By Bruce S. Ticker
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Off-duty Israeli police officer Elad Yaakov Winkelstein’s son was sitting in his car Monday morning when terrorists murdered the master sergeant, 35, in an Arab village in the northern West Bank. A few minutes earlier, terrorists fatally shot two elderly women, who were sisters-in-law, and injured eight people traveling on a bus.
After the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged, “We will reach the despicable murderers and settle accounts with them and with anyone who assisted them. No one will go unpunished.”
Instead of pursuing these criminals, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders might have prevented Monday’s tragedy – as well as many similar tragedies over the years – had they barred the construction of communities (a.k.a. settlements) in Israel’s territories in Gaza and the West Bank. Years ago, I was reading about 35 Israeli soldiers who were killed while serving in Israeli territories, and I abruptly whispered to myself, “They better get out of there.”
Defenders of the so-called settlements claim that Jews have a right to live in Gaza and the West Bank. They do. No argument there. They can note that Israel seized that land after it was attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967. Right again. They claim it as Jewish land, and I even lean toward believing that. God gave this land to the Jews, they might add. I feel uncomfortable using religious philosophy as an argument. Are they going to argue that sacrifices must be made to ensure that Jews run the territories?
That is where we differ. When Israelis move into these settlements, as they are widely known, they set themselves up as targets, relieving terrorists of the task of trekking to Tel Aviv to kill Israelis, though they still do that. Israel makes it much easier to kill Israeli Jews by constructing settlements. A terrorist murdered a 13-year-old girl in her bedroom, as one of three fatal home invasions that I can recall.
Before the government forced settlers to leave Gaza in 2005, a woman and her daughters were shot to death when killers stopped their car on a lonely road in Gaza. For decades, Israelis were killed in drive-by shootings in the West Bank, through accidental detours into Arab villages, chance encounters in isolated outdoorsy spots and other sites.
Since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, 46 people have since been killed in Israel and the West Bank in Palestinian terror attacks, according to The Times of Israel. Much of the mounting violence has occurred close to Jenin, Nablus and other Arab cities in the northern West Bank, locations where control by the Palestinian Authority has diminished throughout the years.
Monday’s incident occurred inside the Arab village of al-Fundug, which straddles a major artery traveled by thousands of Israeli and Arab drivers each day. Gunmen fired their assault weapons at a civilian car from a close range that killed Rachel Cohen and Aliza Raiz, both educators in their seventies. The terrorists then injured eight people in a bus farther away, which the Israel Defense Forces reported in an initial investigation, according to the Times.
An armed civilian fired a handgun at the terrorists as they shot at the bus, which prompted them to return to their car and flee, the Times reports. Apparently, none of the gunmen were injured. As they fled, the killers fired on another car almost 500 feet away which killed Winkelstein, the police officer. One of his two sons sat in the car when Winkelstein was shot, but the child was not harmed.
It would be ideal for Israel to reach a pact with the Palestinians, but failing that we can only struggle to preserve the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians. Extremists on both sides want too much as a desired outcome in this ongoing conflict, more than either can ever acquire through diplomacy. Many Arabs seek control over all of Israel and right-wing Israelis want to rule Gaza and the West Bank.
It is doubtful that either side will quietly give up what the other side demands. There is only one way for either party to win – a gruesome war that will produce countless deaths.
Why anyone would act to endanger people, especially their own brood, is too incomprehensible to figure out. They must be mentally unstable to put their own people in harm’s way for no practical reason.
I can understand why Jews believe that Gaza, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem belong to us. Israel won these territories during the Six-Day War of 1967 begun by its then-opponents. However, belief in a scenario that Israel may deserve is different from maintaining this land.
Israel places its own citizens in peril by plunking down a half-million of them in a land mass – the West Bank – that is populated by 3 million Arabs, many of them openly hostile to Israel.
The Jewish state already faced plenty of friction with the Arab world when it authorized settlement construction after the 1967 war. The establishment of these communities provoked the Arabs. They found the presence of their new neighbors convenient to murder Israelis and exploited it as an excuse to commit these crimes.
The military’s presence may have prevented far worse activity, but it sure was not sufficient to protect many Israelis.
If Israel needed to prevent terrorists from using these lands as a launching pad for war, it could have left a military presence there without the settlements.
Yet periodic attacks on both Israeli residents and the military is exactly what happened. We can readily predict that more Jews in the West Bank will join Elad Yaakov Winkelstein, Rachel Cohen and Aliza Raiz in the graveyards.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.
First, the term “West Bank,” which only came about as result of Jordan’s imperialist effort to expand its borders at the cost of the Jewish State, is only as old as the State of Israel. Before the Jordanian invasion, this region was always called Judea and Samaria. The land in question belongs to Israel under international law. Specifically, Article 6 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (preserved under Article 80 of the UN Charter) calls for “close Jewish settlement” on the land west of the Jordan river. Even the original version of the Palestinian National Charter — formulated in 1964, a full three years before the “West Bank” fell under Israeli administration — unequivocally forswears Palestinian claims to “any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Gaza.” It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source for exposing as bogus the Palestinian claim that the “West Bank” and Gaza comprise their “ancient homeland.”
Second, the unvarnished truth is that—correctly conceptualized—the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian-Arabs over the control of the Holy Land is a clash between two rival collectives, with irreconcilable foundational narratives. They are irreconcilable because the raison d’etre of the one is the preservation of Jewish political sovereignty in the Holy Land, while the raison d’etre of the other is the annulment of Jewish political sovereignty in the Holy Land—thus generating irreconcilable visions of homeland. As such, the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian-Arabs is an archetypical zero-sum game, in which the gains of one side imply an inevitable loss for the other.
It is, therefore, a clash involving protagonists with antithetical and mutually exclusive core objectives. Only one can emerge victorious, with the other vanquished. There are no consolation prizes.
Clayton, I try to limit use of the phrase “West Bank” because it implies that it is part of Jordan. However, that is the common phrase to describe that land. I also use the term “eastern territory.” I also appreciate the background information that you provide. I strongly lean to the view that all the land belongs to the Jewish people, but Israel likely can only acquire the land by force, which would mean loss of life on both sides.