I used to report from the West Bank. Twenty years after my last visit, I was shocked by how much worse it is today
In November, Israeli flags suddenly appeared beside a highway in the Palestinian West Bank. More than 1,000, placed about 30 yards apart on both sides of the road, stretching for roughly 10 miles. They were planted south of Nablus, close to Palestinian villages regularly targeted by extremist Israeli settlers. I saw the flags on my way to visit those villages, the morning after they were put up. Their message echoed the ubiquitous graffiti painted by settlers across the West Bank: “You have no future in Palestine.” Compared with the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza and more than 1,000 in the West Bank since October 2023, the flags amount to no more than a minor provocation. But they reflect how dominant Israel has become in the West Bank, land recognised under international law as belonging to the Palestinians. During the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005, Israeli settlers would not have risked planting such flags, for fear of coming under fire from Palestinians. Not now. I returned to the West Bank last month for the first time in 20 years. In the early 2000s, I had visited regularly as a correspondent for the Guardian, in support of Jerusalem-based colleagues covering the second intifada. The uprising was much more violent than the first, which ran from 1987 to 1993. The enduring image of the first is of Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. The second was a full-scale confrontation, with Israel attacking Palestinian cities and towns with artillery, tanks, helicopters and jets while Palestinians fought back with rifles and explosives. Palestinians ambushed soldiers and settlers in the West Bank, making roads a risky venture, especially at night, and terrorised Israel by sending suicide bombers across its border to attack bus stops, cafes, hotels and anywhere else that was crowded. More than 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis were killed. I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse. I had been invited to attend a conference at Birzeit University, on the outskirts of Ramallah, organised by Progressive International, a loose coalition of leftwing organisations and individuals worldwide founded in 2020 by, among others, the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the US senator Bernie Sanders. The conference on the decolonisation of Palestine was organised jointly by Progressive International, the Palestinian thinktank Al-Shabaka and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit. The university’s academics and students have had a long history of protest and clashes with Israeli forces, and the campus has been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces over the last two years. After the conference, a few attenders set off around the West Bank. I was curious as to why there had been no Palestinian uprising in the West Bank comparable to the second intifada, in support of their compatriots in Gaza. Curious, too, about how much support there was for Hamas in the West Bank, and whether anyone believed that an independent Palestinian state was something we might see in the next few decades. Their responses were varied and complex but consistent themes emerged. One was how demoralised they have become. The other was how far away the prospect of a sovereign independent Palestine now seemed. * * * Ramallah, the political, cultural and economic centre of the West Bank, looked cleaner, less chaotic and in places, more prosperous than the last time I was there, not that different from many European cities, with billboards advertising restaurants, speciality chocolate shops and the opening of new gyms. Young, fashion-conscious Palestinians sat chatting in cafes and bars; according to some of the older generation, they are generally less concerned about politics. But this air of normality and prosperity is doubly deceptive. First, Ramallah is not typical of the rest of the West Bank. And second, one of the reasons Ramallah appears so different and less chaotic is the absence of so many of the villagers from surrounding areas who used to line the sides of the city’s streets with their piles of fruit and vegetables. Faced with an expanding maze of Israeli checkpoints and gates that make a journey uncertain, many farmers no longer make the trip to Ramallah. The obstacles are a deterrent not only to farmers but to trade and business generally throughout the West Bank. At the end of the second intifada, there were, according to the UN, 376 checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank. Today there are an estimated 849, many of them erected in the last two years. Checkpoints and barriers are a topic of conversation among Palestinians in much the same way weather is in the UK. While an app that provides information supplied by bus drivers and other road users helps, it is no guarantee, as I found, that roads will be open. The occupation is colour-coded: red metal barriers are closed much of the time, and yellow ones are open more frequently. Yellow Israeli number plates grant access to roads denied to those driving with green Palestinian plates. Israeli army incursions into the centre of Ramallah have become more common over the past two years. Israeli soldiers arrive in force, make arrests and leave. In a raid in August, they targeted currency exchanges, made five arrests and, according to Palestinians, left more than a dozen injured by live fire, rubber bullets or teargas. During a major incursion in 2002, Israel took over much of the city. Its tanks and bulldozers battered into the presidential compound, reducing much of it to ruins and besieging Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinian leader. The darkly lit, cramped rooms in which he was confined until close to his death in 2004 have been left intact, forming part of an Arafat mausoleum and museum. The remains of the compound are a symbol of defiance, from a time when Palestinians were united and there was a sense of hope.
One of the biggest differences between the second intifada and the present day is that Arafat tacitly backed the uprising. His secular Fatah group fought alongside the Islamists – Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – and the leftwing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. By contrast, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected president in 2005, has resisted pressure over the past two years to launch a new uprising in the West Bank. Abbas’s decision is unpopular among Palestinians in the West Bank, according to polls and the Palestinians I spoke to. Among the few I found who supported Abbas’s decision was Maher Canawati, the mayor of Bethlehem, who, like Abbas and Arafat, is a member of Fatah. He said Abbas had faced lots of criticism. “People wanted him to say: ‘Let’s go fight.’” But the president’s caution had been vindicated, Canawati said. “People in the West Bank understood that this was not the time to do what they did in the first and second intifada. We do not want to give them an excuse to attack us. We are helpless. We are not at the same level as the Israelis,” Canawati said. “If we decided to go with an uprising, it would give them the green light to retaliate as they did in Gaza.” From the mayor’s office, it is possible to see the Church of the Nativity, where steps lead to a grotto celebrated by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus. In 2002, during the second intifada, Israeli forces held the church under siege for 39 days, firing at Palestinian militants holed up inside. Few tourists realise that close to the steps to the grotto, the bodies of the Palestinian dead had been left to rot. Not that there are that many tourists these days. Canawati, a Christian whose family has lived in Bethlehem since the 17th century and owns The Three Arches, one of the biggest suppliers in Palestine of biblical souvenirs, said tourism had dwindled to almost zero in the past two years. It is not just tourism that is suffering. The economy of the West Bank as a whole is dire. Per capita, income is down 20% and unemployment hovers around 33%. On top of this, while the population is suffering, the Palestinian Authority, nominally responsible for administration of the West Bank and run by Fatah, is synonymous with corruption, embezzlement, dodgy contracts and nepotism. Palestinians I spoke to were incensed by the way jobs were so often awarded not on merit but on family links, contacts, backhanders or political affiliation. It is not hard to find examples. While wandering around the centre of Tulkarm, in the north of the West Bank, a stall-holder called me over to chat. He said he had been a star student at university, gained a degree in law and proudly showed his membership card of the Palestinian bar association. So why was he working at a fruit and vegetable stall? He said he just did not have contacts inside the PA that would open the way to a legal career. Canawati acknowledged there was corruption but softened this admission by adding “like other countries”. Given the unpopularity of Abbas, the PA and Fatah, I asked Canawati how Hamas would fare if there was to be an election in the West Bank. Hamas would have “no chance”, he said, though almost everyone else I spoke predicted Hamas would win. In the absence of national legislative elections – there have been none since 2006 – student council elections at Birzeit University are viewed as a barometer of sorts. In the last election in 2023, before 7 October, an Islamist bloc affiliated to Hamas won 25 of the 51 seats while a Fatah-affiliated group took 20 and one affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took six. Raising the 7 October massacre, in which more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were killed and about 250 taken hostage, invariably provoked a strong reaction. Why, Palestinians would angrily ask, take 7 October as a starting point? Why not start with repeated Israeli airstrikes on Gaza that left thousands dead between 2005 and 2023? They viewed Hamas as part of the resistance and few that I met were prepared to criticise the attack. One of the exceptions was Omar Haramy, director of Sabeel, a centre for Palestinian liberation theology based in Jerusalem. In his view, Palestinian civil society’s failure to have a serious discussion about the massacre is a problem. As we spoke, he was standing near the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, close to Israel’s Kishle police station. Haramy, who said he had been held there and questioned many times, suggested that if Palestinians had put pressure on Hamas early on, maybe they would have released the children, women and elderly people who had been taken hostage. “Is this the values we want as Palestinians? To take babies as hostages? For God’s sake. This is not who we are.” He viewed the various factions and political parties as a burden in the push for liberation. “They are all complicit, with no elections, with no vision. It’s all sad and messed up.” * * * The most serious change since my last visit to the region is the expansion of Israeli settlements. There are 3.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including 435,000 in East Jerusalem. The number of Israeli settlers has jumped from 400,000 at the time of the second intifada to more than 700,000 now. But those figures do not convey the extent of the encroachment of the settlements, their suffocating impact, occupying more hilltops overlooking cities, towns and villages and even setting up in the middle of them, behind walls and barbed wire, often only yards from Palestinian homes, and protected by Israeli soldiers. During the second intifada, I interviewed the leader of a small settlement in the centre of Hebron, whose population was overwhelmingly Palestinian. When I asked him what he thought of Palestinians, he replied they were “animals”. When I told him I would quote him, he did not attempt to retract the statement. I have never been able to shake off the memory of that casual contempt. But it seems tame in comparison with what is happening today, as settlers, encouraged by extremists in the Israeli cabinet, harass Palestinians with increasing frequency and viciousness, rampaging through villages with impunity, intimidating Palestinians in an attempt to drive them out. About 10 miles from Hebron is the hillside village of Umm al-Khair, infamous as the scene of violent confrontations with settlers. Eid Siliman Hathaleen, a Palestinian Bedouin and community activist from the village, said the Bedouins had bought the land in 1952 but settlers and the Israeli army are conducting a sustained campaign against them. Palestinian homes have been demolished while settlers expand their presence. Seven new mobile homes appeared overnight in October in the middle of the village, while an Israeli order had come to demolish a further 14 Palestinian homes.
The village, like the rest of the West Bank, is under constant surveillance from cameras, military vehicles and drones. While we chatted, Israeli soldiers arrived. An hour before, Israeli peace activists who had turned up in a show of solidarity with the villagers were moved after soldiers declared the location a closed military zone, Hathaleen said. The soldiers told us the place we were standing was now too designated a closed military zone. While Hathaleen and young soldiers argued about the military order, a senior figure in uniform, heavily armed and wearing a black balaclava and dark glasses joined us. Exasperated by the exchanges, he eventually said: “You have four minutes. Go. Goodbye.” Hathaleen, who said the soldiers had come at the request of settlers, filmed the confrontation on his phone, a potentially risky provocation – but one that ended peacefully. Hathaleen said his father, Siliman Hathleen, also a community activist fighting against demolitions, died after being hit by an Israeli police truck in 2022. His cousin, Awdah Hathaleen, a consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was shot dead in the village by a settler in July. In Palestinian villages south of Nablus, representatives of agricultural cooperatives and women’s organisations told us of attacks from settlers descending from the hilltops to beat them up, destroy property and spread a poisonous white powder that killed crops. In one village, farmers, coming up with ingenious ways to counter this, had started growing vegetables in barrels filled with uncontaminated soil. * * * Is it possible that anger with Israeli military incursions and settler attacks – not to mention the destruction of Gaza – will provoke large-scale retaliation, a third intifada, in the West Bank? The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in a poll in October, found 49% of Palestinians in the West Bank – and 30% in Gaza – still favoured armed struggle as the most effective way to achieve a Palestinian state. Abdaljawad Omar, assistant professor of philosophy at Birzeit, who goes under the pen name Abboud Hamayel, is sceptical about the possibility. He has written a forthcoming book about the Palestinian resistance. He does not advocate a return to violence but regretted the prevailing fatigue and paralysis, what he calls “emotional hollowing”. He said: “Anger has mutated into impotent resentment. Today stones are seldom thrown in the West Bank. This is something new … Resistance is slowly becoming a memory.” The hotbed of resistance in the second intifada was the refugee camps, many of which date back to 1948, when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes in what became the state of Israel. At the entrance to the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem there is an arch above which rests a huge key, symbolising the hope that one day its inhabitants might go back to Israel to reclaim their former homes. Around the walls of the camp are murals that range from a commemoration of Palestinian heroes, such as stone-throwing youths and guerilla fighter Leila Khaled, to an unflattering painting of US president Donald Trump. Rushing to prayers at midday one Friday, residents had little time to talk but were dismissive of the ceasefire in Gaza – “What ceasefire?” – and ridiculed Trump’s plan for a Gaza Riviera. The one-tonne metal key fixed above the arch and the murals celebrating resistance feel like symbols from a bygone age, an era that is slipping away, not least because the dream of the refugees of a return to their original homes in Israel is almost certainly never going to be fulfilled. I interviewed a father in another of the camps in Bethlehem during the second intifada who was adamant he, like the other residents, would not leave the camp other than to return to his original home. Does that diehard stubbornness still exist? A former resident of the camps expressed surprise on hearing that families who had been among the most intractable were considering for the first time leaving, ground down, in part, by unemployment, poverty and debt.
The Israeli military is not waiting for them to leave. Earlier this year the IDF demolished large parts of the three of the camps that have been on the frontline of resistance, during the second intifada and since 2023, all three in the north of the West Bank. Israel described the three as “hubs of terror”: Tulkarm, Nur Shams and Jenin. Palestinians said the Israeli military, through flyers and loudspeakers, warned the residents of Aida and other camps they, too, will be destroyed unless they behave. When the Israelis mounted an incursion into the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, they met fierce resistance. I interviewed an Israeli sergeant at the time, Israel Kaspi, a combat veteran who had seen service in the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and in Lebanon in 1982, who said the fighting in Jenin had been the most intense he had ever been involved in. The Palestinians had turned the refugee camp into a fortress, he said. Israel lost 23 soldiers as they fought from street to street, house to house, and room to room, amid booby-traps, explosives hidden in alleyways and in rubbish bins, dynamite sealed inside walls, and Palestinians firing from well-prepared positions. Earlier this year, when they attacked the camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams, the Israelis lost three soldiers but managed to empty the camps of a combined total of 30,000 residents, shattering close-knit communities and dispersing them to temporary accommodation elsewhere in the West Bank. An estimated 850 homes and other buildings were destroyed across the three camps. On a visit to the camps at Tulkarm and Nur Shams last month, I could see tracks of tanks or bulldozers in the muddy road but nothing inside, partly because it was dark but also because venturing further is dangerous. The Israeli military had warned that anyone trying to enter the camps would be shot. This was not an empty threat: three days later a cameraman, Fady Yasmeen, was shot during a protest near the entrance. I travelled to Tulkarm with Aseel Tork, who works for a not-for-profit organisation that runs community projects in rural areas, in particular for women and the young, the Bisan Centre for Research and Development. It was designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel in 2021, a move condemned by, among others, the United Nations office of the high commissioner of human rights. Tork told me that she believed a third intifada is impossible now. “When the first and second intifadas happened, the Palestinian community as a whole was looking out for one another. There were fewer divisions among us: ideologically, politically, geographically. Right now, we cannot – and have not – stood up for the people in Gaza the way we should have. If an intifada was going to happen, it would have happened after 7 and 8 October.” * * * At an event in Ramallah in November, titled Poetry after Gaza, a Kafka quote came up in conversation between a European and a Palestinian. I was to hear it again twice during the week from Palestinians in other settings. “Plenty of hope – for God, an infinite amount of hope – only not for us.” Where do Palestinians look for hope? Few answers are forthcoming. An overhaul of the Palestinian Authority? Elections are long overdue – but problematic from an international standpoint, given the level of professed support for Hamas. Is a two-state solution, an independent Palestine and Israel side by side, even viable, given how much land settlers now occupy in the West Bank? A one-state solution, with Israel as an enlarged apartheid state, in which Palestinians could fight for equal rights, backed by the international community, as in South Africa? One weary Palestinian writer, after declaring the two-state solution dead, said he would settle for a one-state solution if it just meant he would finally be able to move about freely.
A global campaign began last month for the release of Marwan Barghouti, widely regarded as the figure likeliest to unify the Palestinians. Barghouti, accused by Israel of being the leader of Fatah militants in the West Bank during the second intifada, has been in an Israeli jail since 2002, convicted on five counts of murder, which he denies. The longstanding Palestinian hope is that he could emerge from there as a Palestinian Nelson Mandela. Although he is Fatah, he is popular among supporters of Hamas and the other factions. I interviewed Barghouti in Ramallah the year before he was captured and wrote then that I thought he could a future leader. He was impressive but did not have the warmth of Mandela and to me he seemed, maybe unfairly, to be more of a street fighter than a political visionary. But perhaps he has changed while in prison, as Mandela did. Barghouti has been held in solitary confinement since the 7 October attack and been beaten by prison guards four times, the last, in September this year, leaving him unconscious, according to his son Arab. Barghouti was on a list of prisoners Hamas submitted to Israel to be freed as part of the October ceasefire deal. Although Israel released others convicted of murder, it refused to release Barghouti. Its decision may reflect Israel’s preference for a weak, malleable Palestinian leader, Abbas, to a potentially more forceful figure. Basem Ezbidi, a leading political scientist and member of the Al-Shabaka thinktank, who was at university with Barghouti, cautioned against expecting a political saviour. “In times of despair, people tend to create myths in which a superhero comes to the rescue,” he said. “People see Marwan Barghouti in that way. But he is not a man who makes miracles. He may be cleaner than others but it is not enough to be clean: you have to have the political skills and the right vision.” With a shortage of options from within, many Palestinians see the international community as their best hope, believing a turning point has been reached because of worldwide outrage over the destruction of Gaza. At the Birzeit conference, Saleh Hijazi, a policy coordinator for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, said more pressure had to be put on Israel by ending military ties, enforcing arrest warrants against Israelis accused of war crimes, divestment from complicit companies and expelling Israel from international bodies such as the UN, Fifa and the Olympics. Action is already being taken at state level, as in Malaysia, which closed down ports to Israeli ships, and even in Europe, he said. “We can now begin to see our South Africa moment arrive. But more escalation of BDS is needed.” Such campaigns might work in the long run, as they did in South Africa. But in the short or medium term they will not change the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, caught between a Palestinian Authority that cannot protect them and Israel, with its military clampdown and its out-of-control settlers. While the body count in the West Bank was higher during the second intifada, life was absolutely worse now in every other way, said Budour Hassan, a legal researcher at Amnesty International. Hassan, who is from Nazareth, said: “Even back then there was hope, maybe. Now the people seem completely desperate. They feel completely abandoned.”
For the past two years, Manger Square in Bethlehem has been deliberately left in darkness and silence at Christmas time in a show of solidarity with Gaza. On 6 December, the Bethlehem mayor relit the Christmas tree in front of thousands of Palestinians – Muslims as well as Christians – and a scattering of visitors from around the world. Canawati hoped the resumption of festivities will revive tourism. He viewed the relighting of the tree as a symbol of hope and resilience. “Those who lost hope, they have left,” Canawati told me. (Since 2023, an estimated 4,000 Palestinians have left Bethlehem for abroad.) “I will never leave, regardless of what is going to happen. I know there are many like me,” Canawati said. Describing himself as an optimist, he hoped the reaction to Gaza will push world leaders into supporting the Palestinian cause, and that negotiations initiated by Trump will lead to a peace deal and a sovereign Palestinian state. But he tempered this with dismay over extremists in the Israeli cabinet and among the settlers. Echoing the despair I found around the West Bank, the mayor said: “The extremists do not want a two-state solution or a one-state solution. The extremists do not want to give us our state or be part of their state. They want the land without the people. They just want us gone.” • Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
