Analysis

Ramallah semi-closure highlights murkiness of Israel’s aims

Op-Ed: From closure to easing of restrictions to total removal of roadblocks within 24 hours -- a message is sent but its content is unclear

By Avi Issacharoff
  • Avi Issacharoff, The Times of Israel's Middle East analyst, fills the same role for Walla, the leading portal in Israel. He is also a guest commentator on many different radio shows and current affairs programs on television. Until 2012, he was a reporter and commentator on Arab affairs for the Haaretz newspaper. He also lectures on modern Palestinian history at Tel Aviv University, and is currently writing a script for an action-drama series for the Israeli satellite Television "YES." Born in Jerusalem, he graduated cum laude from Ben Gurion University with a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies and then earned his M.A. from Tel Aviv University on the same subject, also cum laude. A fluent Arabic speaker, Avi was the Middle East Affairs correspondent for Israeli Public Radio covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq and the Arab countries between the years 2003-2006. Avi directed and edited short documentary films on Israeli television programs dealing with the Middle East. In 2002 he won the "best reporter" award for the "Israel Radio” for his coverage of the second intifada. In 2004, together with Amos Harel, he wrote "The Seventh War - How we won and why we lost the war with the Palestinians." A year later the book won an award from the Institute for Strategic Studies for containing the best research on security affairs in Israel. In 2008, Issacharoff and Harel published their second book, entitled "34 Days - The Story of the Second Lebanon War," which won the same prize.
 2 February 2016, 4:07 pm
An Israeli soldier stands guard at a checkpoint near the Beit El settlement on the outskirts of West Bank city of Ramallah, on a road linking Ramallah and Jerusalem on February 1, 2016. (AFP/Thomas Coex)

The confusion began on Sunday evening. The Palestinian liaison commander announced to local media that he had received an order from Israel that, on Monday, access to Ramallah would be blocked to everyone except the city’s residents.

On Monday morning, it emerged that this was not exactly the case. That is, people who didn’t live in Ramallah were allowed to enter, but residents were not allowed to leave.

And so we went back to the days of the Second Intifada when blockades would be imposed on the de facto capital of Palestine, the seat of the Palestinian Authority government — usually focused on the western side of the city.

After only a few hours, an easing of the so-called closure was reported and the evening brought an announcement that the measure had been lifted completely.

If someone can explain what happened here during the course of less than 24 hours that so changed the situation — from a siege of Ramallah to a partial closure to a removal of all the roadblocks that had been put in place — I’d like to hear it.

You don’t need a rich imagination to understand that this was a kind of punishment or a message from Israel to the Palestinian Authority following Sunday’s attack by Amjad Sakari, a member of the PA security forces, on an Israeli army checkpoint near Beit El in the West Bank, which wounded three Israeli soldiers.

The question is what this message was supposed to achieve. The Israelis are not claiming that this policeman acted under the influence of his superiors or that he followed an order. On the Israeli side, it’s understood that Sakari acted on his own initiative, inspired by stabbing attacks and the Intifada of the Lone Wolves.

So did Israel want to pressure the PA to check out its people better? Perhaps to even erect a barrier to examine people coming from Ramallah to the checkpoint? Maybe. But the next time a Palestinian policeman decides to carry out a terror attack, the erection of roadblocks around the city will only give him better access to a few more Israeli targets.

Or perhaps the decision to impose a halfhearted siege on Ramallah, the PA’s center of government, was actually aimed at showing the Israeli public that Israel was doing something?

It could be anything. Maybe there was a double message here — one to the PA to carry out better checks on its soldiers and police, and the second to the Israeli public to say “We’re not letting the PA off and we are pressuring it to act.”

A third message — of collective punishment — was perhaps aimed at the Palestinian street: Just as a closure had been imposed on the village of Seir, near Hebron, for almost two weeks and almost nobody heard about it, Israel will also impose a siege, if needed, on the center of Palestinian government.

As for the efficacy of such a move in preventing the next attack, that’s a whole other question whose answer, sadly, is not affirmative.

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