"West Bank arrests."

The social fabric is shredding.

Depicting the victims. A mural in Aida refugee camp. (C.M., 2024.)

28 SEPTEMBER—The other day I received a text telling me one of my West Bank contacts had been arrested in an early morning raid on her home. This occurred in a small town near Ramallah.

This woman is one of two detained on the same morning, both of them associated with a decades-old Palestinian civil society organization. They will almost certainly be imprisoned under administrative detention, which means they can be locked up indefinitely without any charge. 

All of this is in violation of international law.

Since 7 October Israel has arrested thousands of men across the West Bank, most of them young, in a preemptive move to cut off any possibility of a significant armed resistance—a third intifada—that could challenge Israeli military occupation while the army conducts its genocide in Gaza and escalates its war on the West Bank—and as we speak Lebanon.

As ever more men are arrested, Israel continues to dismantle towns and refugee camps in the northern governorates of Tulkarm, Jenin, Tubas, Qalqilya, and Nablus. Bulldozers are tearing up roads, smashing shops, and destroying water mains and electrical lines, making neighborhoods unlivable and displacing large numbers of people or forcing them into exile. A large food storage facility was destroyed just yesterday in the city of Qalqilya, in a direct attack on food security. I hear of many of these incidents through my Palestinian contacts. Most or all of them have been documented in reports and photographs. 

But the arrest of these women represents a front in Israel’s war on the West Bank that is rarely reported: Israel is attacking social organizations and civil society altogether. Among other community-based work, this women’s group oversees and administers numerous kindergartens throughout the West Bank, often located in remote villages. The organization supports and provides services to the poorest and most vulnerable people and communities. 

There are many ways to destroy a people and Israel is using all of them in its attempt to totally subjugate the people of the West Bank.

In a video published earlier today, Chris Hedges interviewed Israeli journalist Gideon Levy about his new book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe. Here is what Levy said about Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza,

[We] don’t necessarily need to kill them physically . . . we are killing their spirit. They must be broken. . . . It’s not only the physical killing, it’s also the national killing, the killing of the spirit, the killing of the morality, the killing of values, the killing of everything which is human.

This is what Levy means when he writes about the killing of Gaza. Israel’s intent is to break the Palestinian people—in Gaza but also ultimately in the West Bank. And as Israel destroys Gaza and the West Bank it destroys itself, a point Levy makes when he says that Israel has lost its humanity. Still, Israel continues its project of ethnic cleansing.

The significance of these arrests should not be missed. Piece by piece, the Israeli occupation force is inexorably degrading and dismantling Palestinian society as Israel continues to seize ever more land. Israel has been but waiting for the right opportunity to take Gaza and the West Bank. It is now doing so leaving Palestinians with three choices, as articulated by the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and analyzed this week in The Floutist: exile, the acceptance of an apartheid existence under racist Jewish supremacist domination, or death.

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