Why Is Israeli-Palestinian Violence Returning to Jenin?

This trauma defined Jenin’s reputation, but less memorable events steered the city back toward a more peaceful existence. In 2005, the Israelis withdrew from four West Bank settlements in the Jenin region, the same week as the more dramatic Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. It rendered Jenin the only major West Bank town without a real settler presence in its immediate environs.

The absence of settlements changed completely the character of the IDF’s presence. Its troops were, on the one hand, much freer to enter the city and carry out arrests. And at the same time, they were not there protecting settlements or manning checkpoints around roads to settlements. This, combined with extensive U.S. and European involvement in training the local Palestinian police force, brought Jenin a surprising measure of quiet for a period of about fifteen years, buttressed by a quiet stream of Arab Israelis from across the Green Line coming to Jenin to shop, invest, and do business.

All this started coming apart with the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and the burgeoning internal rivalries of various Palestinian armed factions gearing up for an inevitable succession battle in the Palestinian Authority, as Abbas rounds out his ninth decade and begins the eighteenth year of a four-year term in office.

The Gaza conflict in May last year accelerated the return to violence. The escape of six militants (most of whom are members of PIJ) from a prison in northern Israel, just across the line from Jenin, also rallied fighters across the Palestinian territories. Lastly, IDF operations in the West Bank throughout 2021 resulted in an unusually high number of militant deaths.

These deaths prompted terrorist organizations in Jenin to reorganize and establish a joint operations room to respond to IDF incursions more effectively. The result was a marked increase in clashes with IDF troops.

Exacerbating the problem in Jenin was a wave of high-profile terrorist attacks deep inside Israeli territory beginning in late March this year. In some cases, the attackers were identified as residents of Jenin, which intensified both the almost daily IDF operations in the city and the militant’s response to the added incursions.

Though investigations are ongoing, the daytime raids by the IDF were a possible contributing factor in casualties, as the IDF usually operates at night, when fewer pedestrians are around. On several occasions, including when Aqleh and an Israeli counter-terrorism officer, Noam Raz were killed, the IDF operated in Jenin during the day.

At the extremes of violence and of (relative) quiet, Jenin, a city with little religious or symbolic importance to either Jews or Arabs, told its own story of conflict.

Once the nest of suicide bombers and Israel’s most aggressive military action in the West Bank, it became an island of calm. The combination of foreign training for Palestinian police, the evacuation of nearby Israeli settlements, and the continued presence of the IDF was something of an experiment in “managing the conflict.” Two months into a renewed wave of violence centered around Jenin again, that experiment might be nearing its end.

Shany Mor is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Follow Shany on Twitter @ShMMor. Joe Truzman is a research analyst at the Long War Journal, a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan research institute. Follow Joe on Twitter @JoeTruzman. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.