By Raja Khalidi and Mushtaq Khan
Abstract: As part of the deals made within the Israeli Cabinet to accept the ceasefire, overriding the objections and resignation of one of the most extreme coalition members Itamar Ben Gvir, the government agreed to add a new war objective to those previously established for the Gaza Strip. This entailed a “shift in security concept and a campaign to eradicate terrorism” and to “protect the settlements and settlers” in the West Bank, as proclaimed with confidence by Minister of Finance (and deputy Minister of Defense) Belzalel Smotrich. But it would be a big mistake to assume that the lesson Israel learnt was that the Smotrich’s Zionism should be abandoned. Rather, Israel responded with even more aggressive strategies to maintain differential rights, including population displacement and making much of Gaza unlivable. For Smotrich and his brand of Zionism, a genocidal campaign is the only option. Palestinians have to develop their own strategies to undermine the legitimacy and feasibility of Israeli strategies of maintaining differential rights, either through asymmetric containment or ethnic cleansing.
Just as Palestinians began to welcome the Gaza ceasefire which took effect on 19 January, hoping for some respite after 15 traumatic months of war and upheaval, they were reminded of the broader struggle with Israeli occupation in the West Bank. As part of the deals made within the Israeli Cabinet to accept the ceasefire, overriding the objections and resignation of one of the most extreme coalition members Itamar Ben Gvir, the government agreed to add a new war objective to those previously established for the Gaza Strip. This entailed a “shift in security concept and a campaign to eradicate terrorism” and to “protect the settlements and settlers” in the West Bank, as proclaimed with confidence by Minister of Finance (and deputy Minister of Defense) Belzalel Smotrich. His Religious Nationalist party did not withdraw from the Government, apparently to retain some influence in the period leading up to the planned second stage of the ceasefire agreement, and to scuttle it if he can. Both the West Bank and Gaza demonstrate a seismic shift in the strategies of neo-Zionism, from a long period of successful ‘asymmetric containment’ to a much more violent attempt at population transfer.
The West Bank War Arena
From the day the ceasefire took effect, the situation on the ground in the West Bank has been dramatically shaken up by this shift in Israeli war policy. Certainly, the situation was already tense and fraught with violence throughout the territory. Close to 1000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers since October 7, and over 5000 imprisoned, and Israeli forces have laid waste to Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps. By the end of 2024, Israeli roadblocks and gates between Palestinian localities had grown from 550 to over 700 as the Gaza war took hold, and some 870 by the end of 2024. The West Bank economy took a hit of close to 30% of its GDP over the past year, with unemployment doubling and over a third of its workforce currently unemployed.
In the first two weeks since the ceasefire, 20 new roadblocks and gates were installed and intrusive inspection at checkpoints intensified and regulated according to peak traffic times. Travel between cities and villages has become almost impossible for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as part of a policy that Israel says will remain in effect for at least the 6-week duration of the first phase of the ceasefire. Coordinated settler attacks against Palestinian homes, cars, and businesses in isolated villages have continued as the Israeli military stands by. Meanwhile, ten Israeli battalions have redeployed from Gaza to the West Bank and a major military operation began on 20 January against Jenin camp, with the goal of eradicating resistance cells still operating there and leveling the camp in the process.
Ensuring the ceasefire agreement apparently involved significant Israeli political horse-trading in the way of promises, commitments, or deceptions between the coalition members. Regardless, Israel is now bound to the terms it signed on Gaza and cannot afford to alienate a new, explicitly sympathetic US administration on that count. The usual rabble rousing voices of both Smotrich and Ben Gvir have been notably quiet for the past two weeks. Israeli politicians are banking on US support for Israeli annexation steps in what some US officials also believe is biblical Judea and Samaria (part of the “Land of Israel”), and neither an “occupied” nor “Palestinian” territory, as the West Bank is internationally defined. However much Trump has surrounded himself with pro-settler appointees, explicit US policy parameters towards the West Bank have yet to be formalized. So Israel may still see a window for action to broaden the scope of "total victory” and perhaps advance towards one goal while not necessarily achieving others.
The Trumpian appetite for renaming (or acquiring) regions or states according to different terms than those globally accepted has already been humorously noted by Danes, Mexicans, Canadians and Panamanians, so Palestinians in turn can only smirk. But trying to redefine the parameters of what is at stake for Palestinians in the West Bank according to messianic Jewish and evangelical Christian conceptions of reality, truth, and justice is likely to be as successful as Israel was in achieving the hollow and what now hardly appears as the “total victory” it sought in Gaza for 15 months of war.
Indeed just when Israel seems to have responded to public pressure to enable the release of the hostages and delayed international opprobrium for the terrible outcomes of the war on Gaza, it has opened up a new front in the West Bank that risks spiraling into a Gaza-like cycle of destruction and armed resistance, beginning in Jenin. Israeli Defense Minister Katz claims that the new policy in the West Bank aims at “ensuring that terrorism does not return to the camp after the operation is over – the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.” Speaking from the ruins of Jenin camp, where Israel has expelled 20,000 residents and demolished close to 100 homes in ten days, Katz this week promised to remain in Jenin and take the fight to other “terrorist camps.”
This is hardly a credible lesson considering the reassertion of Hamas military control above ground in Gaza in the past weeks. So, beyond the crude calculations of how to assure Netanyahu’s political survival or how the settler bloc can make the best out of its spell in Government, how should we understand the new Israeli war goals in the West Bank? Is there a prospect for a West Bank ceasefire as well?
Enter Smotrich Stage Left
Belzalel Smotrich is the firebrand leader of the influential settlement lobby in the Israeli government pushing for dejure annexation, through extending Israeli sovereignty into areas of the West Bank that it had never accepted was occupied but rather “disputed.” Indeed, his political career and raison d’etre is explicitly dedicated to forcibly expanding the settlement enterprise throughout the West Bank, and not only in Area C that Israel controls by virtue of the Oslo accords and already has settled with over 500,000 Israeli Jews (in addition to the 350,000 settlers in east Jerusalem). This doctrine has been on display in his Gaza war policy demands, supporting genocidal actions such as ethnic cleansing, politely labelled as “voluntary re-location.” No less compromising has been his determination to prevent Palestinian statehood or national governance through recurrent poaching of Palestinian Authority finances and encroaching on its already restricted jurisdiction in the 40% of the West Bank (and over 100% of its Palestinian population).
Smotrich may be viewed internationally as an extremist seized by a messianic impulse based on a biblical political ideology, as an exception to the rule of a liberal and democratic Israel. But in Israel he and his allies have largely succeeded in mainstreaming his brand of Zionism into Israeli strategic and military doctrine, promoting a dehumanization of Palestinians in public discourse and reasserting the ugly face of a militaristic and expansionist Israel. This was a process that began well before 2023 and was accelerated and normalized since, as Israelis reeled from the shocks of October 7th. Public opinion was ripe for an exaggerated narrative of an existential threat to the Jewish people that could only be defeated through means and on a scale never before deployed.
It may yet take some time for Israelis to realize that the destruction of Gaza and the reduction of the immediate threat posed by Hamas to Israel has only reaped a transition to yet another stage in their long war with the Palestinian people. It regrettably may take even longer for it to sink in that the Israelis’ national project as framed by Smotrich poses an existential threat to that of Palestine. Some in Israel are already aware that leaving their state’s future to the mercy of adventurous ideologues like Smotrich will only accelerate Israel’s internal deterioration and the collapse of its international legitimacy. But understanding Smotrich as an exceptional, transitory phenomenon in Israeli politics, which traditionally saw swings between right and left, misses the point. This is a man with a mission he has been working on for years, which saw its first roll-out under fire in Gaza and appears poised for a new trial in the West Bank. For Smotrich and his brand of Zionism, a genocidal campaign is the only option, a conclusion that even the liberal Zionist historian Benny Morris has reached.
Since 2017, Smotrich has been advocating for his “Decisive Plan” to annex the West Bank and impose Jewish sovereignty there, and the war since October 2023 has provided ample opportunity for him to make clear his concept of the State of Israel. In Smotrich’s words: “the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel... will be realized via a political-legal act of imposing sovereignty on all Judea and Samaria, and with concurrent acts of settlement: the establishment of cities and towns.” The Plan spells out the conditions that Religious Zionism places on Palestinians who wish to live in their homeland, painting a dystopian scenario given Smotrich’s meteoric rise since first floating his once-fringe ideas. After the Palestinians have abandoned their national aspirations, they have three options: a) they can accept their status as subjects under Israel’s control, denied citizenship and ruling themselves at a regional, sub-national level; b) they may “voluntarily relocate” to other countries, with Israeli funding and facilities; c) otherwise, any who choose to resist will be dealt with as necessary by the IDF.
If indeed the war was viewed by the Smotrich bloc as a chance to implement the Decisive Plan phases simultaneously, 15 months later none of its three pillars have been achieved. Hamas and Gazans certainly did not accept their status as a permanently besieged people at Israel’s mercy. To the contrary, October 7th was precisely a massive prison break repudiating any acceptance of such terms. The fears and real risks that during the worst battles of the war Palestinians would be forcibly or spontaneously moved en masse to North Sinai were also dashed against an Egyptian and Arab refusal to engage with such designs. Even as the US President insists that Egypt and Jordan will go along with his own version of ethnic cleansing (“they will do it, OK?”), resistance to the idea is widening throughout the Arab world. Finally, despite the IDF bringing all it had to bear against armed resistance in Gaza, it was incurring painful casualties until the last days before the ceasefire in a guerrilla war that its military experts have acknowledged was turning into Israel’s Vietnam.
The end of Israeli asymmetric containment
So the grim first conclusion is that it’s only reasonable for Palestinians to expect that the new Israeli war goals and operations in the West Bank are coherent with the settler movement’s goals and strategies, the Smotrich plan, as well as the new “Jabalya Doctrine” of total urban destruction. It is clear that Israel no longer sees asymmetric containment as a viable strategy either in the West Bank or Gaza. That only leaves it with a strategy of ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. But even with Trump’s support, this is a desperate strategy. Israel can kill many Palestinians, but it is still very unlikely that it can achieve depopulation on a scale that will solve the problem of maintaining neo-Zionism.
The full implications of the cataclysmic events following October 7th will only be clear years from now. But it is already clear that business as usual, the status quo of asymmetric containment is over. The astonishing violence of the Israeli response was not just intended to demonstrate Israel’s capability of inflicting massively disproportionate pain as a deterrence. It went much beyond that. Israel has been forced into its last remaining strategy: ethnic cleansing. To understand this, we have to go back to why the two-state solution failed. The Palestinians and many in the international community believed since Oslo that Israel’s goal was to achieve a stable Jewish-majority state that was universally recognized, and to end the conflict. If so, Israel should have rushed to implement a two-state solution. If, however, the fundamental Israeli objective as defined by Smotrich and others is to enforce differential rights, the two-state solution not only fails to ensure that, but in fact it ensures the opposite.
Not surprisingly, after Oslo Israel did not push for the two-state solution and instead used Oslo to maintain a new strategy of “asymmetric containment” or a political settlement based on the use of power and resources to preserve a relatively stable system of differential rights. Palestinians were deprived of meaningful political rights; they suffered severely restricted freedom of movement within their own territories and even more restricted rights to travel abroad. The economy of the occupied territories, including currency and taxes, remained under Israeli control. Effectively, a one-state reality of apartheid developed across Palestine, a system that operated at different levels of intensity and in different legal and security regimes within Israel and in the occupied territories, and between Gaza and the West Bank.
This was the world in which the 7th of October erupted, in a real flood that disrupted the political settlement based on asymmetric containment in several really important ways. Firstly, it demonstrated that mowing the grass was not guaranteed to work. With new technologies of warfare, which includes drones and missiles, effective weapons can now be constructed in small factories or underground, a localized military-industrial complex. This happened in Gaza, and in Lebanon with Hezbollah. This was an unprecedented shock for the Israeli polity that its strategy of maintaining the status quo had totally failed. Israel understands that even if it has demolished Gaza and killed between 70-120 thousand Palestinians, and Hezbollah appears defeated, there is no guarantee that in a few years, even more lethal weapons will not be constructed, and even more successful drones will not emerge. But it would be a big mistake to assume that the lesson Israel learnt was that the Smotrich’s Zionism should be abandoned. Rather, Israel responded with even more aggressive strategies to maintain differential rights, including population displacement and making much of Gaza unlivable.
If asymmetric containment is not a viable long-term strategy, and if this radical “neo-Zionism” requirement for differential rights championed by Smotrich will not be abandoned, the only other political settlement that remains for Israel is one of ethnic cleansing. This was not just the strategy for Gaza, and many politicians openly support settler violence and population transfers from the West Bank. Smotrich rashly suggested in the last days of the war, that "Al Funduk, Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabalia.”
We are therefore seeing the end of the first phase of the Israeli strategy based on asymmetric containment. It is a type of turning point that Churchill once described as the end of the beginning, talking about the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. Churchill had the strategic genius to see that while the phase of blitzkrieg was over, it was by no means the case that the Germans would lose every battle from then on. It was not the beginning of the end. But it was the end of the beginning. The phase of rapid advances was over, and very gradually German military and strategic weaknesses were exploited by the allies.
It is a similar end of the beginning in Palestine: the asymmetric containment strategy that Israel pursued since Oslo is over. Israel cannot continue with that strategy because the Palestinians have shown they can break out of containment. Israel has understood the implications if no one else has. Even if breakouts like October 7th are occasional, they are too costly for Israel and could become more so. Israel has therefore adopted a much more intensely violent strategy to maintain its differential rights. The last remaining strategy is to create the conditions for depopulation.
Nothing has changed that should make us believe that Israel has abandoned its commitment to differential rights. Without that, a political settlement based on a territorial compromise, such as the two-state solution, is not going to happen. Moreover, imagining that Israel might revert to the relatively more benign asymmetric containment phase will simply give it time to further advance the conditions that it thinks will lead to an exodus.
A ceasefire may be sustained. But if Israel’s government and people continue to conclude that their only strategy is Smotrich’s formula of “submission, expulsion or repression,” it is likely to use a pause to look for new opportunities to achieve its goal in the West Bank, if not force a breakdown of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Palestinians have to develop their own strategies to undermine the legitimacy and feasibility of Israeli strategies of maintaining differential rights, either through asymmetric containment or ethnic cleansing. Israel can unleash untold violence in the short to medium term, but its goals are unsustainable if Palestinians and people across the world reject differential rights in all its forms. Reasonable people worldwide can only hope that the wild ideas and unbridled narcissism of Donald Trump do not tempt Israel to try and implement extremist visions that have devastating consequences for everyone in the region including Israel.
Raja Khalidi is Director-General of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS)
Mushtaq Khan, Professor of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
