The US failure behind Israel’s Jenin raid
Sean Durns
America’s close ally, Israel, has launched the largest military excursion in the West Bank in nearly two decades. And a decades-long, bipartisan United States policy failure is partially to blame.
On July 3, 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces entered Jenin, a city in the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank. Thousands of troops have taken part in the campaign, which also included targeted airstrikes. An Israeli government official said that “the goal of this extensive operation is to end Jenin’s role as a ‘city of refuge’ for terror, and it will last as long as it needs to.”
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Jenin has become a rising haven for U.S.-designated terrorist organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other groups that call for Israel’s destruction. For years, they’ve used the town as a base to plot and carry out attacks. More recently, Jenin has served as a de facto weapons factory. Palestinian terrorists have used the city to develop labs for rockets and improvised explosive devices. Israel has been clear that it won’t allow the development of such weaponry in its backyard.
However, the operation in Jenin really highlights the failure of the Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed entity that was created as part of the 1990s Oslo Peace Process. The PA is tasked with preventing terrorism, and its security forces are trained and armed by the United States, among others, to do just that. Instead of preventing terrorism, however, the PA pays tax-deductible salaries to those who carry out terrorist attacks. The PA has also incentivized terrorism in other ways.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas, head of its ruling Fatah movement, is deeply unpopular. The eighty-six-year-old Abbas is notoriously corrupt and has refused to hold elections since 2006. Increasingly autocratic, he has both imprisoned and exiled critics. The Palestine Legislative Council, the PA’s legislature, hasn’t met for nearly two decades. Abbas’s security forces and intelligence services have been accused of torture and human rights abuses.
But Abbas’s iron fist masks a brittle hand. The authority’s control of key towns has been slipping. Iranian-backed rivals of Fatah, like Hamas and PIJ, have seen growing support in the West Bank.
Iran covets the West Bank, hoping to turn it into another front to launch attacks into Israel. The high hills and strategic ground of the West Bank provide the Islamic Republic with greater reach into Israel — for both missile and terrorist attacks. Iran is turning the West Bank into an outpost for terrorism thanks, in part, to U.S. neglect. As Seth Frantzman, the head of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis noted, while the PA “had a duty to bring peace and security to people in Jenin,” it “systematically abandoned the city to extremists” tied to Iran.
Indeed, Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has announced that it’s taking part in the fighting in Jenin. And Abbas himself has condemned the IDF forces taking part in the counterterrorist operation as “another war crime.”
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The U.S. has failed to stave off the PA’s growing unpopularity and weakness, declining to pressure the authority to uphold the rule of law. Fixated on a “two-state solution” that Palestinian leaders like Abbas have repeatedly rejected, U.S. policymakers have infantilized Fatah’s leadership, failing to push for healthy institutions and a stop to the authority’s policy of rewarding terrorism.
The Palestinian Authority, birthed more than three decades ago, is a failure. It has failed the Palestinian people, rejected peace with Israel, and now it has left the door wide open for Iran.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.