Meanwhile, On Israel's Eastern Front...

With the new attention being paid to the front up north that Israel shares with Lebanon, one might forget that the West Bank has been relatively peaceful. Khaled Abu Toameh reported earlier this week in Analysis: Why has the West Bank been quiet?

A rally held here on Tuesday in solidarity with the Gaza Strip drew about 150 protesters. Similar demonstrations in other parts of the West Bank over the past 11 days have also attracted small numbers of Palestinians.

As the demonstrators in this city's central Manara Square chanted slogans condemning Israel as a "Nazi state" and calling on the Arabs to severe their ties with Israel and on Fatah and Hamas to join forces, shopkeepers did not shut their businesses to participate in the rally.

Nor did many passersby heed the protesters' appeal to join the rally. At the Stars & Bucks café overlooking the square, young men and women smoked water-pipes, sipped cappuccino and exchanged jokes, totally ignoring the protest and the graphic images broadcast on Al-Jazeera via an LCD screen hanging on the wall.

The general atmosphere in this city was not different from other places in the West Bank. While the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians in the West Bank continue to express their full solidarity with their brethren in the Gaza Strip, they have not gone a step further by resorting to widespread violence against the IDF and settlers.

In fact, the feeling here on Tuesday was that many Palestinians related to the war in Gaza as if it were happening in another country.

David Hazony comments on Toameh's observations:

All this leaves us with a small number of possibilities regarding the Palestinians, at least one of which must be true, but none of which fit well with the anti-Israel narrative:

1. That the “Arab street” is a myth, and that violent protests are always directed top-down, even in the face of so-called Israeli atrocities;

2. That West Bank Palestinians are starting to understand that renouncing terror and violence might have serious advantages;

3. That the destruction of the Hamas regime is of importance not only to the West, and not only to the tacitly supportive Egyptians, but even to most Palestinians, even at the cost of civilian casualties in Gaza;

4. That Palestinian national identity is a lot weaker than we are usually told — that West Bankers are more willing to support their local regime and way of life than their brethren in Gaza.

Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank might not feel as strongly about the Iranian threat as the Arab world leaders do, but they do not have any particular affection to Iran's puppet Hamas. There may be things that they dislike more than incompetency.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Gaza and Hamas and Operation Cast Lead.