A Simple Observation

Are all Palestinian Arabs at war with Israel?

It’s difficult to get clear information these days. That’s nothing new. But one thing I haven’t seen at all is any indication that Israel is at war with Fatah. Try your favorite LLM and search for military operations by the IDF in the West Bank. I know it is difficult for us to think ‘West Bank’ without immediately thinking ‘and Gaza Strip’ but they are separate geographical as well as separate political entities. At this moment in history if one would clump those two together for the sake of political rhetoric one might as well similarly say ‘Newark and Queens’, which are actually physically closer.

According to my sources, there was a two day military operation in Jenin in the West Bank conducted by the IDF in July of 2023 against Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This was the most intense confrontations since the Second Intifada. In the Jenin engagement 12 Palestinians were killed as was one Israeli. Jenin, by the way, is 85 miles northeast of Gaza, which is further than the distance between Newark and New Haven.

Jenin to Gaza

There were by recent estimates about 3 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank as compared to 2 million in Gaza before hostilities broke out last October. I can count.

As a crazy and ridiculous aside, I remember that during the Anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s, those many millions of Americans who supported or opposed Constructive Engagement had to scratch our heads about the political independence of Lesotho and Swaziland. In addition to Xhosas of Transkei and the Zulus of KwaZulu we had to reckon with the relative independent thinking of those groups in nine bantustans during the overall mess of negotiations. Or course they all came to be subsumed and recognized by the artistic symbolism of the musical Sarafina! starring Whoopi Goldberg. At this remove, the ethnic diversity of South Africans is not often considered, because we’re Americans and we have a long history of black and white thinking, now extended to Good vs Evil and other clumsy abstracts of the Middle East.

I know it’s often difficult to understand or wrap our minds around Christian physicists, black MAGA Americans, married homosexuals, Palestinian Arabs that are Israeli citizens & representatives in the Knesset or serving in the IDF or that there are Arabs who are Christian. I am convinced that there are quiet minorities of every sort who are ignored in our watercolor paintings of war and peace in that corner of the globe. But you’d think we’d actually pay a bit more attention to that majority of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank where no bombs are dropping.

I pay for enough Substacks and the WSJ to think I’m informed. Honestly, restack and retweet this if this is the first time you’ve really considered the difference between Hamas and Fatah in the past year, because I haven’t read it anywhere. Tell me more.