The government is leading to an intifada

I don’t know whether the events in the West Bank over the weekend are an outbreak that can be contained or the opening shots of a third intifada. Israel’s security establishment is not particularly good at predicting intifadas: it refused, with its arrogance, to see the first intifada, in 1987. The writer David Grossman went down to the ground, saw, and warned—in the “Yellow Time,” the series of articles he wrote—but at the political level and in the IDF they preferred to close their eyes.

For the second intifada, in 2000, the army was deployed, but the preparations that were made did not help much when a wave of daily terror swept over the country. The third intifada, if it occurs, will be different from the two that preceded it: it will be the first to arise at the initiative of the Government of Israel and in accordance with its vision.

Many blame the current government for lack of initiative, for intellectual stagnation, and for failure in execution. As far as Arabs are concerned, this is a false blame. The renewed awakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon was initiated by the Government of Israel. “We lured them in, we brought them into a trap, and now we will eliminate them once and for all,” the ministers boasted. This was the opening signal of the drone attack that returned security to Hezbollah, caused unnecessary killing of our fighters, shook the residents of the North again, and produced Trump’s and his deputy Vance’s restraining orders.

I’m not sure Trump knows what he’s saying on a good day, but there is no way to interpret his words other than this: either you do everything that the president of Lebanon asks, or I open a stormy romance with Hezbollah. That is the big picture.

My heart is full of respect for every fighter and every female fighter who eliminate a Hezbollah terrorist or expose a hidden tunnel, but the decision was—and will not be—in their hands. A day will come, and they will understand.

The embarrassment in Lebanon is small money compared to what is happening in Judea and Samaria. Following the clashes over the last weekend, three narratives became fixed in Israel: the first, a harmless outing by citizens who love the Land of Israel, cut short by a murderous terror attack; the second, the military version—an excursion by settlers that was not coordinated with the army encountered an aggressive Palestinian gathering; the third—a group of Jewish lawbreakers invaded a Palestinian village and got tangled up.

Each of the narratives is disseminated when packaged with an operational demand. “You need to immediately carry out a broad military operation that will remove the Palestinian Authority and establish facts on the ground,” says Yossi Dagan, head of the regional council and the sheriff of Judea and Samaria. “You need to establish a farm on every hill,” says Israel Katz; “the defense minister needs to put the Jewish offenders under administrative detention,” says Yair Lapid and the other opposition spokespeople.

Each side in the internal Jewish dispute adopts its own narrative. Each one tells itself a story that, at best, is only partly true. That’s how it’s convenient.

I propose a fourth narrative: not a harmless outing and not a terror attack, not an uncoordinated excursion and not a reckless group of lawbreakers. The confrontation near the Gilad farm is one milestone among many, a chapter in the vision that the current Government of Israel adopted, in practice: a religious, ideological, political, military vision.

The travelers, like the rioters in the villages, are emissaries of the government. The government provides for them, protects them from punishment, keeps the army and the Shin Bet away from them, and pampers them with praise. They are the army of Yesha.

The plan is complex: it turns illegal outposts into illegal farms that, by a government decision, become legal. The farms, with the assistance of the army, take away from the local farmers the sources of their livelihood. The riots fit into the trend: they force them to flee to the cities, where they will be homeless. Mass transfer to the East will be the next stage. If the name is desired, there will be war, Armageddon, and after that the coming of the Messiah.

There are those who sow wind in the hope of reaping a storm. What enrages is that the IDF, the legal sovereign in the territories, has its head in the sand: the government is making a historic move, and in the Central Command they hide behind talk of isolated incidents—each one a tragedy in itself. All these things were said openly, by Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of Judea and Samaria in the Netanyahu government, and by others.

In the eyes of the commanders of the IDF, only the other side, the Arab side, has a vision (and indeed it does—and it is no less bloody and no less lethal than the vision of the current government). If the violent round over the weekend rolls over into a third intifada, the IDF will not be clean of responsibility for the blood that will be spilled.

The task of the commander of the command is to protect the Israelis who live in Area C, but he has an earlier task, anchored in the laws of the state and in international law: to be the sovereign, to impose his authority in the territory, to ensure the security of all residents. This is his military duty, his command duty, his legal duty; this is his job—with a knitted kippah or without it. His legal obligation overrides the directives of ministers and the dreams of rabbis.

His political views, if he has any, are irrelevant, as are his inner feelings. Avi Blot, the commander of the command, has only a few months left until his planned retirement, at the end of the year. This is his time to get his bearings.