The terror attack on Wednesday near Peduel in the lower part of the northern West Bank Samaria region highlighted a point which top IDF and Shin Bet former and current officials have made throughout the war: crackdowns can reduce terror temporarily, but to sustain a calmer safer time period, there also need to be positive incentives.
What the positive incentives should be is then an extensive debate.
Some defense officials favor merely returning all or most of the 210,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank from before the war.
Others support this, but also believe Israel needs to be making larger strategic offers to the Palestinian Authority regarding the future of building in new uninhabited areas of the West Bank or providing it greater aspects of autonomy in various political or economic areas.
None of these ideas are under consideration by the current government.
Since the war started, the number of Palestinian workers approved to cross into Israeli parts of the West Bank or the Green Line is down to around 10,000 or less.
Some officials believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would support increasing the number of Palestinian workers on his own, but fear that doing so would lead Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich to topple his coalition.
Arguments against returning Palestinian workers
The arguments against returning the workers are that after October 7, virtually all Palestinians are potential suspected terrorists or spies for future invasions.
This is based on the fallacy that it was the 18,000 Palestinian Gaza workers who mapped out Israel’s military bases and vulnerabilities on the Gaza border, which enabled Hamas to invade Israel so effectively.
Except that the IDF and Shin Bet probes disclosed in late February and early March made it clear that this was not true.
Rather, infuriatingly, Hamas managed to piece together all of the precise locations of Israeli military bases and classified portions within those bases based on social media.
Soldiers working at those bases took photos of themselves next to classified installations and posted them for years without anyone cracking down on that practice until October 7.
The IDF and Shin Bet found all the information Hamas needed to carry out its precise invasion on wide-open social media.
What’s more, all of the evidence from both before and after October 7 is that the number of Palestinian workers who get to enter Israeli parts of the West Bank or Green Line Israel, and who then turn to terror, is minuscule.
Most Palestinian terrorists who perpetrate terror attacks either do so in West Bank areas where Jews and Palestinians are mixed or simply break through the West Bank barrier, which remains vulnerable and unpoliced in a large number of areas.
The other fallacy is that allowing West Bank Palestinian workers to return would be a victory for Hamas.
The PA controls the West Bank, not Hamas.
Returning workers would not empower Hamas, but the PA
Returning the workers would not empower Hamas, but the PA, which, while far from being a trusted ally of Israel, is nowhere near as dangerous or destabilizing as Hamas.
Or it might not even empower it, but at least restore some of its ability to control the terror elements of its population.
Arguments that returning the workers would show that Israel learned nothing from October 7 also belies that the Jewish state has already changed the face of the region: Most of Gaza has been destroyed, over 20,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed and reportedly around another 30,000 Palestinian civilians killed, Hezbollah has been decapitated including losing its leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of its heavy weaponry and with the IDF holding five outposts in Lebanese territory, the Syrian military’s elements which could threaten Israel have been bombed and Israel now controls a huge new buffer zone in Syria, Iran has been defanged of many elements of its ability to threaten Israel, and the IDF is finally building a more serious fence on the border with Jordan to block Tehran from smuggling weapons to Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank.
After all of these changes, no one in the Middle East is going to think Israel has gone soft because it shows mild openness to positive incentives on one of the seven fronts.
According to defense sources, there is essentially no demonstrable or data-based downside to increasing Palestinian workers, and its only impact would be to reduce the motivation of normative people to radicalize and join terror groups.
None of this means that Israel can sit on its laurels.
It will need heavily increased volumes of troops on the borders and a proactive and preemptive strike strategy against border threats for years if not decades.
And virtually all of the defense officials who favor increasing Palestinian workers are on board with the more aggressive Israeli policy in the West Bank, including more air strikes, tanks, and D-9 bulldozers, which have made parts of Jenin and Tulkarem look more like blown-up Gaza.
These strategies have reduced terror in the northern West Bank over the recent period.
But some of the terrorists merely shifted to the Hebron area, which had been one of the quieter areas for much of this war.
There will always be holes that security forces cannot cover
Also, the latest attack at Peduel shows that even in areas where the IDF has cracked down the hardest and been more aggressive in the West Bank than ever before, there will always be a hole that security forces cannot cover.
Making a bigger diplomatic move in the West Bank is more complex and controversial, but there are plenty of ways that defense sources believe Israel could give temporary economic, land, and political incentives in certain quiet areas, which could be withdrawn if those areas stopped being quiet.
For 19 months, the government has ignored the virtually unanimous security forces recommendation of returning more West Bank Palestinian workers and has been unwilling to even entertain any positive diplomatic incentives.
Over those 19 months, the IDF has used force, force, and more force as its strategy, and has sometimes achieved impressive shifts because of that.
But there are limits to how long military crackdowns can maintain strategic achievements and quiet.
When will the government’s answer be not just to kill the latest terrorist who killed another Israeli, but to try out some of the defense establishment’s positive incentive ideas, while maintaining its harsher than ever military pressure?
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