While everyone was focused on Gaza after October 7th, there were really significant both Israeli army actions in terms of cleaning out refugee camps in the West Bank, but also an ever-increasing amount of attacks on Palestinian civilians that had been going on.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm senior editor Scott R. Anderson, joined by Joel Bronald, managing director of the Center Project, for the latest in our regular series on developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the next administration, there's also going to be this desire saying, what are you for when it comes to the Palestinians?

What are you for? We need to be able to explain it and to talk about it.

And Netanyahu post, you know, October 7th has not said anything about what they're for.

And the only people have been able to say what they're for, have been Smotritch, Benegra and their crowd that are for ethnic cleansing, right?

For all the population to leave.

Today we're discussing violence in the West Bank, the new offensive in Lebanon, and what it all may mean for Israeli elections later this year.

So, Joel, the past several weeks, the world, and certainly here in the United States, people have been focused predominantly on Iran.

It's dominated the headlines.

We have an ongoing armed conflict that the United States and Israel are actively involved in with huge regional ramifications.

But while that issue has been dominating the headlines, a lot has been happening elsewhere in the region, kind of beneath the water level, going largely overlooked,

at least by kind of the mainstream top level media here in the United States and all

of other corners of the world. And really on the top of that list, at least for the issue

set that we cover in this series of conversations, it has to be West Bank violence.

Folks who've listened to our conversation before, listen to Lawfare Podcast before know that the Biden administration thought before October 7th

that West Bank violence was going to be the big flashpoint in Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

They were worried about Gaza, kind of subsumed that, but now the West Bank has come back. It's kind of always

been percolating a little bit in the background, and now it's really come back in a big way.

Talk to us about what we're seeing happen in the West Bank and where it's leading this broader

conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thanks, Scott, and it's good to be with you again.

Really, the level of, you know, extremist violence, some people say settler violence, some people say extremist violence, some people say state violence, and I can walk through why people use

...