Palestine at the Heart of the Regional Transformation: The West Bank Moves to the Fore as the Balance of Power Shifts*
By Michel Shehadeh
Palestine can no longer be understood as a political island, isolated from the developments unfolding around it. From Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and from the Strait of Hormuz to Bab al-Mandab, war, negotiations, economics and elections are becoming intertwined within a single regional landscape. Pressure exerted in one arena reverberates across another, while maritime corridors, energy markets and ballot boxes have all become part of the same equation of conflict.
At the heart of this landscape, Gaza remains an open wound. Siege, hunger, thirst and destruction dominate people’s daily lives, while hundreds of thousands live amid rubble and temporary shelters. Yet the fundamental political question remains unresolved: what comes first — an Israeli withdrawal or the disarmament of the resistance?
The resistance insists on the reciprocal and sequential implementation of the agreement, beginning with the completion of its first phase and an Israeli withdrawal. Israel, by contrast, seeks to secure the resistance’s disarmament first, leaving itself free afterwards to retreat from its commitments, as it has done with previous agreements.
This is where the fundamental danger lies: the resistance could take an irreversible step in exchange for promises from which Israel could subsequently retreat. This is not merely a procedural dispute. It is an attempt to obtain politically what the war failed to impose by force.
But despite the magnitude of Gaza’s tragedy, it is no longer the only centre of danger. The West Bank is increasingly moving to the forefront and may become the most sensitive arena of the Palestinian struggle in the coming phase.
The West Bank occupies a particular place within the Zionist project — not only geographically and strategically, but ideologically and religiously as well. The Zionist right, in both its nationalist and religious forms, regards it as part of its biblical and historical vision. This helps explain the drive by the Netanyahu government, alongside Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, to create realities on the ground that would make the annexation of large parts of the territory extremely difficult to reverse.
The E1 project is a striking example. It is not simply about constructing thousands of settlement housing units. It would connect Jerusalem with Ma’ale Adumim through a settlement bloc that disrupts Palestinian geographical continuity, separates Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings and deepens the division between the northern and southern West Bank. When Smotrich speaks of “burying” the idea of a Palestinian state, he is stating the objective without ambiguity.
It would therefore be a mistake to regard settler attacks on Palestinian villages as merely random outbreaks of violence. Settlers exert pressure on the Palestinian presence precisely where it is most vulnerable: villages, grazing lands, agricultural areas, water sources and roads. They attack shepherds and farmers, burn crops, uproot trees and block roads, turning the very act of remaining on the land into a daily struggle.
The result is clear: Palestinians are pushed away from open areas and gradually confined to increasingly crowded cantons, while Israeli control expands around them. Not every settler needs to have participated in designing such a plan; in practice, however, settlers become instruments of a systematic project that reshapes geography and demography simultaneously. Preventing a shepherd from reaching grazing land, attacking a farmer, burning a home or killing someone is not simply an assault on an individual. It contributes to determining who is able to remain and who is pushed into leaving.
Here, one of the most serious Palestinian weaknesses becomes apparent. The West Bank faces an escalating existential assault without a unified national leadership capable of organising society and mobilising its resources. The resistance there has suffered severe blows, while the continuation of security coordination, the Palestinian Authority’s adherence to the Oslo framework and its hostility towards the resistance have contributed to stifling resistance activity and restricting even peaceful popular mobilisation.
The Authority has consequently become, in practice, a functional structure operating within the system of occupation, maintaining the stability of the existing settler-colonial order and linking its own survival to the continuation of that order.
Responsibility, however, does not lie with the Authority alone. Palestinian factions, political forces and elites have also failed to fill the vacuum. They have not transformed widespread public anger into an organised movement capable of protecting villages, supporting farmers, establishing early-warning and relief networks, mobilising universities, trade unions and municipalities, or developing an economy of resistance that enables people to remain on their land.
This does not necessarily mean armed action. It can mean popular committees, protecting the olive harvest, support funds, agricultural cooperatives, emergency medical networks, legal and media teams, and connecting villages with one another so that they do not have to confront settlers alone.
Amid all this, Mr Abbas and the Fatah leadership are approaching elections as though they are certain to take place, ignoring the fact that the final decision remains subject to the will of Israel and Washington, and that the electoral process itself can be obstructed — or its results overturned — whenever they conflict with Israeli or American political and security calculations, as the experience of the 2006 elections demonstrated.
Preparations nevertheless continue for the Palestinian National Council and legislative elections, as though the central question were how to redistribute influence within the politically exhausted institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has lost its national role, rather than how to prevent the land beneath those institutions from being seized.
The objection here is not to elections as a principle. Elections are both a right and a necessity in any functioning national political system. The question is: what kind of elections, for what purpose, and at what historical moment?
Do we rebuild the Palestine Liberation Organization on an inclusive national basis that restores the liberation and resistance project and its National Charter? Or do we reproduce the same system, with the same programme and dependencies, before covering it with a fresh layer of electoral legitimacy?
A ballot box does not create a national project, nor does it confer sovereignty. Elections themselves derive their legitimacy from a free national will and a liberation project capable of protecting the people’s right to make their own decisions. Elections that merely reproduce the same structure under occupation and political dependency do not establish national legitimacy; they provide only formal legitimacy to a system that has lost its national raison d’être.
The contradiction becomes even sharper as Israeli and American elections approach. Netanyahu, facing domestic pressures, may need escalation to mobilise the right, while Trump, under pressure from the economic costs of confrontation with Iran, may need to lower the temperature before the US midterm elections.
The electoral calculations of the two allies may therefore collide: one could need an expansion of the war, while the other seeks to contain it. Yet Washington no longer possesses the ability to control the rhythm of the conflict on its own, determining when the flames should spread and when they should be extinguished.
Iran, meanwhile, has held its ground and has not submitted to American conditions. Some issues Washington previously handled through dictates have now become part of broader regional negotiations.
The Strait of Hormuz provides a clear example. When navigation and the opening of maritime passages become matters for negotiation with Iran, this means the terms of the discussion have changed. This does not mean that Iran has won or that the United States has been defeated. Rather, it means that the policy of pressure has failed to produce surrender, and that Israeli-American military superiority has not translated into a decisive political outcome.
Yemen has added another dimension. What might politically be called the “Bab al-Mandab Flood” has overturned the image that Ansar Allah’s opponents sought to establish — that the movement was besieged and approaching its end.
Bab al-Mandab is not merely a local Yemeni front. It is one of the arteries of global trade, and whoever possesses the ability to influence it holds leverage extending far beyond Yemen. The implication is clear: the initiative is shifting towards the Axis of Resistance, even if the struggle remains far from decided.
But we must not fall into the illusion of an easy victory. Israel still possesses enormous military power backed by extensive American support, while Washington remains the most influential international power. Yet the problem confronting the American-Israeli camp has become increasingly apparent: military superiority alone is no longer sufficient to produce the desired political outcomes.
Israel can destroy and kill, but it has not been able to decisively settle any front in a way that produces the regional political order it seeks. The United States can bomb, impose sieges and enforce sanctions, yet it has failed to subjugate Iran and reshape the region according to its will. Military power loses much of its value when it cannot be converted into lasting political gains.
At the same time, resistance forces have demonstrated an ability to endure, take the initiative and acquire sources of leverage, although they continue to pay an enormous human and economic price.
What is needed, therefore, is neither naïve optimism nor a culture of defeat, but a cool mind and a passionate will: to see the balance of power as it really is, to transform steadfastness into organisation, organisation into action, and action into an accumulation of achievements capable of altering that balance.
In Palestine, I see no question more urgent than the West Bank.
While the Oslo system and those who remain under the illusion that institutions can simply be rearranged through ballot boxes under occupation remain preoccupied with electoral politics, the geography itself is changing at a dangerous pace.
The settler is no longer merely behind the fence of a settlement. Settlers have entered the villages themselves. In many places, the confrontation has become immediate and direct: over the home, the field, water, livestock and the road — and over a person’s ability to remain where they were born, and for them and their family simply to stay alive.
Unless a national and popular framework capable of protecting villages, organising society, supporting farmers, keeping people rooted in their land and filling the vacuum created by the Authority’s dependency and the failures of the factions and elites is rapidly established, we may find ourselves confronting a tragic paradox: Palestinians could remain consumed by arguments over elections and institutional reform while the settlement project reshapes Palestine itself.
What institutions will there be to rebuild if the land they are supposed to represent is being seized piece by piece?
For this reason, the West Bank may become the central Palestinian battle of the coming period: a struggle over land and people, villages and memory, and ultimately survival — a struggle over all of Palestine.
It is a struggle over whether an actual homeland will remain, one in which tomorrow we can disagree about the form of its state and its political system, or whether, after years of debates, conferences and elections, we will discover that the land was being pulled from beneath our feet while we argued over who would sit in the chair above it.
* TLF Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Arabic by Raialyoum on 19 September 2026 and was translated into English by The Levant Files (TLF). The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Levant Files.