they want to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in a different way. We have not really seen them coming out publicly to oppose these things yet, maybe because of their own internal reasons, or because they think the war needs to happen. But that will eventually be a point of departure for the different Israeli ideologies and the two different Israeli governments.
I am not a military expert myself, but it doesn’t sound like the Israelis have broken the military wings of Hamas and the other factions. This could last for many years. And the political organization of Hamas is going to get bigger because of the level of support that it’s picking up from Palestinians, and not only in Gaza. It may lose half popular support in Gaza, but Hamas has a major public incubator in the West Bank because of frustration, and for resisting Israel and its collective punishment.
So, even if Netanyahu wants to keep the war going for political reasons—even if people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have long-term ideas about cleansing the West Bank or Gaza’s Palestinians and collective punishment—the Israeli government, especially post-October 7th, doesn’t seem like a coherent entity with a coherent plan to you?
Someone like Gantz actually comes from a school that basically says, We need to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through separation. He’s not getting at the complete two-state solution, but saying, “We need to separate from the Palestinians.” Whereas someone like Smotrich is talking about breaking Palestinian national aspirations.
I’m a little surprised by your take, because I have heard Palestinians say a version of, “Yeah, sure. Gantz is not this horrific person like Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. He’s not just dripping with racism and contempt and bigotry at every moment. But, fundamentally, with people like Gantz in power, nothing will actually change.”
You should not be surprised. I spent twenty years working, as I told you, with the U.S. government. I’m a Palestinian from Ramallah. I don’t really think that Gantz is going toward a two-state solution. I’m just saying that his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different from that of Smotrich. I don’t really see them as the same. And, unlike some of my fellow-Palestinians, I do think that, if Gantz has enough of a mandate in the Israeli Knesset, he could go to separation, even if not a strategic end-of-conflict kind of agreement. But I think that there would be a situation that could improve on that level and start a path that could lead us somewhere. It could be a frustrating, painful process, and it would not satisfy the entire Palestinian people. But, between this and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir—if you think they are the same, I think that’s simply wrong.
We have been experiencing life under Netanyahu since 2009, with total desperation, no political horizons, and no hope for a political solution. Gantz and others had a short-lived government that did not have enough of a mandate to change things in a real way. During their leadership, there were attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside Israel, and they reacted to those attacks. Life continued to be the same for Palestinians. And I don’t blame people for seeing it this way. But, if Gantz and Yair Lapid get a mandate in Israel rather than Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, I think there will be a big difference in terms of how life will be.
I understand Hamas’s support increasing now for various reasons having to do with the bombing of Gaza and so on. Is there any feeling that Hamas’s actions have caused, as you’ve put it in the personal story you told me, increased hardships for Palestinians?
Are there people who think that way? Definitely, yes. And I think from the people who are paying a very high price in Gaza for this, you get the sense that many actually see that this was a mistake. It’s a complicated picture in Gaza. But the West Bank is different, because the West Bank has been punished without Hamas’s control, without having to be part of those attacks, and is actually reacting in a very frustrated way to living under occupation and continuing to be punished.
Imagine if Hamas carried out the October 7th attacks, and then Israel retaliated with pinpointed killings of Hamas fighters and leaders, and you asked the Palestinian people, “What do you think about striking against Israeli civilians?” I think that you would get an overwhelming majority of Palestinians saying, “We’re against it.” The problem is that, after the attack against Israelis, there was a conflict with babies and women being killed, and this created a sense that there is no way on earth that anyone would actually say, “I’m against killing Israeli civilians, period, as a Palestinian.” It’s just a much more difficult reality to say, “No, forget about Palestinian casualties. Take the Israeli narrative that Hamas is to blame for this because they are hiding behind civilians.”
We are in a very bad moment of our conflict, to the point that I think the problem now is not only about making peace after this war. We are even below the level of accepting each other’s right to exist.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you did for the American government, and how you feel about the way it has handled this situation in the past three months?
I was a political adviser for the consul-general in the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem before it was shut down. I was a point of contact between the Palestinian Authority and the U.S. consulate. So I’ve been through the second intifada, I’ve been through the Bush Administration era. I was with Obama in his first and second term, and then also with Trump until they closed the consulate.
I don’t really think it was a big surprise that the Biden Administration responded by supporting Israel going to war. The United States does not really have a button where we can turn this off just simply by saying, “The President does not want you to continue.” I think one of the biggest problems was the precious time that was wasted not addressing the fundamental issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Administration allowed the focus to shift to bettering the life of Palestinians under occupation, like providing the Palestinian Authority with 4G Internet lines, rather than focussing on a critical path that could lead us eventually to a solution. But it didn’t want to do any of that. Even the promises or the pledges that the Biden Administration made to reopen the consulate were broken.
And, as such, it went along with the conflict-management tools in the lightest way possible. When things were heating up in the West Bank, the Administration couldn’t do much about it. And then things blew up on October 7th, and it wasn’t a big surprise that the U.S. would come to support Israel given the horrific nature of those attacks. But I think it’s time now to exercise real leverage no matter what it takes. Because, if you allow the current Israeli government under Netanyahu and the second government of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to take over, the situation will continue to move from bad to worse, with no prospects of a solution. It will just be the continuation of suffering and misery for both Palestinians and Jews. ♦
