Opinion | A Message From the West Bank: ‘We Are Coming to Horrible Days’

The West Bank village of Qusra was smoldering as I arrived. Clouds of black smoke swirled from a field where rampaging Israeli settlers had lit it on fire, while also setting fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles, according to Qusra residents.

“At any moment, we expect settlers to attack,” said Abdel-Majeed Hassan, a salt-of-the-earth farmer in his 70s. He showed me the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said settlers had destroyed.

Six residents of this village have been killed in such attacks since October, when the Israeli government responded to the Hamas terror attack from Gaza by imposing far harsher rule in the West Bank — more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements — and by giving armed settlers freer rein to attack Palestinian farmers. The result is a despair and fury that every Palestinian I spoke to predicted would lead to a bloody uprising.

I met Hassan here in 2015, on one of my many trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories over the years. Despite enduring repeated attacks by settlers who coveted his land, he thought then that he could hang on to his family farm.

Now he’s not so sure. His wife argues for abandoning their house for fear that settlers will firebomb it. After settlers smashed all their windows, the family installed heavy steel screens and window shutters, but this month settlers still tried to force their way inside while his granddaughter was visiting. So now he tells his grandchildren not to visit, and he or his son stands watch all night, every night.

A few days before my visit, Hassan said, settlers set fire to his barn with his sheep inside. Hassan ran and extinguished the fire as settlers hurled stones; “rocks were falling on my head like rain,” he said. Others in the village confirmed his account.

That is life for Palestinians in the West Bank today.

There are places in the world with significantly worse oppression and killing, including in Arab countries like Sudan, Syria and Yemen that draw less attention or protest. But Israel’s “state-backed settler violence,” as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops.

With Israel possibly winding down the most intensive phase of its war in Gaza, we should be paying much more attention to the crisis building in the more populous West Bank. The United Nations reports that 536 Palestinians, including 130 children, in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the last eight months. During the same period, seven Israeli soldiers and five settlers have been killed here by Palestinians.

One way of thinking of it: An average of about 60 Palestinians have been killed each month in the West Bank since early October, in an area nominally at peace — six times the pace at which American soldiers were killed on average during the war in Afghanistan.

It could get much worse. Hassan warned that the West Bank is seething with so much frustration that “a big explosion is coming.” Others predicted that this wouldn’t be an organized rebellion but more of a spontaneous uprising, perhaps magnified by the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority.

“There’s a war in Gaza, but the big war will be here in the West Bank,” Muamar Orabi, managing director of a West Bank news organization called Wattan, told me. Including East Jerusalem, the West Bank is home to three million Palestinians and 720,000 Jewish settlers.

Historically, Palestinians had few firearms, but that is changing. Military weapons are being smuggled into the West Bank, apparently mostly from Israel, and are sold on the black market.

“ People think that the only path left is armed resistance,” one young Palestinian man told me.

Extremists in the Israeli government are pressing ahead. When settlers invaded the farming village of Burqa in the West Bank last summer and shot dead a 19-year-old man, the U.S. State Department called it a “terror attack by Israeli extremist settlers.” But Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, suggested the killer “should get a medal of honor.”

Older Palestinians like Hassan mostly don’t want confrontation. I asked him what he does when settlers periodically cut down the trees in his olive orchard, and he smiled sadly.

“I replant,” he said.

“I do my best to calm this new generation,” he said. “But I fear that one day they will no longer listen to me.”

Again and again, I encountered that dynamic. Abdul Hakim Wadi, 53, preaches patience even after his brother, a chemist, and his nephew, a lawyer, were shot dead while in a funeral procession mourning four other Qusra residents killed the previous day. “We have been preventing the youth from doing anything,” Wadi told me. But his 18-year-old son, Omar, thinks his dad is deluded.

“I have lost hope,” Omar told me. The only thing Israelis understand, he said, is force. “We no longer have these conversations,” his father told me, “because he says, ‘your generation has ruined our lives.’”

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Hani Ouda, 70, the mayor of Qusra, believes in peace. “It’s impossible for them to get rid of all Palestinians, and it’s impossible for us to get rid of all Israelis,” he told me. “The only solution is for us to live side by side.”

But the hope seems beaten out of him. He wanted to show me his orchards, so he took me to a road and pointed to his land that he can no longer set foot on.

“If we go beyond here, we could get shot or arrested,” he said. Then he took me to the community hall, built with German aid money but now burned and unusable. Some 200 settlers set fire to it this spring, when they also burned six homes and a bus, Ouda said. And now, he warned, “we are coming to horrible days” with “lots of bloodshed.”

I don’t know how to assess the risk. I see deep anger and frustration among West Bank Palestinians but also great fear and recognition that an uprising could be suicidal. Over the decades, I’ve often heard predictions of upheavals that never come to pass, while others, like the Tiananmen Square or Arab Spring movements, erupted with little warning.

What is clear is the deterioration in freedom and well-being in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The heightened repression feels partly opportunistic — a land grab — but it is also shaped by a determination that Israel will never again be vulnerable to massacres.

Israelis do have legitimate reason to be fearful, and Palestinians do throw rocks at settlers and occasionally kill or injure them. While on average fewer than one settler has been killed a month since Oct. 7, that’s partly because settlers have guns, high walls and soldiers protecting them. Polls show growing support for Hamas on the West Bank, and many Israelis conclude that their survival depends on crushing Palestinians, not trusting them.

The village of Qusra has about 5,000 inhabitants, while the nearby Jewish settlement of Migdalim has about 600. One angry Qusra resident told me that it might take 2,000 Palestinian attackers, but they probably could overrun Migdalim if it came to that. So Migdalim settlers have a right to be nervous, but it’s also true that settlers have earned the loathing directed at them.

Settlers in Migdalim did not respond to my requests for comment, but Shmuel Junger, who works with an organization that supports settlements, said in an email that it is the people of Qusra who have attacked Migdalim, not the other way around.

“After everything we witnessed on Oct. 7, do you still believe that Israelis shouldn’t do everything in their power to protect their homes?” Junger asked.

That attitude reflects the tragic symmetry of the Middle East today. Israelis and Palestinians largely agree on just one point: The other side is untrustworthy, inhumane, illegitimate and extremist.

The final element of this symmetry is that each denies that there is any symmetry at all.

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The anger about land theft and settler violence is compounded by a growing economic crisis. The World Bank estimates that about 300,000 people in the West Bank have lost their jobs since Oct. 7.

The economic difficulties were compounded in May when a far-right Israeli cabinet minister, Bezalel Smotrich, began withholding Palestinian tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority, or P.A. Along with other punitive financial measures taken by Israel, there are growing fears that the P.A. could collapse — but Smotrich is not concerned.

“If this causes the collapse of the P.A., let it collapse,” he reportedly said.

In contrast, the Biden administration is alarmed. “If you saw the Palestinian Authority collapse and instability spread across the West Bank, it’s not just a problem for the Palestinians,” said Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman. “It is also a massive security threat for the state of Israel.”

There were reports on Friday that Smotrich had tentatively agreed to release some of the funds to the P.A. in exchange for strengthening Israeli settlements. There was no official announcement, however.

If the P.A. collapses, its security forces would no longer be there to gather intelligence on threats and prevent attacks, and it’s not clear what would happen to their guns.

President Biden and leaders of other Group of 7 nations this month called on Israel to release the tax funds. “Actions that weaken the Palestinian Authority must stop,” the leaders said in their communiqué.

Palestinians believe that the Israeli right would like to provoke an explosion of violence and use it as an excuse for an ethnic cleansing.

For my part, I think a simpler explanation is more likely: Israel is once again acting shortsightedly, against its own security interests. To paraphrase what the former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban said of Palestinians, the Israeli right never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Policy to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is immensely complex, with infinite room for nuance. I’ve focused here on the security dimension, for I believe it’s in American and Israeli interests to create a Palestinian state. But one more thing must be said: The seizure and occupation of other people’s land is wrong. And it is not wrong in a complicated, finely balanced way; it is simply, straightforwardly wrong.

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The Biden administration has spoken out against Israel’s abuses in the West Bank, imposed financial sanctions on some violent settlers and withheld delivery of thousands of M16 rifles for fear that they would be handed out to settlers. Those steps are useful but inadequate. Biden didn’t respond forcefully even when Israel in March announced one of the largest seizures of Palestinian land in the West Bank since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

I’m afraid that Biden’s refusal to stand up more firmly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister — over either Gaza or the West Bank — enables more extremism and increases the risk of a cataclysm.

Israeli officials are right to despair about the lack of credible Palestinian leadership, but there is a step they could take to address that. Israel could release Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian leader, from prison. Barghouti has spent more than two decades in prison for murdering Israelis, and Israel regards him as a terrorist. But he favors a two-state solution and he has enough legitimacy that he just might be able to deliver a peace deal. As a result, some serious Israeli commentators favor his release.

“He is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in,” wrote Alon Liel, a former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

The United States should push for Barghouti’s release and also press Israel harder to clamp down on illegal settlements and settler thuggery. For the same reason we oppose Palestinian terrorism, we should stand against Israeli terrorism.

I believe critics of Israel overuse the term “apartheid,” because Arab and Druze citizens of Israel have sat in the Knesset, held cabinet posts and, in 2007, briefly served as acting president. But the West Bank? Yes, that is apartheid.

“The entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians,” says B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization.

The occupation is as toxic to Israelis as it is to Palestinians. “We are losing our identity as people, as Jews and as human beings,” Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, told the journalist Christiane Amanpour.

Americans should call for Israel to grant Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights — including voting rights — that it gives settlers in the West Bank. That’s a way of reminding Israel that it cannot simply occupy land decade after decade.

The United States is already in the thick of the West Bank conflict. Many settlers have American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States. Meanwhile, some of the West Bank Palestinians on the other side of the fences also have American accents.

“I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do?” said Sayel Kanan, an engineer who lived in New Jersey for a dozen years and is now mayor of Burqa. “They can break my gate; they can kill me.”

Kanan put up a high wall around his home for protection from settlers (just as settlers put up high walls around their homes for protection from Palestinians), but he says he still fears for himself and for his son, a doctor who is also an American citizen. Settlers recently burned Kanan’s olive orchard and previously destroyed two of his vehicles, he said.

“I love America as a land of opportunity, but its foreign policy?” He paused. “I have lots of questions.”

So should we all.