Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city. Proverbs 16: 32 (NIV)
In what is perhaps the most difficult year in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948, a predictable but particularly dreadful scenario has failed to materialize. While the violence exercised by the Israeli police and civil authorities in East Jerusalem, and by the military and settlers in the rest of the West Bank is intensive and widespread, Palestinians in East Jerusalem do not respond with escalation, and armed confrontations remain limited even in the rest of the West Bank.
There are incidents of stone-throwing at Israeli vehicles on West Bank roads, and Palestinian armed groups attack Israelis, and even manage to attract new recruits despite the activities of the army and Shin Bet. However, the Palestinian public, as a whole, refrains from uprising or even nonviolent protests.
In Israeli public and professional discourse, the prevalent approach is to refer to the Palestinian struggle against the occupation as “terrorism”, while branding its absence or weakening as bidna na‘ish (“we want to live”), meaning concession of freedoms and acceptance of life under Israeli control in exchange for purported economic benefits.
This article examines the choice made by the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023, not to rise against the increasing oppression by the Israeli settlers, military, and government. This choice, to which the Israeli public and professional discourse appears to be completely blind, is particularly surprising against the backdrop of the dramatic events of the past year.
Against the backdrop of Gaza’s destruction and Israel’s aspirations regarding the rest of Palestinian territories, this self-restraint bears special significance
These events include Hamas’s attack in southern Israel on October 7, which many in Israel were convinced would ignite copycat attacks by Palestinians elsewhere; Israel’s harsh and indiscriminate military response in Gaza, which could also have sparked a mass uprising in the Occupied Territories; the economic collapse in the West Bank following Israeli measures such as the revoking of work permits in Israel; and unrestrained attacks by settlers coupled with increasing oppression by Israeli authorities.
Why isn’t there a Wave of Uprising in the West Bank?
Given the Israeli obsession with Palestinian violence, it is amazing that no convincing explanation has been offered for the nonoccurrence of the taken-for-granted scenario of a third Intifada. The indifference with which we regard Palestinian sumud – steadfast resilience that does not involve violence – is tragic, because it demonstrates that Israel and Israeli society can only notice the Palestinians when they use violence.
The explanation I will offer for this striking phenomenon may trigger some Israeli and Palestinian sensitivities. Among other things, it conflicts with views that condone or even value the use of violence in the struggle for decolonization, frequently based on a common reading of Frantz Fanon. Such views expressed by pro-Palestinian Western circles lent legitimacy to the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, to the point of supporting them, which naturally horrified many Israelis.
Much has been written about the views of Palestinians in the West Bank regarding armed struggle and this atrocious attack in particular, but the analysis I propose shows how Palestinians in the Occupied Territories demonstrate through their actions the simplistic nature of the claim “decolonization is not a metaphor,” and practically do not go along with the idealization of the murderous manifestations of anticolonial violence. As an Israeli venturing to analyze Palestinian ways of resisting Israeli oppression, I can only hope to avoid some of the blind spots inherent to the colonial act.
It seems that the rightwing government is determined to push Palestinians in the West Bank to resistance, violent and nonviolent, thereby justifying an unprecedented Israeli response
The practical implication of the analysis presented below poses an enormous challenge for Israelis. In deliberately choosing to avoid uprising, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are creating an opportunity for all the inhabitants of this land. Realizing this opportunity, however, is threatened by the dominant forces in Israeli society and government, who advocate Jewish supremacy. Against the backdrop of Gaza’s destruction and Israel’s aspirations regarding the rest of Palestinian territories, this self-restraint bears special significance.
Although Palestinians act this way not out of consideration for Israelis or of any expectation of Israeli recognition, their choice of restraint places a heavy responsibility on Israeli society. Recognition by Israeli society is essential if we are to change course. The question remains whether we have enough forces within us that can understand this, and stop those who advocate Jewish supremacy and the violence it entails on the ground.
Another Broken Conception: The Escalation That Never Happened
The following description focuses on residents of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. Despite some differences between the regions (such as the fact that East Jerusalem residents do not require work permits and therefore do not experience forced unemployment), henceforth the term “West Bank” will be used to refer to East Jerusalem as well.
Hamas’s attack and the Israeli army’s debacle on October 7 shattered Israeli complacency and replaced it with a sense of vulnerability, existential threat, and fear of copycat attacks in which masses of Palestinians would raid Israeli neighborhoods in Jerusalem or settlements in the West Bank or across the Green Line. Although some used the disaster to stoke fear and launch an incitement campaign, these fears were authentic and not unfounded.
The last decade reveals that the spread of violence between Israelis and Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank is not a far-fetched scenario. The military campaign in May 2021 added to the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon the term “convergence of fronts,” meaning Hamas’s aspiration to have at least the Palestinians from all parts of the land join in the next confrontation.
Surprisingly, this scenario did not materialize after October 7, except for isolated actions by armed Palestinian groups in cities like Jenin and Tulkarm. Israeli discourse replaced the warning against the “convergence of fronts” with warnings against Iran’s “Ring of Fire,” as the government and its settler proxies kept trying to push West Bank residents into violent actions. However, reality refused to conform to the conception that escalation in the West Bank had to happen sooner or later.
The resulting budget deficit has forced the partial closure of schools, disruption of health services, and nonpayment of salaries of most public sector employees
To gain perspective on the degree to which the relative stability maintained east of the Green Line cannot be taken for granted, let us briefly describe Israel’s policy, which even its own military-security establishment has warned could lead to destabilization.
This policy has involved the killing of over 700 Palestinians (hundreds of whom were unarmed), a record number of detainees held in harsh conditions including torture, and a huge spike in house demolitions (over 4,500 in the West Bank according to UN data and a 60% increase in East Jerusalem according to Ir Amim data). Violence by settlers and the army has led to the expulsion of dozens of Palestinian communities and prevented the olive harvest in over 90,000 dunams (22,000 acres) of olive groves in 2023. Finally, Israeli violations of the status quo on Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque, which has consistently led to rapid deterioration in recent years, have been soaring with police encouragement.
Moreover, the revocation of work permits in Israel made about 120,000 workers from the West Bank unemployed overnight. Even the comprehensive review we have recently published in Hebrew about the revocation of work permits and its severe implications does not reflect the depth of economic distress of about half a million people, a quarter of the West Bank population, who for over a year have been forced into poverty. Beyond the direct impact on workers and their families, the Palestinian economy lost about NIS one billion each month (about 20% of the West Bank’s GNP) as a result of the permit revocations.
To this must be added Israeli government decisions, such as the freezing of transfers of tax money that Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority. The resulting budget deficit has forced the partial closure of schools, disruption of health services, and nonpayment of salaries of most public sector employees. All in all, this appears like a deliberate move to push the Palestinian Authority beyond the brink of collapse and create chaos in the West Bank.
This partial list of different forms of Israeli violence demonstrates how the West Bank has become a pressure cooker. Each of the measures described above could have led to loss of control, let alone their combination.
However, although it seems that the rightwing government is determined to push Palestinians in the West Bank to resistance, violent and nonviolent, thereby justifying an unprecedented Israeli response – be it ethnic cleansing or even mass killing as in Gaza – the anticipated Palestinian response is delayed.
This is despite repeated calls by Hamas for uprising in the West Bank and despite the fact that Palestinians in the West Bank are keenly aware of the disaster Israel is inflicting on their people and their relatives in Gaza. They grit their teeth, suppressing anger and vengefulness, responsibility and guilt.
Neither Deterrence nor Despair?
The right wing would be happy to claim that Palestinian restraint proves that the hardhanded policy works, that violent suppression deters, and that Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and their followers know how to “handle the enemy”. However, this claim has little basis.
First, the Palestinians have proven time and again – including in the last decade – that Israeli violence does not cause them to bow their heads, and like any Indigenous minority, they are willing to pay heavy and painful prices for defending, violently or not, what they hold dear. Moreover, on October 7, it was Israel that was in shock and awe, with its resources directed toward containing the collapse in the south and preparing to hold back a Hezbollah invasion in the north (another broken conception).
The next day, when Israeli vulnerability was exposed in such a harsh way for Israel, and such a tempting way for those who wish it harm, the Palestinians in the West Bank were far from deterred. Nevertheless, the scenarios of “storming the settlements” that many in Israel imagined completely failed to materialize.
Moreover, many of the suppression measures increasingly used by Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack – preventing prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, demolishing houses built without permits, and revoking work permits – lack a deterrent effect because they are not initiated in response to any Palestinian action.
There is little in the horizon for the young generation: the chance of being arrested is higher than the chance of finding work
Actually, a central goal of the endless harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank is not to instill fear that will thwart resistance, but rather the opposite: to provoke Palestinians to react to provide Israel with a pretext for ethnic cleansing and killing. This realization reveals the right wing’s boasting about deterrence as shamelessly cynical.
Another explanation that Israelis may offer for our conundrum is that Palestinians in the West Bank are desperate: the world is again turning its back on them, their present is gloomy, and their future might be similar to that of their Gazan counterparts.
Daily life is unbearable: traveling to a nearby city involves waiting hours at a military checkpoint, leaving the village for olive harvesting or any other need might result in an attack by armed settlers, and even those who stay home are not safe from arbitrary military raids in the dead of night. Persistent unemployment brings people to the breadline and leaves them in perpetual idleness that weighs on every hour of the day.
There is little in the horizon for the young generation: the chance of being arrested is higher than the chance of finding work, and parents have no future to offer their children. Many who need medical treatment cannot afford it, and even complaining is out of the question given that things are much worse in Gaza. Every conversation with Palestinian acquaintances reveals the weight of worry, distress, and frustration with the inability to stop the destruction and killing in Gaza.
When seeing these impressive creative, patient, and calculated ways of coping over the past year, one understands how much sumud is an endeavor of the spirit
However, looking at the Palestinian coping with the Israeli stranglehold also reveals their tremendous coping resources – mental, social and even spiritual. Parents continue to shield their young children from reality and provide them with (much) more than minimum needs; men and women show an entrepreneurial spirit and find new ways to generate income, which is also accompanied by important changes in gender relations in this patriarchal society; communities mobilize to ease the material hardships of those who cannot support themselves; and shepherds and farmers persistently go out to the fields despite the fear of violence, choosing where and how to challenge prohibitions imposed by soldiers and settlers.
This is not the behavior of desperate people. When seeing these impressive creative, patient, and calculated ways of coping over the past year, one understands how much sumud is an endeavor of the spirit. Moreover, this helps understand what lies behind the restraint of the vast majority of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
The Palestinian Choice
The reason for the absence of widespread Palestinian protest or violence east of the Green Line is that Palestinians have chosen not to rise up. They make this choice day after day, not out of fear of Israeli punishment and not out of despair. They even avoid nonviolent protests that have always been part of every Palestinian struggle and have regularly taken place in various locations in the West Bank until the eve of October 7.
This Palestinian restraint is much more than abstaining from response, certainly when it persists over time under the present unprecedented circumstances. It is an active restraint, which, as explained above, necessitates to constantly withstand an oppressive reality and manifests an admirable strength of the spirit.
The mental strength required to live up to this Palestinian choice has important implications, but it should be emphasized that it does not stem from rejection of violent resistance in principle.
First, regarding violence, Palestinian discourse in the last year has included direct or indirect condemnation of Hamas’s massacre (especially in the first weeks of the war) and simultaneously, admiration for the military achievements of the attack. Even if West Bank Palestinians have not heeded Hamas’s calls to rise up, they have not disassociated themselves from the organization, and support for armed groups remains high, alongside expressions of mourning for the killing of figures such as Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar.
Second, violent or nonviolent uprising can break out at any moment. The Palestinians may certainly choose to break their restraint, especially when Israel makes such desperate efforts to push them over the edge.
It is an active restraint, which necessitates to constantly withstand an oppressive reality and manifests an admirable strength
Restraint as Re-Humanization and Internal Liberation
The Palestinians’ enemies dehumanize them, legitimizing the war crimes in Gaza and violent dispossession in other Palestinian territories. On the other hand, due to the enormous power gaps and ongoing Palestinian suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause tend to reduce Palestinian existence to that of a victim needing protection. Despite the moral attitude underlying this position, it also turns the Palestinian collective from a subject to object lacking in agency.
Two or even three generations of Palestinians have not experienced a single day of freedom. Such persistent oppression scars a person’s soul and exacts a deep psychological, social and spiritual price. The erosion and pressure that turn those living under colonial oppression into “less than human” was described by psychiatrist and anticolonial activist Frantz Fanon.
Following the October 7 massacre, Fanon’s description of the process of liberation from colonial oppression was raised in public discussion. Fanon argued that rebellion against colonial forces liberated the oppressed not only from external oppression but also from internal chains and ailments embedded both in the personal consciousness and collective society: “Decolonization is truly the creation of new humans,” he wrote. “The ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself.”
Since Fanon also explained how violence was an inevitable part of the path to decolonization, some of his interpreters combined the two statements and argued that lethal violence was necessary for the internal liberation of the oppressed.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the introduction to one of the editions of Fanon’s famous book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was probably the source for this interpretation, that violence, to the point of “crazy rage,” was the way the oppressed would restore their humanity, or “become anew” as humans.
This glorification of violence was also expressed in some Western voices that not only supported the Palestinian right to fight Israel but also justified the crimes Hamas had committed against Israeli civilians. Thus, in the name of the just demand for liberation from colonial oppression, this interpretation of Fanon not only involves the blatant crossing of basic moral boundaries but also idealizes violence as a heroic act in which the oppressed supposedly heal their souls and re-humanize themselves.
In view of this agentic choice, racist views that describe them as less than human – bloodthirsty aggressors or alternatively victims dependent on external protection – cannot stand
This interpretation of Fanon may imply that the restraint of the oppressed leaves them in a subhuman state. However, since the Palestinian choice of restraint has been made under the impossible conditions created by Israel in the past year, it offers an alternative way for re-humanization.
I do not mean to argue that using violence for liberation from oppression is fundamentally wrong or inhuman. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. However, since a violent Palestinian uprising in the West Bank was the expected scenario after October 7, choosing it would have been a reflex response to external circumstances. In contrast, restraint embodies active choice and agency, as acknowledged in this article’s opening quote. Raising hands in despair and helplessness, on the other hand, could not be considered a reclaiming of Palestinian humanity as subjects in the world.
It is precisely the restraint of West Bank residents that is the unexpected act, indicating choice rather than reflex. This choice has countered and even broken the deterministic dynamics of escalation for more than a year, thwarting the intentions of Netanyahu’s regime and the extreme right, which seek escalation that would justify ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
As described above, to persist in this restraint under tremendous pressure and over long months requires patience, determination, courage, creativity, and mutual responsibility. What are all these if not an inspiring expression of humanity and the embracing of life by individuals and communities? In view of this agentic choice, racist views that describe them as less than human – bloodthirsty aggressors or alternatively victims dependent on external protection – cannot stand.
And to the extent that Palestinian society has so far partially internalized these views, then its choice of restraint in the past year is also an act of liberation from them – an act of self-humanization.
The Israeli Choice
An Israeli writer praising Palestinian restraint should be suspected of bias. I cannot claim objectivity, but my analysis does not stop here. Internal liberation is important, but is not the whole story.
Not only does the external oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank continue, but Israel seeks to exploit the “miracle of October 7” to crush Palestinian existence between the River and the Sea. If the world does not stop Israel, it would become extremely implausible to continue claiming that ethnic cleansing at the very least is not occurring in the Gaza Strip.
In the West Bank, there has been “only” increasing settler violence, expulsion of small Palestinian communities, restricted destruction of residential environments where armed groups operated, and deepening of annexation. However, the war in Gaza that continues unhindered makes clear to Palestinians and their supporters that when Israel decides the time is ripe for mass killing of West Bank residents and their expulsion, there will be no one to stop it.
Without liberation from colonial oppression, Palestinian internal liberation offers little comfort. All the more so when, to paraphrase Fanon, Israel is determined to “substitute one ‘species’ of humans for another”. This threat is existential and real for Palestinians, and restraint by itself will not be enough.
the restraint, alongside the existential threat to Palestinians, shift the burden of responsibility to us Israelis. Can we put an end to our indifference to Palestinian lives?
During the first decades of rightwing rule in Israel, public figures from the left used to fantasize about how “we will lie on the roads and block the transfer with our bodies,” in Amos Oz’s words from the late nineties. The moment of truth has arrived, but government opponents, many of whom admire Oz, insist on dealing with other things and are generally indifferent to the destruction in Gaza and the suffering in the West Bank. Israeli activists against the occupation, on the other hand, demonstrate commitment and dedication and pay a price for standing with Palestinian communities. However, this is a tiny group with very limited influence.
The Palestinian choice of restraint has not been made for the sake of Israelis and certainly not out of thinking of them as partners in saving this piece of land from disaster. However, the restraint, alongside the existential threat to Palestinians, shift the burden of responsibility to us Israelis. Can we put an end to our indifference to Palestinian lives and identify the inspiring humanity they have exhibited in the past year and the life forces that have enabled them to survive it with dignity?
If only we open our eyes, we will see not only this but also the fact that we are the originators and executors of the existential threat to Palestinians.
Those who see these things cannot remain indifferent. The challenge is enormous: to stand against those parts of Israeli society that threaten the very existence of Palestinians in the West Bank. However, it is also an opportunity that Palestinians offer us: this is perhaps our last chance to stop the destruction we are causing. In Gaza, we have already failed. What will we do to prevent the disaster from also occurring in the West Bank?
