The Israeli raid in Jenin is over for now. Tanks, bulldozers, armoured cars and the hundreds of troops have withdrawn. The drones and helicopters have drawn back, as the battered West Bank city begins to bury its 12 dead and tend to the dozens of injured. One of the Israeli army’s biggest operations in the occupied territories may be over, but Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed that they would be back: “I can say that our extensive activity in Jenin is not a one-time operation.”
But to what end? Although Israeli officials say that more than 50 shooting attacks on Israelis have emanated from Jenin this year, it is hard not to see the operation as purely punishment. It is not an effective countermeasure.
And Israel does not need to demonstrate its overwhelming superiority in arms. Its depletion of the fighting capacity of Palestinians is at best marginal and temporary – 30 militants arrested, explosives and weapons found, “terrorist hubs” blown up.
Every single such bloody incursion, moreover, simply feeds the flames, driving more hopeless young men into the militias to take the place of the fallen. Another generation is blooded in the national narrative of permanent war, of intifada.
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Attacks on civilians and their infrastructure are breaches of the rules of war, as even US allies have reminded Israel. Homes ransacked and destroyed. Infrastructure too: the water and electricity cut. Food supplies disrupted. More than 3,000 refugees moving from their own miserable refugee camp where 14,000 people lived in less than half a square kilometre. Hospitals not even safe sanctuary from gas and bullets.
The violence continues. As the troops leave, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired five rockets toward Israel in the early hours of Wednesday. Nine Israelis were wounded on Tuesday in an attack in Tel Aviv.
And what we are seeing is not a “necessary” step towards peace but a further turn downwards of a deadly descent into further mayhem, driven by the most extreme nationalist government that Israel has yet seen.
The peace process is long dead, with not the slightest glimmer of hope for any resumption, further mass illegal settlement expansion is getting the go-ahead, settler violence against Palestinians is escalating. The only possible counterweight, the Palestinian Authority, has crumbled into total ineffectiveness.
Netanyahu has once again demonstrated that he is unable to resist pressure from far-right settlers such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. But where to now? Just more of the same. Yet, to many Palestinians, Jenin, in the hilly north of the West Bank, is a heroic symbol of resilience and resistance against Israeli rule.