The terrorist attack on Wednesday near Peduel in the Binyamin Region of the West Bank highlighted a point that senior IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) officials, former and current, have made throughout the war: Crackdowns can reduce terrorism temporarily, but to sustain calm and security, there also must be positive incentives.
What the positive incentives should be is an extensive debate.
Some defense officials favor merely bringing back all or most of the 210,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank who were employed before the Israel-Hamas War.
Others support this but also believe that Israel needs to be making larger strategic offers to the Palestinian Authority regarding the future, building in new uninhabited areas of the West Bank, or providing 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 inside the Green Line are about 10,000 or fewer.
Some officials believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would support increasing the number of Palestinian workers but fears that doing so would lead Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to topple his coalition.
Arguments against returning Palestinian workers
The arguments against returning the workers are that, after the October 7 massacre, virtually all Palestinians are potential suspected terrorists or spies for future invasions.
This is based on the fallacy that it was the 18,000 Gazan workers who mapped out Israel’s military bases and vulnerabilities on the Gaza border who enabled Hamas to invade Israel so effectively.
However, the IDF and Shin Bet probes disclosed in late February and early March this year 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 posted on easily accessible social media.
What’s more, all of the evidence from both before and after October 7 indicates that the number of Palestinian workers able to enter Israeli parts of the West Bank or within the Green Line who then turn to terrorism is minuscule.
Most Palestinians who perpetrate terrorist 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 many 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; it would help the PA, which is far from being a trusted ally of Israel but is nowhere near as dangerous or destabilizing as Hamas.
Such a move might not even empower the PA, but at least it could restore some of its ability to control terrorist elements of its population.
Arguments that returning the workers would show that Israel had learned nothing from October 7 also obfuscate that the Jewish state has already changed the face of the region.
Most of Gaza has been destroyed, more than 20,000 Hamas terrorists have been eliminated, and as reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, about another 30,000 Palestinian civilians – used as human shields – have been killed.
Hezbollah has been decapitated, including losing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of its heavy weaponry – and the IDF holds five outposts in Lebanese territory.
Syrian military elements that could threaten Israel have been bombed, and Israel now controls a huge new buffer zone in Syria.
Iran has been defanged of many of the elements in 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 terrorist groups.
None of this means that Israel can sit on its laurels, however, and 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 airstrikes, tanks, and D-9 bulldozers, which have made parts of Jenin and Tulkarm look more like blown-up Gaza.
These strategies have reduced terrorism in Samaria over the recent period.
Nevertheless, some of the terrorists have merely shifted to the Hebron area, which had been one of the quieter regions for much of this war.
There will always be holes that security forces cannot cover
Additionally, 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 holes that the 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 recommendation of the security forces to return more West Bank Palestinian workers, and it has been unwilling to even entertain any positive diplomatic incentives.
Over that time, the IDF has used force, force, and more force as its strategy, and it has sometimes achieved impressive shifts because of that.
There are, however, limits to how long military crackdowns can maintain strategic achievements and quiet.
When will the government’s answer not just be 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?