Israel Setting the Stage for the Next Conflict
This post was prompted by the image below. The left side is the original BBC headline and the right side my edits on what’s actually happening.
Why did I change the headline?
To answer that, I need to provide a brief and incomplete history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In 1967, Israel launched a preemptive strike against five nations who were massing armies in preparation for an invasion. Over the course of six days, Israel kicked the living shit out of the countries involved, seizing the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan.
Israel suddenly found itself occupying conquered territories with nearly 1 million people—400,000 in Gaza and 585,000 in West Bank. (The 90,000 Muslim Syrians in the Golan Heights were ethnically cleansed so quickly that history books barely even acknowledge it.) Suddenly, what had been a pan Arabic-Israeli conflict started to become a Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In the intervening years, the population of Palestinians has ballooned to 5 million people. Peace talks have been brokered and agreements broken. Every solution from giving Israeli citizenship to Palestinians to a two-state solution has been suggested and rejected by those in power. Zealots in Israel think the land was given to them by God. Jihadists in Palestine chant that they are going to push Israel into the sea.
Meanwhile, with Gaza and West Bank separated by 93 kilometers of Israel, two rival political factions have come to dominate the respective territories. Hamas, a fundamentalist terrorist group, controls Gaza. Fatah, a secular and perpetually corrupt political party, controls West Bank.
We don’t hear much about West Bank because Fatah has typically sought conciliation and cooperation with Israel Hamas prefers random attacks on civilians that result in Israel counterattacks and the 50:1 kill ratios that have made headlines over the last 20 months.
As a thank you for Fatah’s apparent reasonableness, Israel takes from the West Bank in the form of “settlements.” While the word settlements might evoke a Little House on the Prairie feeling, they are full-fledged cities whose total population in West Bank comes to more than 700,000 people.
Thus, the image above.
“Everyone” was shocked by the bloody Hamas attack in October of 2023. I put everyone in quotation marks, because plenty of people saw it coming. For those who pay attention to current events and history, it was just another Saturday.
Pay attention now.
Each Israeli person moving into West Bank brings more tension. That tension brings more soldiers. Those soldiers bring more checkpoints, more strip searches, more raids, more mosques and homes demolished. It is not a question of if but when a population finally snaps. “Terrorists” from West Bank will wage “senseless violence” on “innocent civilians.” The Israeli government will react with a bloody attack on hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets in the name of fighting terrorism. For every dead Israeli, there will be 10, 20, or maybe 50 dead Palestinians. Everyone acts surprised.
Cleanse, wash, repeat.
I’m not writing this to convince you to take sides. Your mind is likely made up on that. Just don’t act surprised when the inevitable conflict erupts on some idle Saturday. It won’t be a surprise.