Israel Escalates Its Attacks on the West Bank as Biden’s Failure Becomes Trump’s Complicity

One can argue at length about the motivations of the incoming Trump administration, and whether this is their way of disassociating themselves from what has largely been categorised as ‘Biden’s war’, but what cannot be disputed is that the Biden administration could have pressured Netanyahu into finalising a ceasefire agreement and ending the extermination campaign in Gaza but refused to do so. Instead the outgoing lame duck administration stymied all negotiation efforts and continued to flood Israel with arms, military equipment and fronted a humiliating publicity campaign that saw State Department mouthpieces defending every criminal act perpetuated by their client state, leading to the likes of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken being described as the “Secretary of Genocide”. Historian Assal Rad, author of ‘The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran’, wrote that “Biden could have ended this horror over a year ago, [and] the devastation could have been prevented, an entire generation of trauma avoided, but he chose to aid Israel’s slaughter at every turn. He chose genocide.” 

The ceasefire, while a much needed reprieve from Israel’s reign of terror, is arguably a defining and colossal failure for Israel and the United States, emphasized by the fact that Palestinian resistance fighters not only fought for over a year, but persisted until the final days of negotiations, even after the assasination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Despite attempts by the Biden administration to take credit for this latest deal between Hamas and Israel, evidence reveals that their public insistence that non-stop efforts were being made to secure a diplomatic resolution to the war in Gaza were nothing more than a farce—a long-winded publicity stunt exposed not only by the admissions made by ambassador Jack Lew, but in how swiftly Trump envoy Steve Witkoff was able to pressure Netanyahu into finalising an agreement, even after the Israeli regime’s latest attempts to impede a final deal. No leverage had ever been applied to bring about a just resolution to this war, because at the helm was an administration that saw the opportunity to bring about an end to Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza, help Israel expand its occupation of the West Bank, and target the wider axis of resistance in the region. 

What remains to be seen is how Donald Trump and his Middle East envoy will react—politically and militarily—to the current war being waged on the West Bank, where dozens have been killed after Israeli attacks on Jenin refugee camp, with help from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which acts as a loyal arm of the occupation inside the West Bank. This may well become another violent quagmire which will pose its own risks for the United States’ plan for the region, as Israel moves to capture more territories and expand its net of security, implemented in part by complicit PA Forces who work at the behest of Israel to quash any and all resistance in the West Bank. 

Tamara Nassar, associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, argues that “[t]he deadly campaign in Jenin appears to be a bid by the Palestinian Authority to demonstrate its loyalty and effectiveness to its Israeli overlords, as well as the incoming U.S. administration under President-elect Donald Trump.” The war on Jenin—known as “the capital of Palestinian resistance”—continues, where Israeli forces are now destroying civilian infrastructure, and members of the Palestinian Authority are detaining and torturing Palestinian civilians and fighters. In spite of ongoing attacks on Jenin, the Trump administration’s UN ambassador pick, Elise Stefanik, has made a clear position on the West Bank—that Israel has a biblical right to the land. While this is a wider rhetorical shift than the previous administration, the United States has historically done little in the way of actually applying sanctions against those arming Israeli settlers or preventing settlements from continuing. One thing is abundantly clear, as the Gaza ceasefire seems likely to hold, what this will mean for the West Bank and what challenges await the people of occupied Palestine under a Trump administration are still to be seen.