Ayman Nobani/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
A young Palestinian man stands in front of Israeli security forces during clashes in the West Bank village of Huwara, amid the ongoing fighting between Israeli forces and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, October 8, 2023.
JERUSALEM – The pilgrimage took place on the night of October 4. A long line of buses entered the city of Nablus in the West Bank. They carried Jewish worshippers to Joseph’s Tomb, a contested holy site whose attraction—especially for religious West Bank settlers—is precisely that it is located inside the Palestinian city.
To protect the pilgrimage, the Israeli army sent three battalions of soldiers—a significant military operation. Those battalions were part of a larger-than-usual Israeli military deployment in the West Bank, where Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and settler attacks on Palestinians, had steadily escalated in recent months.
Three mornings after the pilgrimage, Hamas terrorists poured across the border between Gaza and Israel and committed atrocities that I can no longer bear to describe, and that will remain in my nightmares. According to first reports, some troops that would normally have defended that border were in the West Bank.
I mention the incident in Nablus precisely because the West Bank is almost absent from the daily horrifying news in my corner of the world. The media’s klieg lights point elsewhere. The war ignited by Hamas is taking place in Gaza, with a simmering second front on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
Israeli settlements are likewise absent from the war narrative. After all, Israel evacuated its settlers from Gaza in 2005. For some Israelis, indeed, this war is proof that the evacuation was a mistake—one that should not be repeated in the West Bank.
And yet, the West Bank settlement enterprise played multiple roles in creating the current crisis, and one critical implication of the war is that the settlements are a security burden that Israel cannot afford.
Let’s go back to the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza—the Disengagement, as then-prime minister Ariel Sharon named it. Over his military and political career, Sharon had promoted settlement as a strategic tool to prevent Israeli withdrawal and a Palestinian state; he had personally drawn the map of settlements in occupied territory. So his decision to dismantle those in Gaza stunned the country.
But leaving Gaza was a general’s choice to pull back on one front to save the majority of his forces. As Sharon’s close aide Dov Weissglas described his thinking, the Disengagement was intended as a “bottle of formaldehyde” in which then-President George W. Bush’s diplomatic push for negotiations with the Palestinians could be kept lifeless and inert. Diplomacy, Sharon correctly foresaw, could lead to an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. He preferred to leave Gaza unilaterally, while holding the West Bank and its settlements.
The existence of two separate Palestinian governments became a crucial impediment to peace diplomacy.
Pulling out without a peace agreement, without international forces in place, and without measures to strengthen the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) rule meant, however, that Sharon’s government “threw the keys over the fence,” as Israelis said at the time. Two years later, Hamas exploited the PA’s political weakness and seized control of Gaza. In any rational analysis, this was a disaster for Israel. Hamas, a terror organization opposed to Israel’s existence, now had a much freer hand to launch attacks against Israel.
The existence of two separate Palestinian governments—the PA in autonomous areas of the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—also became a crucial impediment to peace diplomacy, for even if Israel were to reach an agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-led government in Ramallah, it would not include Gaza—and would not end the conflict.
For just that reason, Benjamin Netanyahu chose to treat the Palestinian split as advantageous. Netanyahu returned to the prime minister’s office in 2009 after a ten-year hiatus and has ruled almost continuously since. Despite public zigzagging, Netanyahu’s overarching goal has been to keep the West Bank under Israeli rule. The Palestinian split served that goal. Alongside repeated rounds of fighting with Hamas, Netanyahu has allowed the organization to develop its unrecognized mini-state in Gaza. The 2011 deal in which Israel released over 1,000 prisoners for one soldier held by Hamas fit that pattern. So did the later policy of letting Qatar fund the Hamas regime. As ex-general and leading Israeli strategic analyst Shlomo Brom recently wrote, Netanyahu “replaced the political process with a strategy of ‘divide-and-conquer.’”
Meanwhile, settlements have continued to grow. They’ve been particularly a priority for Netanyahu’s current and most hawkish government, in which ultranationalist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich—himself a settler—also has responsibility within the Defense Ministry for settlements. Another sign of government priorities: The Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which oversees military policy, is controlled by the governing coalition. Before the war, according to the official listing of its agenda, the full panel hadn’t held one meeting this year on the army’s readiness for an attack from Gaza. (The minutes of one meeting are classified, leaving a slim chance it was about Gaza.) Multiple meetings were devoted, however, to settlements and security on the roads between them.
In the West Bank, the rising violence—by Palestinians and by settlers—reportedly led to the Israeli army increasing its troop strength to as much as twice the normal level in the months before the October 7 Hamas attack. When the war began, units that normally would be on the Gaza border were reportedly deployed in the West Bank. The army now claims that the extra units in the West Bank weren’t pulled from the Gaza border, but from training courses. If so, that’s a less direct, but still significant way in which protecting settlements left the army less prepared for war.
To that I’d add: Even in quieter times, soldiers in highly trained units critical to security have told me of being sent to rotating duty guarding small West Bank settlements, including tiny outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law.
Since the war began, clashes in the West Bank have only increased. Israel has called up massive numbers of reservists. Many of the reserve units have reportedly been sent to the West Bank, so that regular army units can be shifted to the Gaza front.
Add it up: Contrary to an old Israeli myth, settlements don’t contribute to the country’s security. The opposite is true: They are a drain on the military in normal times, and all the more so in wartime. Even if one were to accept the supposition that Israel has no peace partner and must hold the West Bank militarily purely for defensive reasons, even that purpose is undercut by settling Israelis there. Purely for defensive purposes, the wise policy would be to stop settlement construction and to start encouraging settlers to move back inside of Israel.
But the larger strategic reality is that Netanyahu has aimed at making sure that Israel doesn’t have a peace partner. His claim, in essence, has been that Israel can continue the settlement project and manage the conflict, rather than seek a peaceful resolution. That claim collapsed in horror on October 7. Some 1,300 Israelis—there is no final number yet—were killed that day, most of them civilians. The war that Hamas ignited that day continues to claim Israeli lives and ever more Palestinian lives.
It would be absurd to try to report the future—to predict how this war will continue or how it will end. If, in the most optimistic scenario, it leads to renewed diplomacy, the West Bank will be as important as Gaza, and Israel will finally have to accept that a secure future does not include settlements.
