What is causing the deadly flare-up between Israelis and Palestinians?
What is causing the deadly flare-up between Israelis and Palestinians?
A rash of near-daily stabbings and other attacks has been sowing panic in Israel and raising fear of another deadly Palestinian uprising.
In a sign of how fraught the atmosphere has become, a Jewish man was shot dead in Jerusalem late Wednesday in a scuffle with Israeli soldiers who suspected that he was a Palestinian assailant. An Eritrean asylum-seeker died in similar circumstances Sunday.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Germany on Thursday in a bid to help quell the violence that has claimed the lives of at least nine other Israelis and nearly 50 Palestinians in recent weeks. They include more than 20 people who Israeli authorities say were carrying out attacks or were about to do so.
The bloodshed started to escalate after Israeli police clashed with Palestinian youth at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque compound Sept. 13. Authorities said they raided the site to head off attempts by Palestinians to disrupt visits by Jewish residents and foreign tourists before the start of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana.
Such clashes are an all-too-familiar occurrence on the eve of Jewish holidays. But this time, the violence quickly spread to Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
There is a growing suspicion among Palestinians that Israel intends to interfere with the privileges accorded to Muslims at the holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City, which also is revered by Jews.Why now?
Analysts also point to the despair among Palestinians about the fruitless peace talks with Israel, which broke down over a year ago; frustration with their own leaders; and the galvanizing effect of social media.
Tension over the holy site
The site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary is among the holiest of both faiths. It is located in territory that Israel seized from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War but continues to be administered by an Islamic trust, under the kingdom’s custodianship.
Jews have access to the hilltop plaza that houses Al Aqsa mosque and another Muslim landmark, the Dome of the Rock. But they are not allowed to pray there. Instead, they gather at the nearby Western Wall, the last standing remnant of a temple that was the center of Jewish life for centuries before it was destroyed by the Romans in 70.
Netanyahu has said repeatedly that there will be no change to the status quo. He has accused Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, of inciting the violence by making unfounded accusations against Israel.
But an increase in the number of visits by Jews, including groups agitating for greater access and prayer rights, has fanned rumors that Israel is secretly seeking to alter the arrangements.
“Israel is touching a very critical point, and that is Al Aqsa mosque,” said Nashat Aqtash, a communications professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “It has a plan to control part or all of Al Aqsa. That's why Palestinians are reacting this way.”
Palestinian frustration
The violence is happening against a backdrop of widespread disillusionment among Palestinians with Abbas, whose strategy of cooperating with Israel has not delivered an end to Israeli military occupation and settlement building in territory claimed for an independent Palestinian state. Some two-thirds of Palestinian respondents wanted Abbas to resign in a poll conducted last month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“This is as much a protest against the Palestinian Authority and Abu Mazen as it is against the Israeli occupation,” said Elie Podeh, a professor of Middle East studies at Hebrew University, using a popular nickname for Abbas.
Is this the start of a third intifada?
Many experts have resisted affixing the label of “intifada” to the current wave of violence and protests, which have not yet reached the level of intensity or organization of previous Palestinian uprisings.
The intifadas that began in 1987 and 2000, although very different in character, were both driven by Palestinian factions with battlefield weapons and suicide bombers at their command. And both were confronted with the full might of the Israeli military.
The latest attacks have been primarily of the “lone wolf” variety, using everyday objects such as knives and cars driven into crowds. Some observers note, however, that there were ebbs and flows to the previous uprisings.
Leaders of the militant group Hamas and other prominent Palestinians already are calling this the Jerusalem intifada.
In Aqtash’s opinion, it began more than a year ago, after the torture and killing of a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem by Jewish extremists in reprisal for the abduction and fatal shootings of three Israeli yeshiva students in the West Bank.
“What makes this intifada different from previous ones is that it has no leaders, no funding, and it is [driven] by personal decisions,” Aqtash said. “That makes it tough for Israel to deal with ... because there is no leader they can pin the blame on or talk to.”
What has been the response from Israel’s government?
Netanyahu’s government has sought to snuff out the violence by deploying police and soldiers across Jerusalem, closing off some Palestinian areas and restricting access to Al Aqsa mosque during periods of heightened tension.
Israel’s security cabinet also has approved measures instituting stiffer penalties for stone-throwing, blamed in several fatal car crashes, and has given police greater latitude to fire live ammunition when they believe lives are in danger.
Israeli civilians who are licensed to carry weapons have been encouraged to do so.
How are Palestinian leaders responding?
Despite some heated rhetoric, Abbas has not stopped security cooperation with Israel and has repeatedly called for calm, warning against an intifada “which we don’t want.”
Such appeals may resonate in the West Bank. But that does not appear to be the case with many young Palestinians in Jerusalem, where the Palestinian Authority has no control. Most of those taking part in attacks and protests there are too young to remember the death and destruction of the last intifada.
Other Palestinian leaders, including from Hamas, have been encouraging Palestinians to resist Israel.
How is this likely to play out?
Few are willing to hazard a guess at how long the flare-up might last.
Diplomatic efforts to end to the violence began this week with a visit to the region by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Kerry plans to meet with Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah II over the weekend.
But even if calm is restored, experts warn it is only a matter of time before another wave of unrest.
“We haven’t even begun solving the real problems,” Podeh said. “So long as these remain ... these waves will keep coming.”
Tags
Who is online
193 visitors
"East Jerusalem is the laboratory of the Israeli right's half-articulated vision of the future: a single state in which Palestinians are excluded from the polity. Nearly all East Jerusalemites have the status of legal residents but not citizens of Israel. The number who have found a place in the Israeli economy as professionals has risen in recent years. For many years, East Jerusalemites who depend on the Israeli economy have told me that they just try not to think about the future, because the present is untenable but so is dividing the city politically if that means splitting it economically. Israelis see Palestinian pharmacists in every drugstore. They do not visit East Jerusalem neighborhoods where there are no sidewalks, where there is a drastic shortage of classrooms, and where the dropout rate from high school is five times higher than in Israel. A few young people who see only this have decided that the glory of martyrdom is the best future they can imagine.
Since he entered politics, and certainly since he returned to the prime minister's office in 2009, Netanyahu has promoted a political mood that could be translated into American as, "When it don't rain, the roof don't leak, and when it rains I can't fix it, no how." When there's quiet, there's no reason to negotiate with the Palestinians. When there's violence, negotiating would be surrender. When there's violence, the only explanation that Netanyahu can offer is that Abbas is inciting it.
Netanyahu has marketed occupation as a sustainable status quo, as normalcy. Now normalcy has becoming waiting for phones to shiver and beep with the next bulletin of an attack, to hope it's not someone you know, and to hate yourself for hoping that."
"Israeli border police officer search a Palestinian youth at Damascus Gate of the Jerusalem's Old City in Jerusalem's ahead of Friday prayers, Friday, October 23, 2015.
he day passes quietly, which only seems like a deception. At 7:55 in the evening, the phones in the house start beeping news alerts. Sanity would require turning off the news notifications. Anxiety requires keeping them on.
The first bulletin on that particular evening says there is a shooting attack in the central bus station in Beersheba, in southern Israel. (I choose which attack to tell you about nearly randomly; the beeping news feels the same each time.) At least five people have been wounded. The number will go up; it always does. The next alert, nine minutes later, says there are two terrorists in the station. By 8:17 p.m. a two-sentence bulletin says one attacker has been shot dead, and the other wounded, but an angry crowd won't let the ambulance crew get to him. At 8:36, one of the people who was shot while waiting for a bus is dead. A little after nine at night, the picture shifts: The second "terrorist" was an Eritrean asylum-seeker, shot by the bus station security officer, who mistook him for a terrorist. The morning news will report his death, along with a police investigation of people in the crowd who assaulted him after he was shot.
The fact that the terrorist used a gun was unusual. Knives are the most common weapon, followed by cars. The Beersheba attacker was a 21-year-old Israeli Bedouin. That, too, was an exception. The standard profile is a young Palestinian from East Jerusalem. The youngest was 13 years old. It can happen anywhere.
Summer has ended, and with it the illusion of calm. The new season is one of fear. It makes sense to be afraid, because when you get on a bus you can't help thinking that in a minute someone could pull out a kitchen knife. It makes no sense to be afraid, because fear itself takes lives, like that of asylum-seeker Habtom Zarhum in Beersheba, like that of an Israeli security guard shot dead a few days later in Jerusalem by a soldier who thought he was a terrorist.
In the Beersheba attack, a soldier's gun played a different role: The terrorist was initially armed with a pistol, but he shot an off-duty soldier, took his gun, and began firing it. Since the knife attacks began, the army has gone back to having soldiers take their guns with them when off their bases. Instead of increasing security, the policy is escalating danger.
Already, very quickly, many Israelis talk about what's happening as a third Intifada, a Palestinian uprising. It could become that, but the label is being applied too quickly. The first Intifada began in 1987 with Palestinians pouring into the streets in Gaza and the West Bank to confront Israeli soldiers. The second began similarly in 2000. Afterward, Palestinian organizations—Fatah, Hamas, and others—began to direct what started as mass anger.
That could happen again, but so far demonstrations have been small. The Israeli security services are skilled at tracking terror cells, but in the current spasm of bloodshed there have been no cells to track or penetrate. A few dozen people, virtually all acting on their own, have carried out the attacks. Their weapons come from their kitchens, not from the explosives experts of an underground. No security agency yet knows how to read the thoughts of a lone person deciding that there's more meaning in dying violently than in living.
This isn't yet an uprising. It's despair expressed with knives.
It is absolutely political, because the despair is the product of Israeli policies under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of the failure of Palestinian leadership under Mahmud Abbas. It is apolitical, in that follows no strategy and has no goals. It is terror, in that the victims are mostly civilians, chosen randomly. And at the same time, the momentum of the attacks is a speeded-up version of American mass shootings. The social-media renown one killer gets in death spurs the next to act.
And not just social media: Jibril Rajoub, one of the leftover Fatah figures from the Yasser Arafat era and a self-appointed potential heir of the aging, exhausted Abbas, said on Palestinian television this week that he was "proud" of the attackers. Abbas's own astoundingly stupid comment that the 13-year-old who'd carried out a stabbing had been "executed" by Israel, when he was actually alive and being treated in an Israeli hospital, provided Netanyahu's PR machine with several days' fuel for his campaign accusing Abbas of incitement. Israeli military sources, meanwhile, tell reporters that Abbas's Palestinian Authority security services continue to cooperate with Israel to stop violence. And Netanyahu's comment blaming the Holocaust on a Palestinian nationalist, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, has utterly overshadowed Abbas's remark.
What could most easily transform a spate of attacks into a mass upheaval is an Israeli response that affects tens of thousands of people—and that's already happening. At the entrances to Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, police have set up roadblocks and checkpoints, making everyday travel into an ordeal for the city's Palestinians. Ironically, the tactic demonstrates again that Jerusalem is not united, that the Arab side of the city is the first-class cabin of occupied territory."
When you have people who are perpetual second class citizens, and see no hope for change in that, there will be be "trouble".
"Since he entered politics, and certainly since he returned to the prime minister's office in 2009, Netanyahu has promoted a political mood that could be translated into American as, "When it don't rain, the roof don't leak, and when it rains I can't fix it, no how." When there's quiet, there's no reason to negotiate with the Palestinians. When there's violence, negotiating would be surrender. When there's violence, the only explanation that Netanyahu can offer is that Abbas is inciting it.
Netanyahu has marketed occupation as a sustainable status quo, as normalcy. Now normalcy has becoming waiting for phones to shiver and beep with the next bulletin of an attack, to hope it's not someone you know, and to hate yourself for hoping that.""