CAROLINE GLICK/
The rapidly intensifying battle in Samaria has made clear that sooner rather than later, Samaria and Judea will soon replace Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Yemen as the central battlefield in this multifront war.
They will also be the place where the war is won. Or lost.
Jenin, the northernmost Palestinian city, has long been the terror capital of Samaria. On Monday, footage from the city showed U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority security forces walking around holding RPGs. For the past week or so, the P.A. has been fighting yet another half-hearted battle against Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror forces in the city. The P.A. is engaging in the fight for one main reason--to secure the continued support of the Americans and the IDF High Command.
The P.A. is largely an empty shell. Its forces, which receive lavish funding, training and arms from the United States control very little of the areas ostensibly under its oversight. According to a survey taken in September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), only 18% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support the P.A.
On the other hand, 85% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria expressed satisfaction with Hamas's war efforts, and 56% said that armed struggle is the best way for the Palestinians to achieve their goals. Hamas enjoys 37% of public support. The rest don't know who they support. In head-to-head races, Hamas bests the P.A. at every turn.
With next to no public support, the P.A.'s forces have opted to put on a sound and light show of fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror forces in Jenin to prove their relevance not so much to the public, but to their primary sponsors: the IDF General Staff and the Americans.
For the past several months, the Netanyahu government has repeatedly ordered the General Staff to take over the principle governing function in Gaza: the distribution of humanitarian aid. But Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the IDF Chief of the General Staff, has staunchly refused to carry out the order.
For Halevi and several of his subordinates, avoiding direct Israeli control over the population in Gaza has been a central rationale for directing the fighting on the ground. Their operating concept foresees the same P.A. that has no control over Judea and Samaria entering Gaza and taking over governance from Hamas at the end of the war.
In part, their judgment is informed by pressure from the Biden administration, which has insisted that Israel agree to transfer governing control over Gaza to the P.A. in a bid to renew the so-called "peace process" that is supposed to bring about the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. In part, it is informed by the General Staff members' ideological commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, which despite the invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, and their total failure to foresee and so prevent the event, remains the primary strategic end they seek.
On Wednesday, Col. (res.) Ronen Cohen, the former deputy chief of the assessment department of IDF Military intelligence, argued on his X account that the death this week of three soldiers in the Kfir Brigade in Beit Hanoun in Gaza on Monday morning was the consequence of Halevi's abject refusal to assert actual control over any part of Gaza. The three were killed when an IED was detonated on them after they carried out an operation in the town, located a stone's throw from the border with Israel.
The same rationale, informs the IDF decision to permit and even encourage P.A. forces to operate in Jenin. It isn't simply that those forces have no public support. They share the goals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad--to annihilate Israel through armed struggle. Last March, the Regavim movement published a paper based entirely on official statements issued by the P.A. and Fatah, which celebrated more than seventy terror attacks against Israel carried out by P.A. security forces.
The General Staff has prevented the publication of data on P.A. involvement in terrorism for decades. And this makes sense. If the generals admit that the P.A. forces are terrorist forces, then their entire conceptual framework is destroyed. So groups like Regavim have been forced to cull the Internet for Fatah and P.A. statements revealing that involvement to expose the open secret that cannot be discussed if the "two-state solution" is to be maintained.
The stakes are not local. This isn't a war about Samaria or Judea, per se.
Hamas called its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel the "Al Aqsa Flood." Its purpose was to pave the way for the destruction of Israel through the conquest of Jerusalem. Hezbollah's plans for the invasion of the Galilee presented the coming battle as the battle for Jerusalem, not Haifa. Iran seeks Israel's destruction to "liberate Jerusalem."
This week, a clip of a speech by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan showed his supporters urging him to "take us to Jerusalem." He responded: "Patience brings victory." Erdoğan's proxies that have taken over Syria have similarly stated that their goal is the conquest of Jerusalem.
Israel's control over Samaria and Jerusalem is what secures its sovereignty in Jerusalem. If the Palestinians seize control over these areas, then the fall of Jerusalem becomes a foregone conclusion. The military, political and ideological battle for these areas is the battle for Jerusalem.
The inevitability of this battle was apparent to anyone listening to what the P.A. has been telling the Palestinians since the 1990s. Every single leader--from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas to the last of the minor P.A. officials and terrorists--told us and continue to tell us that they are fighting for Jerusalem.
The situation has become untenable
Israel's ruling elites--from the IDF General Staff to Shin Bet leadership, from the media to the legal system to academia--have refused to admit this state of affairs. Instead, they have insisted on an artificial distinction between the "moderate" P.A. and the "radical" Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces. In their efforts, they have been supported by successive U.S. administrations.
The unbridled hostility of the European Union, the United Nations and other international actors towards Israel as a whole has been used by Israel's leftist ruling class and Washington as a means to coerce successive governments and the unwilling public to maintain faith with the fiction that the P.A. is a stabilizing force, whether in Judea and Samaria or in the Gaza Strip.
Most of their efforts across the years were directed not against the Palestinians calling for the conquest of Jerusalem. Their chief foe (and the focus of their anger) has always been the Israelis--IDF officers, politicians, journalists, academics and regular citizens who have insisted on listening to the Palestinians and acting accordingly.
If the war is to end, Israel must win this battle in a manner that is not open to question. To win this war, Israel needs to dismantle not only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but the governing body that has cultivated and grown these forces. To win the battle for Jerusalem, Israel must dismantle the P.A.'s security forces and the notion that they are moderates, or that they aren't fighting for Jerusalem.
The presence of advanced weapons and tens of thousands of men under arms supported by a society mobilized to use them to kill thousands of Israelis at the first opportunity has made the situation untenable. The government is well-advised to delay the reckoning until after Donald Trump becomes president in January and until after Halevi's expected resignation in February. It is clear that the battle cannot be won so long as the IDF is led by a man who refuses to abandon the strategic conception that the P.A. is Israel's partner, not its enemy.
In the past year and three months of war, the overwhelming sense has been that we are fighting for the survival not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. There is poetic justice, then, in the fact that the approaching battle for Jerusalem has come into view just as we celebrate the festival of Chanukah, the time when the Jews fought both their enemies and their internal demons to secure their religious freedom and restore Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem.
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