Sept. 3, 2024, 4:30 p.m.
As war raged in the Middle East this summer, "Amado Sison," a teacher and activist from Jersey City, New Jersey using a pseudonym, decided to travel to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to volunteer.
He arrived in early August and joined a weekly demonstration in the town of Beita. Every Friday, a group of Palestinians with the non-violent organization Faz3a approaches the Israeli settlements sprouting up on Palestinian land across the West Bank. The activists pray, chant, and bring international observers—including Sison—to witness events on the ground.
As the praying and chanting began, Sison saw three Israeli soldiers pointing guns at the activists from a nearby tower. A few minutes later, the soldiers started to fire tear gas and live ammunition at the group, he said. The activists crouched behind a concrete wall. Sison continued to record what was happening until the Israeli soldiers started to get closer. Then, the activists ran, jumping over a wall to escape their pursuers.
“To my left, I saw some Palestinians running into the olive grove behind me,” Sison described to National Journal. “While we were going down the olive grove, we heard a loud bang. I thought it was a tear gas canister that hit my thigh. It felt like a blunt force that hit me. I was limping but still running because I didn’t want to get shot. Then we got to a clearing, and a whole bunch of Palestinians came running to me, and they carried me.”
The Israeli military had in fact shot Sison in the back of the thigh with a bullet. He eventually received emergency surgery in a hospital in Nablus and is expected to make a full recovery. An Israeli military spokesman said that ammunition was fired in the air to disperse the crowds, and Sison was hit by mistake. But his experience highlights the level of everyday violence unfolding in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settler groups face off against Palestinians regularly. Palestinians have had their houses, cars, and farms burned and their access to water cut off.
“The Palestinians didn’t have any guns or anything. The most they have around them are rocks,” Sison said. “There’s no guns, there’s no knives, so tear gas and live ammunition is definitely not the correct response to demonstrators who are just trying to get back to their land.”
With a bloody war unfolding in Gaza which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, it can be easy to forget about the West Bank. But the escalating violence and ongoing Israeli settlement construction there are making it nearly impossible for there to be lasting peace in the Middle East. That means the cycle of violence is set to continue even in the unlikely case that ceasefire negotiations to end the war in Gaza are successful.
The West Bank is a roughly 2,200 square mile tract of land that lies west of the Jordan River. Israel captured control of much of it during the Six-Day War in 1967. Control is now split between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The U.S. estimates that around 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
The international community has determined—including in a 2024 ruling from the top court of the United Nations—that Israel's occupation of both the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal. There are estimated to be between 500,000 and 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. Experts estimate there are around 150 Israeli settlements and at least 130 outposts, makeshift structures meant to demarcate territorial control.
After the militant group Hamas brutally attacked civilians in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza began in earnest, the Israeli military began providing settler militias in the West Bank with weaponry, ostensibly to protect themselves from further terror attacks. There have been numerous attacks on Palestinian communities since then. The United Nations estimates that 580 Palestinians have died in the West Bank since Oct. 7. There is a growing sense that Israeli settlers are committing violence with impunity or even with the support of Israeli officials.
“The state takes over land openly, using official methods sanctioned by legal advisors and judges, while the settlers, who are also interested in taking over land to further their agenda, initiate violence against Palestinians for their own reasons,” said Shai Parnes, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, in an email to National Journal.
Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza now based in Washington D.C., argues that settler violence was a constant threat in the West Bank even before Hamas attacked Israel in October. In February 2023, hundreds of Israeli settlers entered the village of Huwara in the West Bank and tried to light the town on fire. Hundreds of people were injured, several critically. At least one person died.
“The guns they have are from the Israeli government. Israeli ministers such as [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir are literally calling for these actions,” Sayegh said. “When the settlers attack somewhere, the military comes. But they come not to defend the Palestinians who are being attacked. They come to defend the attackers, and that’s a daily thing that happens.”
Both settler violence and government action in the West Bank have intensified over the past 10 months. On Wednesday, Aug. 28, the Israeli military launched raids and airstrikes in the occupied West Bank in an unusually large-scale operation, sending in hundreds of troops. At least 10 people were killed. The operation continued throughout the week. Experts said the operation was the largest in the West Bank in the past 20 years. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the operation was part of a “full-fledged war,” linking the operation to the war in Gaza.
The operation began just two days after a separate Israeli airstrike on the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank killed at least five Palestinians. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on Israel to halt its operation in the West Bank immediately, arguing it was “fueling an already explosive situation.”
Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli-American analyst and expert on Israel at the International Crisis Group, noted that armed groups usually comprised of teenagers who are not very well organized are operating in areas of the West Bank—particularly Jenin and Nablus. In response, Israel pursues a policy described as “mowing the grass,” which compares Palestinian populations to weeds that need to be cut down with regular military action.
“They’ve been doing these raids daily for months, especially after October 7, but even before that, quite often and routinely,” Zonszein said. “So this is just an intensification of that.”
Zonszein noted that Israel’s approach is often “self-defeating” since it sparks resistance and boosts the popularity of groups like Hamas rather than calming tensions. Smotrich, in his role within the Israeli Defense Ministry, has completely restructured the Israeli civil administration in charge of governing Palestinians in the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces have recruited settlers to act as reservists, empowering them to act as an arm of the state. The West Bank’s Palestinian population, on the contrary, has no police force to protect them and no rights, leaving them vulnerable to intimidation and violence.
The Biden administration, however, has continued to focus on securing a ceasefire deal in Gaza instead of using U.S. influence to prevent more violence across the region. Some Palestinian advocates have expressed hope that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, will take a different approach if she is elected. She told the Democratic National Convention that the Palestinian people have a right to “dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
But that could require a rethinking of the relationship with the current Israeli government, which appears determined to prevent a two-state solution from materializing. Last month, Israel’s Knesset voted overwhelmingly to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state, dealing a blow to the longstanding U.S. policy of supporting a two-state solution. Meanwhile, the right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has continued to support settlement expansion. On Aug. 14, Israel published additional plans to expand settlements in the West Bank that the international community considers illegal.
“We will continue to fight against the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state,” Smotrich said during the announcement.
Some organizations have started calling for U.S. sanctions in response to the events on the ground. Last week, as Israel conducted its large-scale raid in the West Bank, the D.C.-based organization Democracy for the Arab World Now, founded by the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, submitted a formal request to the Biden administration, requesting sanctions against violent settlers centered in the Yitzhar settlement in the West Bank.
On Wednesday, the State Department issued sanctions against an Israeli non-governmental organization, Hashomer Yosh, and three individuals for providing material support to an Israeli outpost in the West Bank, known as Meitarim Farm.
“After all 250 Palestinian residents of Khirbet Zanuta were forced to leave in late January, Hashomer Yosh volunteers fenced off the village to prevent the residents from returning,” the State Department said.
But many believe these actions are just a drop in the bucket. Zonszein argues that a two-state solution is “untenable” due to “years and years of U.S. policy that has allowed Israel to act with impunity.”
“We have reached a point now where we have a government that is openly, not just rejecting a two-state solution, but acting very proactively to completely destroy Palestinian society, community, infrastructure, ability to build, in a very open way,” Zonszein said.
“You have a government whose senior ministers are settlers, and not just settlers, but settlers that represent the radical hilltop youth, the kind of settlers who want to annex the entire West Bank, people who believe that Israel has a religious, fundamental right to be there, that there’s no practical diplomacy,” she added. “It’s very much messianic, ideological people, and they are the ones in government.”
