Israel is Fighting to Prevent a Third Intifada

T. Belman. It is not enough for Israel to knock down the terrorists but it must also give them a drubbing they will never recover from. Our response should not be to restore calm but to kill all hope in the leadership and the terrorists they support, of ever succeeding.

Palestinian terrorists target buses, cafes, and nightclubs – leaving a scar on the Israeli psyche.

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On Tuesday Israeli forces killed five Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank including Wadee al-Houh, leader of a new terror group, the Lion’s Den. The battle was part of Operation Breakwater, the biggest IDF operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. The sustained violence and mounting Palestinian casualties have some media outlets to speculating that Israel may be on the verge of a third intifada.

Those, like myself, who lived in Israel during the Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000-2005, remember the fear of riding buses and gathering in public places. The most infamous of the Second Intifada terror attacks was a suicide bombing at a Passover dinner in Netanya, which killed 30 and injured 140. During the early 2000s, Palestinian terrorists targeted buses, cafes, and nightclubs, ultimately killing over a thousand Israelis and leaving a scar on the Israeli psyche.

Israel is fighting to prevent the violence in the West Bank from boiling over into another intifada that will paralyze Israel like intifadas past. Breakwater has involved a sustained campaign of nearly nightly raids into the West Bank, and more than 2,000 arrests since the launch of the operation in the spring. A senior Israeli security official recently told me that the goal of Breakwater is to remove the most dangerous players from the equation as part of a robust containment strategy.

Since the launch of the operation, Israel’s major cities have remained mostly insulated from the violence, largely due to the IDF’s aggressive containment strategy in the West Bank and Israel’s improved security posture. While the violence continues to spiral in the West Bank, where the number of shooting attacks has spiked this year and is rising significantly on a monthly basis, things have remained relatively quiet inside the Green Line.

Israeli populations centers are protected by the security barrier it began constructing at the height of the second intifada, which serves as a line of physical defense between Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank and Israelis inside the barrier. In the early 2000s, the number of suicide attacks fell sharply when critical sections of the barrier were erected.

New technological advances have also made Israelis safer. The IDF recently confirmed that it is preparing to operate armed drones in counterterror operations in the West Bank, taking the place of boots on the ground.

There may be less foreign support for another round of violence. The second intifada was fueled both rhetorically and financially by Sunni Gulf states. Thanks to the new regional alliances embodied in the Abraham Accords, a future intifada would probably receive little or no support from traditional Sunni champions. Shiite Iran, on the other hand, will continue to finance, incite, and champion Palestinian terror through its proxies.

Israel’s Arab population is a wild card in this equation. Iran is arming Israeli Arabs in the hopes that they will form a fifth column against the Jewish State. Two of the terrorists who murdered Israelis earlier this year were ISIS-inspired Israeli Arabs. During the 2021 IDF conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Arabs took to the streets and violence flared between Arab and Jewish mobs in cities like Ramle, Lod, and Acre. These are troubling indicators; however, it is far from clear if the resistance narrative will galvanize Israel’s diverse Arab communities, the vast majority of whom enjoy full rights in Israel and participate in every aspect of Israel’s democracy.

Israel must continue to do everything in its power to deter another full-blown intifada. U.S. and Israeli regional allies have an important role to play by maintaining steadfast support for Israel’s right to proactively root out terrorist threats and by continuing to deny Iran sanctions relief that ultimately arms and emboldens Iranian proxies in the West Bank. Invested parties should remind Palestinians that a third intifada would play out east of the Green Line, would not receive previous levels of support from moderate Sunni regimes, and would be a losing proposition for the Palestinian people.

Enia Krivine is the senior director of the Israel Program and the National Security Network at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

October 30, 2022 | 4 Comments »
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  2. And it’s not enough to demolish homes they can just rebuild. Apply eminent domain to the land on which those homes are built and award that land to the families of their Jewish victims or the JNF. Let them know that every terror attack will cost them land, one plot at a time.

    And this plan of the late Professor Stephen Plaut still seems to me to be the most practical (whether or not Mudhar Zahran comes to power and the Jordan Option can be implemented.)

    …The “Palestinian declaration of statehood” must be dealt with by means of a unilateral Israeli settlement imposed on the West Bank and de-nazification of the local population.

    The principles upon which such a unilateral Israeli concordance and resolution must be founded are these:

    1. The West Bank belongs to Israel and is Israeli in all ways. No non-Israeli sovereignty of any form will be permitted in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The West Bank is part of the Jewish national homeland, always was, and always will be.

    2. “Palestinian” Arabs living in the West Bank will not receive Israeli citizenship and will not vote in Israeli national elections.

    3. The land and resources in the West Bank will remain under Israeli supervision, control, and regulation.

    4. “Palestinians” who do not wish to live under Israeli sovereignty will be free to leave. Israel may consider providing financial support, property compensation, or incentives for those so wishing to leave.

    5. Most “Palestinians” choosing to remain in the West Bank will live in reservations, in some ways resembling Native-American-Indian territories that function inside the United States (possibly even including casinos), although in some ways they will differ. Reservations will be operated in those parts of the West Bank that have large concentrations of Arab population, meaning Jericho, Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, Tul Karem, and a few other areas. Reservations will NOT have territorial contiguity. In each reservation, the “Palestinians” will be permitted autonomy and limited self-rule to manage their own local affairs as long as violence is completely absent from the reservation. Where violence is present, they will be denied autonomy. Reservations from which terrorism arises may be shut down and their populations dispersed. Arabs engaging in or supporting terrorism in any way will be deported.

    6. “Palestinians” in the West Bank will be considered to be resident aliens within the Jewish state. Many still have Jordanian passports and citizenship and will be considered resident Jordanians. “Palestinians” who do not have Jordanian citizenship will be stateless unless they obtain citizenship from some other country.

    7. Jews will have the right to live anywhere they wish in the West Bank outside the reservations assigned to the “Palestinian” Arabs. The territory in the West Bank in which Arabs do not live or live sparsely, and this includes the Jordan Valley and the sparse areas in between the reservations, will be opened to unlimited Jewish settlement.

    The villages and towns with the Arab reservations will be assigned to two lists, a white list and a black list. Those in the white list will manage their own affairs without interference from the Israeli central authorities. Residents of white-list towns may hold commuter jobs in Israeli cities and industrial parks. The local authorities in the white areas will manage their schools and other local institutions. They will collect their own taxes and may benefit from revenue sharing arrangements with the Israeli fiscal authorities, like other Israeli towns. They might be allowed to operate their own local police forces. Residents in white-listed areas will be fully and freely mobile, able to move freely within and among all white-list areas. They will be allowed to develop local industry and tourist services. Their residents will have access to Israel universities, health facilities, and other services.

    Those towns and villages in the black list will enjoy none of the above. Their residents will be denied the opportunity to hold day jobs in Israeli cities and industrial parks. They will have no access to Israeli services. They will have control over nothing. Their residents will be prevented from moving freely outside their reservation, except in cases where they wish to leave the country altogether. They will receive no shared revenues, no fiscal incentives.

    Villages and towns will be assigned to the two lists based entirely on one single factor: violence. Areas in which violence occurs, and this includes rock throwing, will be assigned to the black list. Areas in which violence is absent will be assigned to the white list. Towns and villages will be reassigned to the black list from the white list when terrorism, sniping, mortars, rockets, or other forms of violence occur there. Towns and villages in the black list will be assigned to the white list only when the local population cooperates fully with Israel in apprehending and arresting the terrorists and those engaged in violence, and takes other effective actions to end the violence. Otherwise they will remain on the black list indefinitely. Entry into black list areas will be denied to foreigners, journalists, and especially to the “International Solidarity” anarchists and their ilk. Any such anarchist infiltrating the areas of the black list will be denied permission to leave them and will remain there indefinitely, or else will be imprisoned by Israel.

    This of course leaves the dilemma of the Gaza Strip. As noted, because of the Israeli folly of withdrawing from and abandoning its control over the Gaza Strip, the area is now nothing more than a large rocket-launching terrorist base. I happen to believe that, in the long run, Israel will have no choice but to re-impose its complete control over the Gaza Strip.

    But for the immediate future, an Israeli unilateral set of moves will be necessary here as well. Basically these must consist of a three-pronged assault against Gaza the very first time that a rocket is launched into Israel from that territory. In this assault, Israel will seize a strip of land several kilometers wide that will divide the Gaza Strip from Egypt and this will end the massive smuggling of weapons, explosives, drugs and other materials into Gaza. The other two prongs will split Gaza into three smaller segments. Israel will control movement of people and materials among these segments. It will arrest and shoot terrorists on the spot. And eventually it may impose the system of reservations and the white-black lists upon Gaza as well.

    This is how Israel should respond to the declaration of war by the “Palestinians” in their unilateral declaration of statehood.

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/time-annex-judea-and-samaria-steven-plaut/

    The only question is how Israel can best prepare to successfully weather the inevitable international sanctions the way Russia did under Putin.

  3. Well, if it were up to me, I would start by executing every Arab terrorist serving time for murder before breakfast tomorrow with temporary reprieves for useful informers and by creating a level playing field in Gaza and other terrorist enclaves, a kind of Dresden 1945 – style affirmative action, as it were. And I’d strip the judges of their authority in the matter.

  4. @Ted

    It is not enough for Israel to knock down the terrorists but it must also give them a drubbing they will never recover from.

    I entirely agree.

    The situation must be treated not as a police action, but as a military exercise. No tit for tat, but a response with enough resolve to demonstrate that this constant wave of rolling attacks will be overwhelmed, and return calm and security to the streets of Israel. These matters are not illegal actions, and they do not require a legal response after the fact. They are a security matter which needs to be dealt a significant and blinding blow, one which is capable of preventing these attacks before they occur, and, thus simultaneously return a sense of security to the people of Israel. Actually, doing so is long past over due.

    3