The Israeli-Palestinian violence that has people openly wondering if we’ve entered a Third Intifada is only getting worse. 32 Palestinians and 7 Israelis have been killed in Jerusalem over the past two weeks, and the situation promises to keep escalating right along with the severity of the Israeli security crackdown. Palestinian access to Al-Aqsa has once again been restricted to women, children, and men over the age of 50. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are being surrounded and cut off by Israeli police, and the Israelis are engaging in a favorite pastime, demolishing the homes of suspected Palestinian militants, that also happens to probably be a war crime. The Israeli government is even withholding the bodies of Palestinians that are killed . It’s all part of the Netanyahu government’s plan to “exact the full price” from any Palestinian attackers or would-be attackers. The Palestinian envoy to the UN is calling for a UN protection force in East Jerusalem to protect the Palestinians, but you’ll likely see Benjamin Netanyahu dancing a waltz with Ali Khamenei before you see anything like that.
The saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves” is of unknown origin, but if it didn’t already exist somebody would have to coin it to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict. Look, criminals are criminals, and any Palestinian (or anybody else) who attacks any Israeli (or anybody else) with a knife (or anything else) should be found and brought to justice. But it never seems to occur to anyone in the Israeli government that, just maybe, the way to prevent an isolated knife attack from turning into a trend and then a crisis is to, I don’t know, not do all this other cracking down shit. Maybe try not demolishing homes, or cutting people off from their holy sites, or laying siege to their neighborhoods and preventing their freedom of movement, or firing on crowds of people exercising their basic human right to protest unfair treatment by an occupying power (that’s in Gaza, but the principle still applies). These acts aren’t only incredibly counter-productive, but they also completely undercut the Palestinian Authority’s credibility, seeing as how they’re supposed to represent the interests of the Palestinian people but they’re also obliged to cooperate with Israeli security. The Israeli government specializes in escalating its security response to the point where it is impossible for the PA to fulfill both of those mandates.
Anyway, the immediate causes of this latest round of violence are numerous, and you can argue that trying to pinpoint the causes of any round of Israeli-Palestinian violence is a sucker’s game that inevitably leads you back to 1948 and earlier. But a wave of Palestinian knife attacks (and alleged knife attacks) against Israelis has been the justification for the Israeli crackdown. And what’s behind those knife attacks is a couple of Palestinian grievances, but chiefly it’s the simmering concern over Jewish visits to Al-Aqsa/the Temple Mount, and the fear that the Israeli government is at some point going to change the status of the site to allow non-Muslims to worship there. As I’ve written before, there’s a religious liberty principle here, the idea that people should be free to worship where they want, that I suspect resonates with most Americans (it resonates with me, to be honest). But in this case, religious liberty takes a backseat. Maybe an analogy would help.
I assume most of you reading this have a neighbor of some sort. Well, imagine that one day you rent a wrecking ball, and you drive it over to your neighbor’s yard. You ring the doorbell, and when your neighbor answers, you say “Hi Frank! Could you come out here on the yard with me for a second?” Then when he does that, you swing that wrecking ball right into his house and bring it crashing down. Then you go through the wreckage, pick out all of Frank’s family’s clothes (including whatever he’s wearing at the moment), shoes, money, and important personal documents, and toss them on a giant bonfire (well, maybe you keep the money; that wrecking ball wasn’t free). You find what’s left of his kitchen, collect anything that’s still edible, and either feed it to your dog or flush it down Frank’s toilet, which still works until you yank out his plumbing fixtures and sell them for scrap. You salvage any major appliances, electronics, artwork, furniture, etc., that survived the wrecking ball and sell those things on eBay, keeping the profits for yourself, though you maybe kick like 10% to Frank because you’re not a monster. Obviously you have to call child protective services and have them come and pick up Frank’s kids — I mean, he’s homeless and they’ve got no food, clothing, or plumbing, for Christ’s sake! Then you build a major expansion of your own home that eats up about 75% of Frank’s former yard.
In the end, all that Frank has left, as he stands there naked on the tiny remaining patch of his front lawn, is the pack of cigarettes that he had in his hand when he opened the door. And after you’ve done all these things to Frank, you turn to him, notice the pack, and say, “Hey, buddy, can I bum a smoke?” I wonder, do you think Frank will share his cigarettes with you (I mean, it’s just a cigarette), or do you think he’ll react badly? Now imagine that Frank is the Palestinians, you’re Israel, and the cigarettes are the sole right to worship at Al-Aqsa. It’s not entirely analogous, because opening the Al-Aqsa complex up to non-Muslim worshipers carries theological implications that sharing a pack of smokes does not, but still, the sole right to worship on that site is pretty much all the Palestinians have left. Forcing them to give that up, or taking access to the site away from them entirely, is just cruel, and would only invite more violence.
Now, the Israeli government has insisted that it has no plans to change the legal status of the site, but why should the Palestinians really believe that? Jewish visits to Al-Aqsa are up as the past rabbinical consensus mostly forbidding such visits has broken down, and more and more prominent individual Israeli voices have talked about the need for a status change. Netanyahu has had to bar members of his own cabinet from visiting the site, because some of them keep doing so presumably to provoke an angry Palestinian response. Israeli columnist Ben Caspit has called for Netanyahu to bar all Jewish access to the site in order to assuage Palestinian fears, but that is a political impossibility for a prime minister whose government is holding the slimmest of majorities in a coalition with parties that espouse opening it up to Jewish worshipers. Netanyahu also has to deal with the fact that the most extreme Jewish plans for Al-Aqsa, which are surely known to Palestinians, would not just open it up to Jewish worship, they would actually destroy the Muslim holy places in favor of rebuilding the Temple and reinstating animal sacrifice (!) there. There are also other contributing factors beyond the status of the holy site:
I think a second thing is disaffected Palestinian youth. In the last few days and weeks, a lot of these attacks have been perpetrated by teenagers. There’s clearly a sense of despair: I’m not sure this is always conscious, but part of that despair is driven by the inability of Palestinians to achieve their national goal of self-determination. The occupation continues, settlements continue to grow. There are also interrelated economic problems: high unemployment and underemployment on the Palestinian side, for example.
I’d also talk about social media. Netanyahu talks a lot about incitement — he’s constantly pinning it on [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas. But that’s not what I’m hearing people talk about. It’s social media, at the grassroots level: I saw someone on Twitter today talking about snuff films. The fact that everyone has a camera in their pocket now — you can’t get away from the role that social media is [playing in] helping feed the appetite for this on both sides, and certainly among Palestinian youth.
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The Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem are not controlled by the Palestinian Authority. [Times of Israel reporter] Avi Issacharoff wrote a nice piece about how you have these spaces in Jerusalem that are kind of neither under Israeli control nor under the Palestinian Authority: mini ungoverned spaces that are on the wrong side of the wall that Israel has put up but are part of municipal Jerusalem. So you have tens of thousands of people living in areas with limited services, limited if any police attention — it fosters hopelessness, poverty, and other economic problems.
This may all really be leading to a Third Intifada, or we may already be in a Third Intifada for all anybody knows (there’s no fixed definition of what constitutes an “Intifada,” after all). But if you ask me, the really scary thought is that this recent violence isn’t a sign that another Intifada is on the horizon, but that it’s just the new status quo. What if this pattern — knife attack, crackdown, protests, further crackdown — is just the way it’s going to be from now on? Things have always been bad in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and they sometimes get worse but then kind of settle back into something livable, but maybe this time they’re just getting worse, period. The now-defunct Oslo process was supposed to lead to Israeli and Palestinian talks, to concessions, to compromise, and eventually to peace. Instead, just a little over 20 years after the signing of the second of the two Oslo Accords, leading Israeli politicians are openly agitating for the government to snatch away the Palestinians’ last pack of cigarettes, in addition to everything else Israel has taken from them since 1967.
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