Testing the boundaries for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
Israeli armored vehicles drive through Tulkarem, September 3, 2024. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)
The current operation in the West Bank is meant to test the boundaries of what Israel will be allowed to get away with. It is setting the stage for the forced ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
There is a pretense of novelty in Israel’s most recent offensive in the West Bank, which it has glibly called “Operation Summer Camps.” Even before it began, Israel announced that the operation was the most wide-ranging invasion of the West Bank since 2002. What is most striking about this framing is the charade that each new operation represents a fresh response to an emerging threat. In truth, these actions are part of a continuous, unbroken chain of suppression and a bloody impulse through which Israel exercises its power to kill and arrest, all the while undergirded by a continuous desire to see Palestinians disappear.
Many have already observed that Israel’s need for constant initiative across its numerous battlefields is central to the hyped-up nature of its offensive. In Gaza, Israel finds itself consolidating its presence in the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, with little military initiative elsewhere in the strip beyond maintaining relentless pressure on a Palestinian population that has endured all manner of horrors over the past 11 months, including daily massacres that are tearing apart the social fabric of the small and dense coastal strip.
In the north, the Lebanese resistance and the Israeli military trade blows within a highly regularized set of rules of engagement. Despite earlier escalations, the battlefield remains largely fixed within specific rhythms, extracting a toll from both sides without any clear resolution in sight.
In other words, Israel’s military campaigns, if not approaching a stalemate, have settled into a war of attrition. The way to regain the initiative is to open up another, perhaps “easier” front that might offer a clearer image of “victory,” even as the actual prospects for decisive victories in other theaters fade. But to whom does Israel want to demonstrate this initiative?
A projection of strength
First and foremost, Israel’s military machine is being driven by the demands of its own settlers and the right-wing agenda that pushes the country toward perpetual war. The need to see things happening — soldiers breaking into homes, Palestinian fighters being killed — is imperative for the type of war Israel is currently waging.
This pressure for more war, originating in a certain segment of Israeli society, is juxtaposed with another pressure from a different segment, which concedes the need for more war but insists on getting back the captives held in Gaza first.
In a prolonged military campaign fraught with economic costs, social and political divisions, and an underlying fear of peace that pervades Israeli society, the military machine must continually find new campaigns to justify its actions — often designating them with bombastic and at times perverse names.
These campaigns serve to placate a restless public, with each operation presented as a fresh initiative, even if they bear a striking resemblance to numerous operations that Israel has regularly carried out in the past.
This narrative of tactical accumulation — the constant movement of troops and the ability to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously — serves to project an image of strength. But it conceals an underlying rot, which is Israel’s lack of viable solutions when it comes to directly confronting its arch-nemesis, Iran, or engaging in open warfare in the north with the Lebanese resistance.
This is why the West Bank offers a convenient respite — a new theater where the illusion of control and progress can be temporarily sustained, even as the broader strategic picture grows increasingly dire.
Israeli armored vehicles in Tulkarem, September 3, 2024. (Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)
Psychological warfare and testing boundaries
Second, these operations are also “cognitive” in nature, a term favored by Israeli military leaders and strategists to describe the collection of tactics that include engaging in information warfare, making Israel’s military presence felt, committing war crimes, and causing widespread destruction to infrastructure.
Israel employs this range of military tactics to create an impression — on its own people, but more importantly, on the Palestinians.
In this context, Israel describes the Gaza model as replicable in the West Bank and flirts with the possibility of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign. Additionally, as it reenacts some of Gaza’s imagery in the northern West Bank, Israel is testing the tolerance levels of its international allies and satisfying its right-wing base all at once, gauging the extent to which it can get away with changing the realities on the ground in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and the region.
It forces Palestinians in the West Bank to grapple with the anxiety of a looming war of annihilation without the concrete capacity to resist. It’s a form of collective psychological torture that impacts everyone in the West Bank, who hurry to reckon with the campaign’s purported novelty, intensity, and violence. Rumors spread, and the Palestinian Authority, operating in the shadows, feeds Palestinians talking points that serve to exalt the policy of Mahmoud Abbas — who by not confronting Israel and cooperating with its security apparatus, protects against the replication of the model of annihilative war in the West Bank. This is exactly the conclusion Israel wants Palestinians to reach.
Streets torn up by Israeli bulldozers in the eastern neighborhood of the city of Jenin, September 1, 2024. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)
Taking the fight to the resistance
Third, on a tactical level, the military campaign is designed to take the fight directly to the armed movements in the northern West Bank. This is particularly crucial in light of growing signs that some factions within the mosaic of groups in the north are shifting toward more offensive actions. These include failed attempts to plant a bomb in the heart of Tel Aviv and the resurgence of car bombs originating from the south of the West Bank. The campaign aims to put the Palestinian resistance on the defensive.