The Israeli army’s overnight raid in the West Bank—strikes in Jenin and Tulkarm that killed 10 Palestinians—underscores another front in a war that Israel had been fighting mostly against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah on the Lebanese frontier, until now.
Here, Israel hasn’t engaged in a full-on ground war as in Gaza, nor an intense air and rocket war as with Hezbollah. But the West Bank is a strategically important front for Israel—one it can’t allow to be dominated by enemies.
Many Israelis fear that if the area were granted independence, terrorist elements in the West Bank would carry out terror attacks against them. That’s what Hamas did after taking over Gaza in 2007, culminating in the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet security service have conducted raids against specific terrorists in the West Bank. Tragically, there also has been violence initiated by Israeli and Palestinian civilians against each other.
Masked Jews attacked the Palestinian village of Jit with rifles and Molotov cocktails on Aug. 15, setting cars and buildings on fire and killing one resident as villagers fought back. The Israeli police have so far arrested four Jews suspected of involvement.
Israel’s leaders denounced the attack, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that counterterror security in the West Bank is the business of Israel’s army, police, and security agency, and no one else.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich denounced it as well, though many say his policies have contributed to the tensions. Leading a party that represents Jews living in the West Bank, he’s been explicit for years in his intention to promote Jewish residence there, despite international pressure for Palestinian independence.
“I want to believe and hope the pressure exerted on us by our American friends to establish a Palestinian state stems simply from a lack of understanding of how much this endangers our existence, as an absolute majority of our people understand today, certainly after Oct. 7,” Smotrich wrote in a post on social media platform X on Aug. 16, according to a translation.
“There is not a single sane Israeli who, after Oct. 7, is willing to multiply Gaza twentyfold and put it on the territory that geographically and topographically controls most of the State of Israel.”
It’s difficult for some Americans to understand “how small Israel is and how much Judea and Samaria”—the Jewish name for the West Bank—is the cradle of the country’s birth and necessary for its security, he wrote.
The area—Samaria refers to the West Bank north of Jerusalem, and Judea to parts south—is seen by those supporting a long-sought two-state solution as the heart of an eventual Palestinian state. Some nations, such as Ireland, Spain, and Norway, already recognize it.
Israel occupied the West Bank during 1967’s Six-Day War. Facing imminent invasion by Egypt, Syria, and other Arab states, Israel attacked the area preemptively and then attacked Jordan once fighting broke out along their border. Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and East Jerusalem as well.
Yoram Ettinger, an Israeli intelligence analyst and former diplomat to Washington responsible for liaising with Congress, told The Epoch Times that while many Israelis pay lip service to the “two-state solution” of creating an independent Palestine, most now understand the real risks.
The High Ground
The coastal plain where much of Israel’s population lives, centered on Tel Aviv, is about eight miles wide, or about a mile less than the distance from New York City’s Battery Park, where the Statue of Liberty ferry docks, to Columbia University, the site of numerous demonstrations.The West Bank is strategically important because it is on higher ground, overlooking Tel Aviv.
The Epoch Times recently visited Peduel, which sits about two miles beyond Israel’s 1967 frontier in the West Bank, or Samaria.
Dubbed “Israel’s Balcony” or “Israel’s Lookout,” Peduel is currently a Jewish development. With an elevation of more than 1,200 feet, it has stunning views toward Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea that lies 15 miles to the west.
Visitors can see planes landing and taking off from Ben Gurion Airport.
Until 1967, the area belonged to Jordan. And Jordanian army artillery shelled Israel from there before it was seized by Israel during the war, according to Roni Gilo, a retired lieutenant colonel in the IDF who acted as liaison to the U.S. army.
When Ariel Sharon was Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, he would bring international visitors to the lookout, Gilo told The Epoch Times.
Israel also seized the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, and for the same reasons it took the West Bank: Syria had used the high ground to attack Israel’s Galilee. Israel has since annexed the area, turning it into a center for wine-making, agriculture, and tourism.
U.S. President Donald Trump recognized the annexation in 2019, but most of the international community has not. Syria has never made peace with Israel. And few Israelis think they should ever give the Golan Heights back.
Strategic Depth
Judea and Samaria have profound meaning for Jews, Ettinger said.“It’s the cradle of the Jewish state, the historical cradle, the religious, cultural, and linguistic cradle,” he said. “It’s all centered in Judea and Samaria, not in Tel Aviv, not in Haifa, or Netanya or Herzliya.”
The historical significance notwithstanding, the area’s greater importance is strategic. Ettinger called the Middle East “the most volcanic region in the world,” referring not to its geology but its ever-unstable politics.
It’s a place of “unpredictability, violence and intolerance, primarily within the Muslim community, the Arab community, but also toward the so-called infidel,” he said.
In the neighboring Arab countries, power rises “through the bullet, not the ballot.” Power is tenuous, and a ruler lasts until his opponents gather enough power to depose him.
Both Iran’s Shah and Libya’s King Idris were pro-United States until their overthrow by violently anti-United States regimes, he said.
“Every time a regime changes, the policy changes,” Ettinger said.
“Reality mandates a posture of deterrence if you wish to survive in this area. It requires a security level way, way beyond the security requirements of any other region in the world.
“And that is completely at odds with the litany of Western prescriptions for the conflict.”
Such solutions “have nothing to do with the Middle East, [but] they have to do with panel discussions in the West.”
A Posture of Deterrence
And Israel’s continuing to oversee security in the West Bank, he said, is its “posture of deterrence.”That sends powerful messages radiating in every direction, he added.
It sends one to Syria, which invaded Jordan in 1970 but backed off when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, at the request of U.S. President Richard Nixon, moved troops to the border where the three countries meet, he said.
“That posture of deterrence forced Syria to pull back without exchanging a single bullet with Israel,” he said.
It sends a message to Jordan, which has surrendered its claim to the West Bank. Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy represents a minority in Jordan, which is predominantly Palestinian.
King Hussein, now deceased, made peace with Israel in 1994, mainly because he realized that Israel’s backing helped prop up his family’s potentially shaky rule, Ettinger said.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II must contend with the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian ambitions to take over, and intensified Iranian subversion. Jordan doesn’t trust the United States to deter its enemies, he said, because it hasn’t faced and dealt decisively with “rogue elements” in the Middle East.
And Israel’s holding the West Bank sends a message to Saudi Arabia. Its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to as MBS, has explored the possibility of peace with Israel.
Many think Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was a desperate attempt to derail Israel’s brewing ties with the Saudis and other Gulf states, which, if successfully established, would help ensure the Jewish state’s survival and weaken pressure to destroy it.
If Jordan’s monarchy fell, there would be a hostile regime on Saudi Arabia’s northern border, threatening the House of Saud, the other Gulf state monarchies, and eventually Egypt, he said.
Israel already cooperates with the Saudis on defense, agriculture, technology, and irrigation.
“I hope [MBS] will live forever,” Ettinger said. “But he knows, even within his family, he has a multitude of enemies. That’s why [so many] princes of his family are in house arrest. In flashy hotels, yes, but it’s still house arrest.
“Today’s relations with Saudi Arabia may not be tomorrow’s relations with Saudi Arabia.
“With all due respect to peace with Saudi Arabia, which I hope for, it’s not even close to the role played by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria in ensuring the survival of the Jewish state.”
