Qusra: The Puzzle

Two points seemed to have slipped under the radar even as the settler tent erected outside three Palestinian homes next to Qusra in Area B inspired vigorous media attention condemning the youth and supporting the youth. These two items generated no more than a few words here and there. And those words did not seem to raise eyebrows.

For me, it led to an OMG-moment.

Part 1 of this series: Six Days under “Siege”: What the Reporting does not Resolve
Part 2: How Did a Tent Become a Siege?

The first thing that raised my eyebrows was the fact that Major General Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF’s Central Command overseeing military operations in Judea and Samaria, drove out to the site. I might be wrong, but I don’t remember him having driven out to other similar sites. I mainly remember the IDF having taken down illegal outposts quite unceremoniously – over and over if needed because the settlers often returned to rebuild.

Therefore, I wondered what was special about Qusra that required Bluth’s presence.

Then, five days after the event erupted, we were told that the army had given evacuation orders to 15 families in Qusra. Six families had already left their homes when the evacuation order was rescinded later that day.

That was the second thing that raised my eyebrows.

Some news reports claimed that the evacuation orders were given in relation to the need to conduct a military operation to remove the settlers and protect the local residents.

That made no sense to me: the three home where the tent was erected were isolated and over a kilometer from the center of Qusra so why did homes within Qusra need to be evacuated? Only Times of Israel seemed puzzled by the reason given for the evacuation orders:

It was unclear why the IDF needed to remove Palestinians from their homes in order to clear settlers from the area, but the IDF rescinded the evacuation order shortly after it began making headlines.

What the anti-settler articles consistently ignored and what the pro-settler articles consistently emphasized was that Qusra has a documented history of violence involving some of its residents, including attacks on Israeli hikers and shepherds and repeated stone-throwing at Israeli civilians and security forces. A Qusra resident had also been implicated in a Hamas cell responsible for two shooting attacks in 2015, one of them fatal.

I put that fact together with the evacuation orders and Bluth’s visit to the site and suddenly was hit with the possibility that a counterterrorism operation had been planned to take place in Qusra and that the youths, by setting up their tent, may have inadvertently foiled it. What an irony, I thought to myself: the Hilltop Youth justify their vigilantism on their view that the IDF does not do enough to fight Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews.

I had nothing to support that hypothesis, however. And I tried to get information about when the evacuation orders were really handed down. If it was before the tent was originally set up, I would have had my substantiating evidence. If it was after the tent, it would neither support nor contradict my theory.

I found nobody who could answer my question.

One of the people I spoke with was Maurice Hirsch, former director of the IDF Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria and now at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. We spoke on the phone.

Hirsch raised the possibility of a counterterrorism operation before I told him my thoughts.

He was unequivocal about one thing: The tent was erected in Area B, where Israel has no civil jurisdiction. Whatever else happened afterward, he said, the youths had no legitimate reason to establish themselves there. And once the IDF ordered them to leave, they should have left and stayed away. To those who argue that the Palestinians built illegally in Area B and these three homes served as a base from which terror attacks against Jews emanated, Israel has no authority to police construction violations in Areas A and B.

Continuing, he said:

The youths’ wrongdoing does not explain why dealing with them apparently required such a substantial military deployment or why 15 or 16 Palestinian houses were supposed to be evacuated and used as military positions.

By Wednesday evening, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir had ordered an additional standing-army infantry battalion into the Qusra area “to strengthen operational control,” with further forces placed on standby. The reinforcement was subsequently identified as Golani’s 51st Battalion. Border Police and other IDF forces were already operating at the site.

The counterterrorism hypothesis potentially explains the anomaly between the scale of this deployment and Avi Bluth’s involvement. After all, all of this cannot be accounted for by the “military problem” consisting of several youths on a sofa and mattresses under a makeshift tent, however close it was to the outlaying homes on the hill outside of Qusra.

But what became of the operation? We have heard nothing more about it and as of this writing, I understand that the youth are still camped out in the terrace beneath the three homes, with the IDF occupying one of the three homes.

Was an intended operation to clear Qusra of terrorists foiled by a group of Hilltop Youth who accuse the Israeli authorities of not doing enough to fight terrorism in Judea and Samaria?

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