April 24, 2023: For two decades Israel had had to deal with Gaza and the West Bank, two neighbors that are obsessed with destroying Israel and eliminating any Jewish presence in the region. These entities are not really countries in the traditional sense. Rather the two began as refuges for Arabs who did not want to live in the new (in 1948) state of Israel. The West Bank was originally part of Jordan, an Israeli neighbor that was a stable monarchy in 1948 and still is. Jordan also had problems with Palestinians and killed or expelled the most troublesome Palestinians, especially those who wanted to overthrow the monarchy and turn Jordan into a bae for carrying out attacks on Israel. Jordan also declared that the West Bank was no longer part of J0rdan but no one else wanted the West Bank either. Palestinians behaved similarly in most other Middle Eastern countries, so their Arab rulers responded like the Jordanians did and killed or expelled the most troublesome Palestinians while tolerating the Palestinians who were willing to behave. Despite that many Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria never become part of the local community. This is a common practice in the Arab world, where non-native Arabs are not welcome as migrants or refugees. That is not the case in most Western countries, even though some of their new Palestinian citizens remain devoted to attacking Israel or local Jews. Ancient feuds and prejudices tend to persist in the Middle East.

Israel’s problem is that it is not a Middle Eastern country. It is a prosperous democracy with an affluent and well-educated population that is mainly Jewish but contains a large Arab minority as well as smaller religious minorities. Many Israeli Arabs are Christians and Jews migrating from Arab countries are Middle Eastern, not Western in appearance and behavior. They spoke Arabic and Israel united all these minorities by adopting Hebrew, an ancient Semitic language that ceased to be used by anyone over a thousand years ago. That meant all the different groups forming the modern state of Israel had to learn Hebrew. It was often annoying but also unifying.

There are three million Palestinians in the West Bank and two million in Gaza. The obsession with destroying Israel and proliferation of armed terrorist or special-interest groups in the West Bank and Gaza sustains very corrupt and inefficient local governments. Many Palestinians want to emigrate to less chaotic countries, particularly in the West. That is difficult because so many Palestinians never adapt to their new homelands and resort to criminal or terrorist behavior.

Criminal or terrorist behavior continues to thrive in the West Bank, where the local Fatah group running the government promotes violence against Israelis to distract the Palestinians there from overthrowing the corrupt Fatah bureaucrats. During the first three months of 2023, Fatha claimed that there were nearly three thousand “acts of resistance” toward Israeli and Israelis. A more tangible achievement was the murder of twelve Israelis by Palestinians. This is the sort of thing Fatah politicians and Fatah controlled media have been encouraging enthusiastically for decades. Fatah not only encourages all Palestinians, including children, to join in the violence, but also spends a lot of money on rewarding those who succeed but are killed or arrested and imprisoned. This is a common practice throughout the region but no one does it so energetically as Fatah.

Fatah also uses this bad behavior to upgrade its image. For example, since 2016 Fatah has prompted the “knife terrorism” campaign. This was all about making the corrupt and incompetent Fatah more popular in the West Bank but opinion polls showed that many (but not most) Palestinians would vote for the more radical and less corrupt Hamas if elections were held. Polls also showed that enthusiasm for the knife terrorism campaign was waning. While Hamas is hated by the people of Gaza, West Bank Palestinians don’t experience Hamas cruelty daily while they do endure the corrupt and inept rule of Fatah. The Fatah pro-terror media campaign has distracted many Palestinians from their problems with Fatah but also convinced many that Israel is refusing to negotiate peace when in fact it is the Palestinians who turned down two peace deals in the 1990s and instead tried terror campaigns to get more. Both of these “intifadas” failed and Fatah has sold the illusion that the third intifada (the “knife intifada") will succeed. It isn’t and that is one reason Hamas has not gotten involved. A year ago, the knife intifada experienced a resurgence with several successful (dead Israelis) attacks. This began in early 2022 when four Israeli Jews were killed by a local Bedouin who was an ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) supporter. The killer was also an Israeli citizen and used a knife to attack people before armed civilians shot him dead. Most of these attacks on Israelis, usually with knives or vehicles, take place in the West Bank and began in 2015 when Palestinian leaders called for suicidal “knife terrorism” attacks. These attacks soon lost their popularity despite Fatah still pushing them energetically in all the Palestinian media. This can be seen in the number of Palestinian terror attacks disrupted each year. It was 217 in 2014, 187 in 2013, 112 in 2012 and 88 in 2011. In the last decade knife attacks are less common and almost always occur in the West Bank or Jerusalem. Since 1948 some 2,600 Israelis have died from terror attacks inside Israel. Nearly five percent of those dead were foreigners. Palestinian terrorism efforts have never recovered from the defeat they suffered, when Israel adopted new tactics that largely shut down the terror campaign the Palestinians began in 2000. Fatah and Hamas have been trying to revive that effort ever since and have largely failed. The 2022 Israeli deaths are hailed as a great victory while the 70 Palestinians killed during these attacks, especially the many that failed, are described as Israeli oppression of peaceful Palestinians.

Since 1949 Palestinian media have constantly pushed the idea that Israel has no right to exist and must be destroyed. Palestinians who disagree with this must either emigrate or keep silent. For most Palestinians it is easier to simply praise the knife until it all blows over. Over all the knife terrorism does nothing for the Palestinians except increase their poverty and Fatah propaganda about how glorious it is to die.

Fatah and Hamas have been holding unification talks since Fatah took control of Gaza in 2007. At the same time Fatah leaders announced that they would never negotiate with Israel again. Yet Hamas officially (via diplomats from major Moslem nations like Turkey) let Israel know in 2016 that Hamas was not planning any major attacks and was not joining in the Fatah sponsored “knife terrorism” campaign in the West Bank. Hamas could not say this itself because it has to pretend to be mobilizing for war with Israel and constantly supporting like-minded groups. Hamas is still doing the supporting and many Islamic terrorist groups have sanctuary inside Gaza. While not technically a violation of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, it is seen as a way for Hamas to facilitate attacks against Israel without having to take responsibility. Both Israel and Egypt disagree which is why Gaza remains largely inaccessible because of the blockade Egypt and Israel enforce.

In Gaza Hamas put over a thousand men to work on new “attack tunnels” into Israel. This results in dozens of Hamas men injured or dead because of tunnel collapses brought on by heavy rains. Much of the work involves rebuilding “combat tunnels” destroyed by Israel during the mid-2014 “50 Day War”. Fatah accused Hamas of wasting the lives of their members working on tunnels, especially the ones used mainly for smuggling goods (which Hamas taxes heavily). Israelis living near the Gaza border complain that they can sometimes hear (or feel) Hamas tunnel building efforts. In 2014 the Israeli military said they would erect a detection system to locate new tunnels so they could be destroyed. The detection system has been delayed because of defense spending cuts but now the government says the detection system is coming soon. There is some urgency to this because Hamas is admitting that it has to do something spectacular to divert the Gaza population from the miserable economic situation Hamas has caused. Because Hamas continues to shelter and aid Islamic terror groups that keep firing rockets into Israel (in violation of the ceasefire deal with Hamas), Israel keeps limiting access to Gaza. Israel believes that Hamas will again be extending its tunnels into Israel and the growing domestic pressure Hamas is under means Israel has to deploy the new tunnel detection sensors quickly.

By providing sanctuary to Islamic terror groups that operate in Egypt, Hamas has made an enemy of Egypt. Thus, since 2012, Egypt has limited the ability of Gaza residents to enter or leave Gaza via Egypt. Worse, the Egyptians have gone after the smuggling tunnels. The most successful tactic has been filling the smuggling tunnels with water. This began in 2013 when the Egyptians dug small canals for seawater that could then be pumped into tunnels discovered. It was eventually found that flooding permanently destroyed the tunnel better than any other method because it caused the sandy soil in the area to collapse and remain unstable. It is believed that only about twenty tunnels are still operating and every week several of those are discovered and flooded. The army engineers have learned that you have to not only flood the tunnels but keep flooding them because the Palestinians can obtain pumps to remove the water and repair the damage. But if you keep the tunnel flooded long enough it collapses and has to be rebuilt as if there were never a tunnel there in the first place. Egypt has also created a buffer zone along the border by moving Egyptians out and destroying all buildings. This means tunnels from Gaza now have to be over a kilometer long and deeper as well to evade detection. To make matters worse Egyptian police watch buildings within a few kilometers of the Gaza border for signs of a tunnel entrance. The police are less likely to take bribes from smuggling tunnel operators because Gaza-based Islamic terrorists have killed a lot of Egyptian police and soldiers in the last few years.

Hamas publicizes its preparations for another war with Israel. Hamas believes that if they can inflict enough damage on Israel by killing or capturing soldiers and civilians they can prompt Moslem and Western countries to pressure Israel to allow more access to Gaza and send more aid. Hamas also hopes that Israel bombs and ground forces do enough damage inside Gaza to allow Hamas to get away with portraying itself as a victim and again persuading other nations to help.

This will be difficult because the Arab donors no longer trust Hamas (or Fatah either) and are put off by the recent Iranian announcement that it was still subsidizing Hamas, which has run Gaza and its 1.5 million Palestinians since 2005. Iran supported Hamas early on. There were recently more rumors that Iran had stopped supporting Hamas. Iran had decreased its support, in large part because of Western sanctions for Iranian support of terrorism and lower oil prices, but never cut off Hamas completely. Although Sunni Hamas sometimes persecutes Shia, Iran supports energetic Hamas efforts to attack Israel. Hamas also supports Islamic terrorists active in Egypt, which turned Egypt completely against Hamas and helped put Egypt firmly into the anti-Iran Sunni coalition. The Iran link makes Hamas an enemy as far as most Sunni Moslem nations are concerned. Hamas has made a lot of bad decisions since 2005 and the Iran link is seen as one of the worst. In response to Arab states who have cut aid to Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian leaders have quietly told the reluctant Arab donors that if they do not increase aid there will be violent Palestinian protests (in Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem) against the Arab donors as well as Israel. These Arab donors (mainly Gulf oil states like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait) have lost patience with the Palestinians and not only cut donor aid (which was being stolen or misused by corrupt Palestinian leaders), but also openly allied themselves with Israel against Iran. The Arab world still technically backs the Palestinians and their effort to destroy Israel but have lost confidence in the Palestinians.