Among Palestinians and
Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the
children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a
distinguishing feature of this round of clashes. The steady erosion of Fatah
and Hamas’ authority during the post-Oslo years, as the Palestinian factions
proved incapable of protecting their people from the structural violence of the
occupation, has driven Palestine’s orphaned children to the streets, armed with
stones. The growing hopelessness and sense of abandonment have led a few
so-called “lone wolves” to vent their fury on Israelis with improvised weapons
such as knives, screwdrivers and cars. These attacks have attracted the most
publicity, becoming the equivalent of the second intifada’s suicide bomber. But
they serve chiefly as a barometer of Palestinian despair. Jerusalem is the
centre of events, with the Palestinians’ only unifying symbol, Al Aqsa mosque,
at its heart. For Palestinians, the incremental takeover of the compound – and
the West’s indifference – is like watching the mass dispossession of 1948 play
out again in slow motion. In addition, Jerusalem is the main fault line.
Israel’s illegal annexation of the city has left Palestinians there in an
extreme form of isolation – indefinitely stateless and supremely vulnerable.
And finally, the
smartphone camera has allowed Palestinians to document their suffering and
witness unmediated their compatriots’ personal acts of resistance and
self-sacrifice. Futile knife attacks may appal outsiders, but for many
Palestinians they are the moment when an individual briefly reclaims his or her
agency and fights back on behalf of a collectively subjugated and humiliated
people. The need for so many different labels for these events reveals another
important facet of the current Palestinian struggle: its disorganised nature. Israel
has almost completed the division and enclosure of Palestinians into
disconnected enclaves. As they hear the sound of the prison doors closing,
Palestinian youths are lashing out at the guards closest to hand. Because the
divisions between Palestinian populations have become so entrenched
geographically, and their leaders politically, it is hard for Palestinians to
find any unifying vision or organising principle. Do they fight first against
their occupiers or their spent leadership? But the lack of planning and
discipline has exposed Israel’s own limitations too. Israel has little but
stopgap measures to defend against the protests. Its intelligence agencies
cannot predict the lone wolf, its guns cannot deter the knife, its military
might cannot subdue the craving for justice and dignity. Strangely, in the face
of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on
the Israeli side. Lynch mobs of Jews patrol Jerusalem and Israeli cities,
calling out “Death to the Arabs!” A jittery soldier causes pandemonium by
firing his rifle in a train carriage after a bogus terror alert. An Israeli Jew
stabs another because he looks “Arab”.
Meanwhile, politicians and
police commanders stoke the fear. They call for citizens to take the law into
their own hands. Palestinian workers are banned from Jewish towns. Israeli
supermarkets remove knives from shelves, while 8,000 Israelis queue up for guns
in the first 24 hours after permit rules are eased. Some of this reflects a
hysteria, a heightened sense of victimhood among Israelis, fuelled by the knife
attack videos. But the mood dates to before the current upheavals. It is also a
sign of the gradual leaching of the settler’s lawlessness into the mainstream.
A popular slogan from the past weeks is: “The army’s hands are tied.” Israeli
civilians presumably believe they must take up arms instead. After six
uninterrupted years of the extreme right in power, Israelis don’t blame their
government’s policy of relentless force for the backlash. They demand yet more
force against the Palestinians. Polls show Avigdor Lieberman, the former
Moldovan bouncer who became the hard man of the Israeli right, is most favoured
to lead the nation out of the crisis. Solutions are being applied most savagely
in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians are being locked even more tightly into
neighbourhood ghettoes. Israel’s “eternal, unified capital” is being carved up
by roadblocks. Palestinian residents are made to endure daily searches and
insults that will sow the seeds of yet more fury and resistance. As Israel
tries to slam shut the door of one prison cell in Jerusalem, the inmates
threaten to break open the door of another, in Gaza. Israel’s leadership has
watched uneasily the repeated breaches of Gaza’s fence over the past week by
youths enraged by their own misery and what they see happening in the other
prison wings. The current unrest may recede, but more waves of protest of ever
greater intensity are surely not far behind. Jafar Farah, a Palestinian leader
in Israel, has warned of it heading slowly from a national conflict into a
civil war, one defined by the kind of debased one-state solution Israel is
imposing. The chaotic violence of the past weeks looks like a warning from the
future – a future Israel is hurtling towards.
Jonathan Cook is an
award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of three
books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Blood and Religion: The
Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008)
Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair (2008)
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