Four reasons why Israelâs ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is being accepted by the world
Earlier this week, while Israeli warplanes were resuming their carpet bombing campaign in Gaza, Israel also expanded its offensive on the West Bank, this time reaching the al-Ain refugee camp west of Nablus. Israeli forces entered the camp in the early hours of Wednesday morning when an undercover Israeli force opened fire on a vehicle, killing its driver, Odai Qatouni, and confiscated his body.
Israeli forces took over several houses and used them as military positions for 14 hours, forcing some 10 Palestinian families to leave their homes. Ameer Said, 32, a resident of al-Ain camp, told the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam that Israeli soldiers entered the three-story building where he lives and forced all 20 residents to leave. According to Said, Israeli soldiers didnât allow him or his family and neighbors any time to take their belongings.
The Nablus director for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Ameed Ahmad, said that the Red Crescent crews evacuated several ill Palestinians, including multiple dialysis patients and a newborn baby who were taking shelter in the campâs mosque during the raid. Eventually, Israeli forces withdrew from al-Ain after arresting 30 Palestinians and dropping leaflets threatening residents with the same fate as the refugee camps of Jenin and Tulkarem if they âallowâ Palestinian militants to operate in the camp. According to local testimonies reported by Palestinian media, the displaced families returned to their homes following the Israeli armyâs withdrawal. Contrary to Jenin and Tulkarem, there is no known Palestinian resistance group in al-Ain refugee camp like the Jenin Brigade or the Tulkarem Brigade.
Meanwhile, in Jenin, the Israeli army published a map highlighting up to 100 houses set to be demolished in the refugee camp. Displaced Palestinians began to file requests to the Israeli army through the Jenin campâs Popular Services Committee to be permitted to return to their homes one last time and recover what they can of their belongings. Some 95% of residents have been forced out of the camp, with around 18,000 Palestinians from the camp being housed in several shelters and private apartments in Jenin City, according to the Jenin governorate.
Only three months ago, nobody anticipated that soon 40,000 Palestinians would be displaced from their homes with no return in sight. Even more unexpected was Israelâs continued widening of its campaign to new parts of the West Bank. But what was the least expected of all was that it would happen with little or no reaction â locally, regionally, and internationally.
Only three months ago, as Israel was negotiating the last details of the ceasefire deal in Gaza, nobody anticipated that soon 40,000 Palestinians would be displaced from their homes with no return in sight. Even more unexpected was Israelâs continued widening of its campaign to new parts of the West Bank, with threats of engulfing the entire territory. But what was the least expected of all was that it would happen with little or no reaction â locally, regionally, and internationally.
When U.S. President Donald Trump said that the U.S. planned to âownâ Gaza, expel its population, and build a Middle East âRivieraâ on top of their destroyed homes, the uproar was unanimous. The Arab states to which Trump suggested Gazans would be shipped off, unequivocally opposed the plan. European states, including Germany, who, throughout the 15 months of genocide, backed Israelâs actions every step of the way, rejected Trumpâs proposal outright.
Yet, when Israel began to do the exact same thing in the West Bank, the reaction was and continues to be terrifyingly modest. The effect is that Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has become normalized to the point that it is now accepted as commonplace.
But the normalization of an ethnic cleansing operation taken out of an eighteenth-century playbook is perfectly explicable â and for the following reasons:
I. The world has already accepted the ongoing Nakba
The world has already normalized the continuous state of displacement that the Palestinian people have experienced since 1948 â continuous because the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes 76 years ago continue to be banned from returning for no reason other than the fact that they do not fit within Israelâs ethnic supremacist makeup. Yet the world decided to reconcile with this fact and admit it as an exception to the post-WWII global order, which was ostensibly built on human rights and international law. There should be no expectation that this same world would have opposed ethnic cleansing in the 21st centuryâs third decade.
II. The world has already accepted slow-motion ethnic cleansing
This is not a new wave of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, but only an intensification of the same process that has been ongoing since 1967. The very first thing that Israel did in east Jerusalem after occupying it that year was to give all Palestinians in the eastern part of the city, and before the first Israeli settler arrived, âpermanent residentsâ status. With the stroke of a pen, Israel, under a âleftistâ labor government turned thousands of families who had been living in Jerusalem for centuries into foreigners under Israeli law. During 57 years of occupation, Israel revoked the residency rights of 14,000 Jerusalemites, cutting them and their descendantsâ existence off from Jerusalemâs present and future.
In 1979, Israelâs minister of agriculture at the time, Ariel Sharon, met with the World Zionist Organizationâs settlement committee. According to the classified meeting minutes, published by +972 Magazine in 2022, Sharon told the settlement committee representatives that the purpose of creating âfiring zonesâ in the West Bank was to create âreserve landâ for settlement expansion. The following year, Israel declared the South Hebron Hills, including the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, a âfiring zone.â
Masafer Yatta was one of many firing zones created by Israel in the West Bank in the past five decades, along with ânatural reserves.â All of these areas were included in Area C under the Oslo Accords, comprising 62% of the West Bank. Palestinians arenât allowed to build in these areas, receive services, or enjoy any kind of autonomy. It is also in these areas that settlements have expanded, cutting up Palestinian lands and urban areas into isolated ghettoes.
All this happened as the international community stood idle and watched. Israel was celebrated as a democracy, a start-up nation, a Eurovision star, and a miracle of Western modernity in the heart of a backward Middle East. All that time, it was gradually enacting its ethnic cleansing campaign.
III. Genocide is the new normal
The displacement of Palestinians was already normalized in Gaza after October 7, anything that happened in the West Bank paled in comparison. In December 2023, Israeli settler groups organized a conference in Jerusalem to call for the resettlement of Gaza by Israelis. The conference was attended by Israelâs National Security Minister and key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Again, the international reaction was anemic.
In the last two months before the ceasefire deal in Gaza was reached, the Israeli army threw all its weight behind a plan drafted by retired Israeli generals to empty the north of the strip of Palestinians through siege, starvation, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and bombardment. It was called âthe Generalsâ Plan.â
At the same time, settler groups demonstrated at the Gaza border fence demanding to be allowed to go in and resettle. No real pressure was put on Israel to halt the Generalsâ Plan, and the Biden administration continued to support Israel through it all. The only reason the plan failed is that, after the ceasefire, Palestinians who were driven out of the north of Gaza returned in a historic march and insisted on staying to live amid the rubble of their destroyed homes. They sent a spontaneous and powerful message to the world that nothing in the Israeli âvoluntary emigrationâ vision is voluntary.
When the U.S. president endorsed the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, he made it impossible to claim that displacement was a result of âcollateral damageâ or a byproduct of war, as Israel claimed regarding the ethnic cleansing of 1948. The ethnic cleansing project officially became an American project, and by extension, a Western one. Arab states, especially Egypt and Jordan, didnât want to be associated with such a crime and knew all too well that a new influx of Palestinian refugees to their countries would destabilize them in ways they wouldnât be able to control.
IV. Half of the Palestinian political leadership tied itself to a world that does not care
The Palestinian leadership â the PLO and the Palestinian Authority â placed all their trust in the international community, the international legal system, and the Westâs goodwill to implement the two-state solution. They hoped that, at some point, the world would put a limit to Israelâs practices. Palestinian leaders gave away all their leverage to qualify as acceptable to international sponsors, on which their entire political existence now depends. The only way they have left to face the current reality is to issue desperate warnings, condemnations, and reminders of signed agreements, with halfhearted appeals to the universality of human rights principles.
The liberal order is indifferent, but another world is being born
The liberal post-WWII order showed that it is unequal to the task of preventing genocide and ethnic cleansing, especially not when it is practiced by the West or its client states. But as people have come to realize this worldâs indifference, a new is now coming into being.
For the longest time, that world was ignorant of the nature of Israelâs settler colonial project, as international public opinion was shielded from the reality imposed on the Palestinian people. An entire generation grew up in this world after the Nakba, yet knew very little of it or about Palestine, and it was also sold on the universal values of the liberal world order. But the Gaza genocide changed everything, breaking down the wall of obfuscation and exposing Israel as a pariah state.
Most of the realities described above might today seem familiar to readers; they werenât twenty years ago. Just as the mass expulsion of Jenin and Tulkarem and Jabalia and Beit Hanoun was unimaginable before October 2023, the global reaction by regular people was equally unprecedented. Global ignorance has been a key component of Israelâs impunity, and that impunity is now under assault.
That is why the backlash against Palestine activism has been so draconian and brutal. From the deportation order of Mahmoud Khalil to the federal assault on institutions of higher learning that are already bending over backwards to appease the Trump administration.
But it is a lost cause because when there is knowledge, it is impossible to go back to ignorance. The world knows too much as of now, and no repressive policy can reverse it. It doesnât mean that this will lead to the victory of the new world that is being born, and which is led by people of conscience, but it is in them that we must place our hope. The future must belong to them.
Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.
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