A few media outlets have asked why the Israeli army is carrying out antiterror missions in the West Bank despite the cease-fire in Gaza. The truth is that there is no contradiction here, and it’s a mistake to assume any and every operation in the West Bank pushes Gaza closer to conflict.
Israel’s actions are, in fact, in concert with the idea of bringing some measure of peace to the Gaza Strip. That is because the IDF is trying to save Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority from irrelevance and give it a fighting chance to once again govern both Palestinian territories.
The odds of that happening, however, are looking a bit longer every day.
In December, the Palestinian Authority’s security forces launched an operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. The move was aimed at restoring order and further sidelining Iran, which dreams of toppling Abbas and uniting the West Bank and Gaza under its proxies. For years now terrorist groups like the Jenin Brigades and others have carved out a separatist island in the city. With Iran at its weakest point in decades, PA forces sought to turn the tide. Success there would also, in theory, prove Abbas’s forces are strong enough to govern Gaza too.
So how did the PA do? Not great.
A flubbed operation was followed by a slightly better one, but PA forces ultimately could do no better than a stalemate. By mid-January, the IDF was back in Jenin.
But the PA operations gave one reason for (very) cautious optimism: Fighting between PA forces and breakaway militants didn’t spread to other cities in the West Bank. Haaretz stumbled upon an interesting explanation for the containment of the fighting:
“Another point concerns the widely held fear in Jenin and the West Bank generally that the destruction in the Gaza Strip could happen in the West Bank. This view is held by many businesspeople and merchants, whose status in Palestinian society has grown, and with it, their influence over the PA.
“This pressure is evident in Nablus, but the merchants also have a great deal of influence in areas like Hebron. This has prevented the protests from spreading and the gunmen from stepping up pressure in these cities.”
In a word, deterrence.
Thought it obviously was not the primary objective of the IDF’s operations in Gaza—this was a war of Hamas’s choice whose continuation was also Hamas’s choice—Israel’s resolve throughout the 15-month war drove home a key point: The trend in Palestinian politics is going to be determined by what proves to be the more successful or desirable expression of Palestinian nationalism. And the “costs” part of “resistance at all costs” turned out to be quite high.
How do we square that with Hamas’s polling support in the West Bank? By theorizing, as Haaretz’s Palestinian sources do, that the opinions of the elites are the ones that matter.
Yet at the end of the day, neither the Palestinian elites nor the Palestinian street matters more to the IDF than Israel’s security. Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar strongly suggested that the new mission in Jenin, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, is aimed at letting Israel take back the initiative.
“You can’t defeat terrorism through defense alone,” Bar said, according to the Jerusalem Post. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi emphasized the point: “We need to be prepared to continue in the Jenin camp, which will bring it to a different place—we are denying the enemy opportunities to harm our forces.”
There’s the rub. Will Mahmoud Abbas ever be in a place where he is strong enough to hold up his end of a security bargain with Israel? Does he even want to be? Winning the hearts and minds of the business community of Nablus is a fine thing, but one gets the impression that Israel remains the only party here that understands the stakes—and is prepared to act accordingly.
