I don't really understand what's been going on there over the last few weeks, other than that it this episode of escalating violence isn't all that different from every other one -- in that it's mostly explained by the exhaustion of hope for change by any means other than yet another mass uprising. In 1989, as 22 years of military rule over the Occupied Territories turned increasingly rote and rigid, numb and dumb, with the Palestinian political leadership broken and scattered, the popular revolt that broke out was called the intifada -- an Arabic word denoting a tremor, shivering, shuddering, derived from nafada meaning to shake, to shake off, to get rid of. It was an almost involuntary response to the daily grind of oppression, and it took the PLO as much by surprise as it shocked Israel's security czars. Their kneejerk reaction then was summed up in Yitzhak Rabin's vow to "break the bones" of those who would dare protest against Israeli power. Nearly all of the violence was the work of Israelis, who killed hundreds of Palestinians, injured and/or detained thousands, and looked foolish. The worst the Palestinians did was to throw rocks at the armed gendarmes, not exactly textbook nonviolence but for two peoples who grew up on the stories of David and Goliath, more an act of symbolic than physical resistance.
Rabin eventually saw the the way out of the embarrassment of the Intifada was to insert a buffer layer of Palestinian "leaders" between the Israeli masters and most of the Palestinian masses: a role that Yassir Arafat all too readily agreed to, as long as it was sugar-coated with vague promises of future Palestinian independence. This was the Oslo "peace process" -- by design it spurred a redoubling of Israeli efforts to "create facts on the ground" (Israel's jargon for building illegal settlements and outposts on occupied Palestinian land) while forces on both sides -- and not just the "extremists" like Kach-ist settlers and Hamas -- worked to poison the agreement. We can only speculate on what might have happened had Rabin not been assassinated; had his successor, Shimon Peres, not recklessly provoked a wave of Hamas terrorism which got him voted out; had Benjamin Netanyahu not come to power and used that power to subvert the "process"; had Ehud Barak, elected with a mandate to deliver the "final status" negotiations, not gotten cold feet, reneged on his promises, tore up the Oslo agreement, initiated the so-called "Second Intifada" while ushering Ariel Sharon into power to nail the coffin shut. But what we know now is that the growing power of Israel's settler movement, its militarist security state, and its right-wing political parties, has buried, as far into the future as we can see, any prospect for equal rights, for justice and peace, under Israel's yoke.
It's unfair to blame the Second Intifada for killing Oslo, but the resort to violence by Hamas and factions of the PLO, especially the practice of "suicide bombing," helped to harden right-wing Israeli attitudes and determination. I always thought the two Intifadas were completely different phenomena: the former a spontaneous mass revolt in the face of Israel's overwhelming potential violence; the latter a calculated attempt by small cadres of militants to show Israel's powers that their subversion of the "peace process" must have adverse consequences for the Israeli people. The former exposed the rotten truth about Israel's "enlightened occupation"; the latter revealed that in a naked test of violence with Israel the Palestinians never stood a chance.
The great failure of Arafat's political leadership was that he was never able to move beyond his famous UN speech where he offered Israel the choice of peace or war, symbolized by an olive branch and an AK-47. When he failed to negotiate a "final status" deal with Barak in 2000 -- which as we now know was almost totally Barak's fault -- his natural instinct was to pick up the gun. It's not clear to me that's what he did: he always held out the hope for further negotiations, but he couldn't distance himself from the militants without admitting that he had no control over them, and as such no leverage against Israel (or for that matter use to Israel). The notion that Arafat launched the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" -- the term widely abused to associate the Second Intifada with the Moslem holy site, hence with Jihad -- is as ridiculous as the notion that Arafat rejected "unprecedentedly generous offers" at Camp David. Besides, we now know the Intifada was something the Palestinians were goaded into: by Barak's self-serving spin after Camp David, by Sharon's massive armed "visit" to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and most of all by Chief of Staff Shaul Moffaz's decision to open fire on Palestinian demonstrators against Sharon's provocations. It's never seemed quite right to view the violence of 2000-05 as an intifada when it was originally set up as an ambush.
It's hard to change long-established terminology, but it would make more sense to refer to the 2000-05 ("Second Intifada") period as the Counter-Intifada. The original Intifada led to the Oslo Agreements and the "peace process" which the Counter-Intifada destroyed: that much should by now be perfectly clear. One can debate whether the Counter-Intifada ever ended: Arafat died in November 2004, depriving the Intifada of its most prominent boogeyman (his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was so firmly opposed to the Intifada that he was useless as an enemy face, a role that was quickly shifted to Hamas); Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza in September 2005; in 2006 Hamas called a truce, and entered the Palestinian Authority's electoral system, winning a landslide before being cut off by a US-sponsored coup attempt. And while Israel's military actions against Palestinians never really subsided, including massive shellings against Gaza in 2006 (and 2008-09 and 2012 and 2014), the violence was at least temporarily eclipsed by Israel's brutal 2006 bombardment of Lebanon (Condoleezza Rice's notorious "birth pangs of a new Middle East").
Levels of eruptive violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have waxed and waned, but Israel has always threatened and exercised much more violence in its efforts to control Palestinians. In most years since 1967, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces is ten times as many as the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian "terrorists." Ironically, the ratio drops to about four-to-one in 2001-03, the one (and only) period where there was significant armed Palestinian resistance. (By the way, the distinction between "eruptive" and "potential" violence is a key concept in the book The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, by Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir. Eruptive violence is something that Israelis and Palestinians can compete at, but potential violence totally favors Israel: it is, for instance, what allows Israel to require permits, to impose checkpoints, to pick up and hold prisoners. Comparing the ratios of killed or injured, even when we're talking ten-to-one, doesn't even hint at balancing the power scales.)
Most eruptive violence is, at least as rationalized by those who perpetrate it, retaliatory, which means as a first approximation is perpetual, a self-sustaining cycle. However, the actual incidence is far from regular. Palestinians, who suffer disproportionately, are more likely to declare unilateral truces and less likely to break them. And while Palestinians will sometimes inflict violence just to remind Israel that Israel's own violence will not go unanswered, Israelis put much more stock in the deterrence value of violence. Moreover, Israelis are much more likely to see violence as a path to personal advancement. For starters, a majority of Israel's Prime Ministers built their careers on their military records -- more if you count paramilitary terrorists like Begin and Shamir. And as Israel continues its drift toward the extreme right, even mainstream politicians take on genocidal airs.
But while Israel's eruptive violence never seems to go away -- the one exception was the year-and-a-half from when Barak won with his peace mandate in 1998 until he squandered it at Camp David and let Sharon run amok at Al-Aqsa in 2000 -- the eagerness of Palestinian militants to match Israel's violence with their own seems to roughly correlate with a generational (12-15 year) cycle -- making this year's uptick in stabbings seem like a harbinger of a third Intifada. I think three things are going on here: (1) people confuse intifada -- a significant increase in activism meant to "throw off" the occupier -- with violence, a tactic that cannot conceivably stand up against the military and police power of Israel; (2) much of the talk of Intifada comes from militant groups seeking to exploit widespread discontent for their own sectarian purposes (or, conversely, from Israelis who see the militants as their ticket to more devastating repression; (3) while at the same time a rigorously non-violent intifada, aimed at soliciting international support especially for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, has been the predominant political expression of Palestinians for the last decade -- Israelis hope that by provoking more violence they can draw attention away from non-violent and increasingly international organization.
The uptick in violence that's been getting the most attention (at least in the US press) concerns stabbing attacks, notably in Jerusalem. The location is significant because Netanyahu's administration has been especially active in building Jewish-only settlements and in isolating Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. One thing that can drive people to desperate acts of violence is hopelessness, and life for Palestinians in East Jerusalem has never been grimmer. I've yet to see a comprehensive report on such events (maybe one will show up in the links below), but my initial impression is that the stabbings are ineffective even on their own terms: hardly any of the people stabbed die, few are injured seriously, while nearly all of the stabbers are quickly apprehended and/or killed on the spot. Rather, this seems like some form of suicide ritual. Some years back one of Israel's security gurus said that the goal of the occupation was to convince Palestinians that they are "an utterly defeated people." When I read that I didn't know what it might look like, but here it is.
Of course, what I just said only applies to Palestinians attempting to stab Jews. There have been a similar number of Israeli Jews stabbing Palestinians (plus at least one case of an Israeli Jew stabbing a Mizrahi Jew mistaken as Arab). In those cases the assailant is much less likely to be apprehended, let alone gunned down immediately. And if arrested, the Israeli Jew is less likely to be convicted, and far less likely to serve any significant time behind bars. Israel has different courts for Jews and Palestinians, different laws, different rights of appeal, and different punishments -- there is, for instance, no death penalty for Israeli citizens, but Palestinians are routinely targeted extrajudicially. Again, I haven't seen a clear statistical analysis, but a casual review of news items (Kate's compendia at Mondoweiss is a good source) suggests that Israeli settlers have become much more violent in the last couple of years, and that officials are doing little to curb their enthusiasm.
Israel's elections last year brought the most extreme right government to power in the nation's history, with Netanyahu finally making explicit his opposition to any form of peace settlement. His cabinet includes members who have called for the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians, in some cases Israeli citizens as well as the unfortunate inhabitants of the Occupied Territories. Last year Israel stepped up harassment of the West Bank, then turned to a 51-day bombardment of Gaza where its kill rate rivals that of Syria's Assad regime. (For some reason you never hear about Israel "killing its own people" like Saddam and the Kurds or Assad and the Sunnis although the ethnic differences are comparable.) Lately various Israeli religious leaders have issued ruling that aim to legitimize indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, while the Netanyahu government has adopted the policy of shooting stone throwers.
If you know one thing about Israel it should be the utter unwillingness of its right-wing political class to do anything to mitigate a conflict that goes back 50 or 70 or 100 years. (Amy Dockser Marcus' Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israel Conflict sees the origin in 1913 resolutions that committed Zionists to seeking exclusive power over Eretz Israel.) They grew up on that conflict, thrived even, advancing to the most prestigious positions in an increasingly militarized society. And quite frankly, they wouldn't know what to do without the conflict -- so they fight on, inventing new existential threats to replace vanquished ones. (Egypt might have been a real one had they focused on Israel but Nasser had other preoccupations. Syria was never a threat without Egypt as an ally. Iraq had actually fought Israel in 1948, but Saddam Hussein was much more interested in the Lebensraum to his east. And Iran, even under the Ayatollahs, had never been less than friendly toward Israel, but Netanyahu sold them to the Americans as a monstrous threat -- which worked because deep down Americans realized that Iran had good reason to hate the United States.) They even find threats hiding in the closets, like the so-called demographic problem. And they've so conditioned the Israeli public, long steeped in the legacy of Jewish victimhood from the razing of the ancient temples to the Holocaust, that every act against them, regardless of how trivial -- like the rockets from Gaza that never hit anything, or a vote from an American church group to divest from companies that profit from the occupation, or an agreement between Iran and the world ensuring that Iran won't develop nuclear weapons -- is received by ordinary Israelis as nothing less than bone-chilling terror.
The main thing you'll learn if you read Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East is how split Israelis were over the coming war: on the one hand, the military leaders were utterly confident of victory; on the other hand, the Israeli public was completely terrified. Of course, overconfidence is endemic in the military (cf. Germany and Japan in WWII, everyone in WWI, Bush in Iraq), but has rarely been rewarded so quickly as when Israel attacked Egypt in 1967. Victory inflated the egos of all Israelis, especially the quaking masses who concluded they were protected not just by the IDF but by God. Israel's leaders were still cognizant enough of world (and especially American) opinion to treat lightly, but almost immediately a dynamic developed where civilians (notably the energized Gush Emunim) and politicians competed to see who could most aggressively expand the Yishuv onto Palestinian land, over the Palestinian people.
For many years, politicians like Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon exploited the settler movement for their own (mostly militarist) purposes, but under Netanyahu it's hard to tell who's pushing whom, in large part because the settler movement and the political powers have largely become one. Netanyahu's own contribution to this comes not just from his pedigree as right-wing royalty -- his father was Vladimir Jabotinsky's secretary in exile in New York -- as from his conceit that he is a master not just of Israeli but of American politics. Moshe Dayan famously said that "America gives us money, arms, and advise; we take the money and arms, and ignore the advice." Even as powerful a politician as Sharon had to humor George Bush when he came calling. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has repeatedly flaunted his contempt for Obama, confident that no matter what the President feels the US is stuck in its carte blanche support of all things Israeli.
Whether Netanyahu is right about America remains to be seen, but for how his position has freed Israel from any pretense of civility -- the last barrier against all sorts of ghastly policies. One could write a whole book about what right-wing Israelis are up to, both as officials and as vigilantes -- indeed, Max Blumenthal wrote one such, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, but his 2013 book already seems quaintly dated. The upshot is that a growing number of Israelis have decided that they can't abide the presence of non-Jews anywhere in Eretz Israel, even completely submissive ones. That's probably not a majority view yet, but one should recall that in 1937, when the British offered to "transfer" all the Arabs out of the proposed Jewish partition of Palestine, the notoriously pragmatic David Ben-Gurion was little short of ecstatic. (A decade later, Ben-Gurion engineered the nakba -- the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from territory seized by Israel. Ben-Gurion argued against seizing more land in the 1967 war on grounds that this time the Arabs wouldn't flee, but like everyone else got caught up in the glory of Israel's "victory.") The fact is that as far back as 1913 "transfer" has been a fundamental (albeit sometimes tactically unspoken) plank of the Zionist platform. The question isn't whether a majority of Zionist-identified Israelis approve of "transfer" -- it's only whether it can be done cleanly, and even that matters less as Israel proves they can get away with ugly.
As it happens, Netanyahu is running two pilot projects to show the feasibility of "transfer" ("ethnic cleansing" is the more accurate term, even if it, too, is merely a euphemism -- the Serbs coined it at Srebrenica). One involves the Bedouin who have for ages lived in the Negev Desert in the southern quarter of Israel. The plan there is to force them off the land and move them into newly constructed Arab-only villages (synonyms are ghettos and concentration camps). This would allow Israel to build new Jewish-only settlements pushing ever further into the Desert. The other is in East Jerusalem, which Israel took from Jordan in the 1967 war and "annexed" days later. Israelis have been building Jewish-only neighborhoods ever since, but as "security tensions" increase they've become more aggressive at isolating and separating Palestinian neighborhoods. The latest round of closures, house demolitions, and exiles are clearly meant to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem, eventually aiming at a city where only Jews can live. And when that happens, demands to raze the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a Third Temple -- something we already hear -- will be deafening.
For many years now critics have pointed out the similarities between Israel and other colonial settler states -- notably South Africa, with its Apartheid policies. The links if anything go deeper: Israelis call their foundation, in emulation of the United States, their War for Independence, but in fact Israel preserved nearly all of Britain's intrinsically racist colonial laws -- they merely reshuffled who was privileged and who was not. Ever since 1948, Palestinians under Israeli control have lived under unequal laws and an often brutal administration, impoverished by both formal and informal descrimination. But while growing inequality is a grave political and economic, indeed moral, problem in the US (and very likely within the Jewish segment of Israel), non-Jews under Israeli control are locked by birth into a life of perpetual crisis, one that is currently worsening, one which ultimately, at least on the individual level, is a matter of life or death.
Whether Israel arrives at the final solution that is the logical outcome of Zionist ideology and unchecked power ultimately depends on whether they can stop themselves. There are, for instance, some number of dissenters within Israel: some are explicitly anti-Zionist, some style themselves as post-Zionist; more are repulsed by the growing violence of the settler movement, or by the chokehold of established orthodox Judaism. The BDS movement is also likely to become more of a burden to Israel, especially if the atrocities the current regime seems to produce like clockwork mount and the credibility of Israeli hasbara wanes. Given how modest the BDS movement's goals are -- equal rights for all, the one thing we should all be able to compromise on -- one can't call BDS a threat to Israel, except inasmuch as Israelis insist that their privileges and prerogatives should be maintained to the exclusion of everyone else.
Some recent links:
Richard Silverstein: Third Intifada or Zionist Jihad: Israel Escalates Tensions With Execution Style Force: Surveys many recent events and argues that "Netanyahu has no strategy for addressing Palestinian grievances short of more force and more blood spilled from Israelis and Palestinians alike." Here are a couple samples:
This video shows Ahmad after he was struck by the settler driver. Two Israeli ambulances arrive and emergency medical personnel approach, stand over him, and then withdraw. Bystanders curse the wounded 13-year-old boy, telling him: "Die, you son of a bitch," and goading police to shoot him.
As of Wednesday, at least 31 Palestinians have been killed and as many as 1,200 others injured amid escalating clashes between Israeli security forces and protesters in Gaza and the West Bank in the past two weeks alone. During this period, eight Israelis have been killed and dozens others injured. [ . . . ]
Those suspected of committing a terrorist act will have their residency permits revoked, effectively expelling them from Jerusalem. This is just one more instance in a series of acts of ethnic cleansing imposed by Israel.
This is a return to the martial law regime which ruled over Israeli Palestinians from 1948-1966. Under these regulations, they were not governed by civil law, but by a military government which imposed a far more restrictive regime. This new development is yet another sign of devolution from democratic rule and values into a form of authoritarianism. It further reinforces the notion of apartheid in which Israeli Jews enjoy superior rights to the Arab minority. [ . . . ]
On Sunday, Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport quoted a series of statements from various Israeli ministers and NGOs indicating that the government is at fault for inciting the latest wave of protests. He quotes the current culture minister, Miri Regev, who said a year ago: "It is unacceptable that Muslims should have freedom of worship on the Temple Mount, but not Jews." Regev, who was former chairman of the interior for the Knesset at the time, advocated a division of the site as exists at the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in 1994. [ . . . ]
On Sunday, IDF soldiers raided the Bethlehem offices of the International Middle East Media Center, a Palestinian human rights organization which documents the activities of security personnel in the West Bank. Video surveillance footage shows a gang of soldiers breaking into the office at 4 a.m. They rampaged through the facility, overturning and breaking computers, destroying equipment and stealing files containing the records of informants.
After a prior IDF break-in, the organization discovered that its informants were later arrested and harassed by security forces and threatened for engaging in the legal act of observing and documenting the actions of Israeli security personnel. [ . . . ]
Last week, in one of the most heinous of a series of incidents in which Palestinians were killed by Israeli security and police forces, Fadi Alloun, a 20-year-old man from the village of Issawiya, was accosted by a mob of Israelis near Jerusalem's Old City. This unruly group, believing that Alloun had stabbed an Israeli Jew, pursued him, screaming: "Shoot him, shoot him!" They summoned the police, and when an officer arrived at the scene and exited his vehicle, he immediately shot and killed the Palestinian with multiple shots. [ . . . ]
Over the weekend, a freelance journalist and Palestinian investigator for Human Rights Watch wearing a clearly marked "Press" sign, was shot three times -- twice with rubber bullets, and once with live ammunition -- by Israeli forces as she documented and photographed a protest. She could easily have been killed. Israeli forces have been known in the past to directly target and even kill Palestinian journalists covering unrest in a systematic assault on the press. [ . . . ]
He continues, relaying the experiences of others on the ground, including a young man who drove his wounded friend to the hospital on Friday, journalists who agree that it seems "live bullets were fired at specific targets," and doctors who said "they were shocked at the numbers of victims with precise bullet wounds, which they say appeared to be deliberately aimed not to injure, but to kill or cause the maximum amount of damage." [ . . . ]
It's important to note that Jewish terrorists are never shot, let alone murdered, when apprehended in the midst of an attack. After a Jew stabbed three Palestinians and a Bedouin in Dimona over the weekend, not a hair on his head was mussed. When Yaakov Schlissel murdered an Israeli woman at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade this summer, he wasn't harmed in any way. The only Jewish terrorists ever killed during commission of their acts of mass murder were Baruch Goldstein and Eden Natan Zenda, who were killed by their Palestinian victims. There are Israeli Jews who have the temerity to condemn Palestinians for taking the law into their own hands in these cases.
The focus on Jerusalem in general and Al-Aqsa in particular seems intent on provoking the most devout Muslims (and perhaps also of messianic Jews) into acts of violence. I can't describe either the Mosque or the West Wall as "holy places" because I believe all such designations are ridiculous, and doing so only feeds the fantasy world of the "believers" -- something that has long hampered efforts to settle the conflict. The 1967 decision to carve out a Jewish space around the West Wall while leaving the Haram al-Sharif to the Waqf was a concession to coexistence that is increasingly rejected by right-wing Israelis: even those who don't particularly relish the erection of a Third Temple see it as a blight on Jewish power in the Jewish state. Those same people object not just to any sort of parity with non-Jews but to their very presence, especially in their Holy City. Pretty much everything that we are witnessing derives from the notion that the end game requires the elimination of non-Jews from Israel. Piecemeal this is becoming Israeli policy, dismantling all checks against the abuse of total power. Netanyahu and his ilk are being swept along by the mob, because they have no alternative vision.
Jonathan Cook: Chaos in Jerusalem is a warning of things to come:
Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side.
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 innocent Eritrean asylum seeker is shot by a security guard during an attack because he looks "Arab," then beaten to a pulp by a lynch mob that includes soldiers.
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.
Willa Frej: Violence Escalates in Jerusalem and West Bank: Scattered reporting, much familiar but this is another angle:
Four Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, voted Sunday to temporarily ban all Arab workers from their schools.
"Entrance to cleaning and maintenance workers will be forbidden during school hours," the Hod Hasharon municipality wrote on its website.
Israel's Education Ministry has yet to comment, but the Interior Ministry released a statement calling for municipalities to "continue to act with respect and equality towards all their workers, irrespective of religion, ethnicity or gender."
Israeli police were also granted greater stop-and-frisk powers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Sunday that these measures were about "preserving the status quo, we will continue to do so."
Meron Rapoport: The paradox of Jerusalem:
The Palestinians in Jerusalem live in a very peculiar situation. They carry Israeli identity cards, so they enjoy freedom of movement denied to their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But contrary to Palestinians living in Israel, they are not Israeli citizens and their temporary residency status could be abolished at any time.
And above all, Jerusalemite Palestinians feel the burden of Israeli discrimination on a daily basis. While they represent 37 percent of the total population in the city, the poverty rate among them has reached 75 percent, a third of their youth drops out before finishing high school and 39 percent of their houses are built without permits. Events on al-Aqsa ignited a longstanding frustration built for many years.
As always, Israel responded to the violent events in Jerusalem by tightening its security control over the Palestinian parts of the city, sending in thousands of extra police forces. It also gave these policemen almost an open hand to shoot to kill any Palestinian involved in attacks. "Any event in which policemen or civilians are hurt must end with the killing of the attacking terrorist," said Moshe (Chico) Edry, the commander of Jerusalem's police.
Ran HaCohen: What Israel Is Up to in Jerusalem:
Once again, war atmosphere in Israel. In television day and night nothing but Palestinians stabbing, hurling, burning; current footage is recycled ad nauseam, and, a second before vomiting, reminders from previous Intifadas are aired, to place the present event in the right historical context. As the fruit juice seller told me, "It has always been like that: they always kill us. First Temple, Second Temple, the Crusades, the Holocaust, and now this." (He was overwhelmed when I wondered where the Amalekites had gone, who it was that killed them.) So you have on the one hand Palestinians armed with knives and stones -- not even bombs and guns this time -- and a regional nuclear superpower, one of the world's biggest exporters of weaponry on the other hand, and is quite obvious that the poor, innocent victim is the latter. When the Gods want to destroy a nation, they first make it blind. [ . . . ]
In coping with the violence -- no community can tolerate daily stabbing of innocents on its streets -- Netanyahu has very little to offer. After all, he refused to negotiate with the Palestinians in years of relative quite (in 2012, for example, not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian violence), so he won't start now. Demolishing terrorists' homes has been reintroduced as a means of deterrence, a decade after the Israeli army itself under Chief-of-Staff -- now Minister of Defense -- Ye'elon officially recommended stopping such demolitions. With one nuance, though: now Israel has taken the right not only to demolish the houses, but to confiscate their land as well. And this is significant. [ . . . ]
The Palestinians constitute 35% of Jerusalem's population, a "demographic threat" in Israeli eyes. East Jerusalem is not cut off from West Jerusalem; this is hardly feasible, as East Jerusalem is packed with Jewish settlements. Instead, the Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem are further cut off from each other, encircled and besieged by checkpoints and concrete blocks. There are small extremist Jewish settlements even within many Palestinian neighborhood; the land of demolished houses will be given to them to expand. Palestinians in the strangulated Jerusalem neighborhood will have little choice but to leave to the West Bank enclaves; and, to make things even clearer, deportations and retraction of their Israeli citizenship are already considered. What is likely to take place now is not a division of Jerusalem, but rather its ethnic cleansing.
Sam Bahour: The Non-Violent Way Young Palestinians Are Flipping Israel's Script:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built his entire political career on a platform of violence against Palestinians. Leading up to his first election as prime minister in 1996 he publicly and aggressively mocked Israel's erstwhile prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for entering into an interim peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The toxic environment Netanyahu operated in was partly behind the motivation of a Jewish extremist to assassinate Rabin. Netanyahu prides himself on being the leader who stopped the peace process in its tracks. To make sure peace would never have a chance, he accelerated settlement building in the West Bank, attacked Gaza multiple times, demolished more Palestinian homes, arrested Palestinians, including minors, often without charges, and failed to bring to justice the Jewish settlers who recently burned alive a Palestinian family while they slept in their home.
But why does Israel seemingly seek violence? The answer is elementary to anyone following this conflict. Israel has a single gamebook against the legitimate Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence: that of using their well-oiled military machine to squash any Palestinian who attempts to resist occupation. Israel since 1948 and 1967 has routinely used war and violence to seize more land, all the while pushing Palestinians to either turn violent or emigrate.
During the past few years, Israel found itself in a strategic bind. Palestinians shifted gears and started to operate in non-violent venues. Palestinians call it "smart resistance." New tools of resistance, such as calling for a boycott of Israeli products, divestment from Israeli investments, and working to get states to apply sanctions to Israel, contribute to this shift in strategy.
Philip Weiss: Facing down hecklers in NY, Gideon Levy calls for equal rights for all in one state: Levy offers what is probably the most succinct summary of the Israeli worldview:
Levy says that Jewish Israelis have been able to live happily with occupation because of three deep-rooted beliefs/blindnesses: One, we are the chosen people, we can do anything we want, and international law doesn't apply to us. Two, we the Jews are the biggest victim in history and the only victim in history. Golda Meir said after the Holocaust Jews have the right to do whatever we want. And third, that Palestinians are not exactly human beings. "Killing Palestinians is not really a violation of human rights."
Levy is equally succinct about what is happening today, and what needs to change:
Now even Israeli Jewish society is threatened by "one lynch after another, day after day." Scenes that he had never thought even imaginable are occurring. [ . . . ]
"The two state solution is in my view dead. The settlers won." And there is only one alternative: the one-state solution. It's not easy. I have no illusions. "But it is the only game that is in town . . . Therefore the struggle the discourse must be from now on I think a very simple one. Equal rights. That's all." [ . . . ]
Levy says that only an international intervention will save Israel's "moral profile."
Life in Israel is too good, Israel is too strong, and brainwashing is much too efficient to expect a change from within the Israeli society.
No country in the world remains powerful when it lives only on its sword. . . . .
The world must bring pressure on Israel so that it will consider whether it "is worth it" to continue the criminal occupation.
Kate, at Mondoweiss, continues to file two or three long posts every week, compiling many of the everyday news items that get overlooked. Here's just one little sample that caught my eye: Extremist settler kills 40 lambs:
An Israeli settler ran over 40 lambs in the eastern part of the West Bank city of Nablus, on Tuesday evening. Owner Ayesh al-Da'ajneh said that one of his sons was taking care of the lambs as they were eating in a pasture at the edge of the city. "The Israeli vehicle approached the lambs and my son raised a light sign in his face thinking the settler had taken the wrong side of the road," Al-Da'ajneh said, according to Days of Palestine. He continued: "The settler hit the lambs several times and my son, who was unarmed, could not stop him." Forty lambs, out of 300, were killed and at least 20 others were wounded. Illegal Jewish Israeli settlers and armed forces frequently target Palestinian farmers, killing their sheep and cattle, as well as burning their crops.
I've also found the rather schematic (and studiously matter-of-fact) lists at Wikipedia to be useful; notably:
For a sample, the entry for October 20 (the most recent day listed) reads:
- An Israeli soldier was lightly wounded, suffered scratches when a Palestinian, Udaay Hashim al-Masalma (24) reportedly tried to stab him during clashes at Beit Awwa, west of Hebron. Israeli sources say the incident occurred near the settlement of Negohot, and the assailant threw himself at troops. The suspect in turn was shot dead with a bullet to the head.
- A settler from Kiryat Arba was killed when he was run over by a truck after he exited his car, which had been struck by rocks, and perhaps with a gun on him. The truck-driver turned himself in to Palestinian police, saying it was an accident.
- A Palestinian, Hamzeh Moussa al-Imla (25) from Beit Ula, is reported to have rammed his car into Israelis at a bus stop at the Gush Etzion junction. 2 Israelis were injured, one lightly, the other moderately. He is said also either to have tried to stab people after getting out of his car, or to have been found with a knife on him.
- 9 Gazan Palestinians were wounded by live fire, and one Ahmad al-Sarhi (27), was shot dead. 6 were wounded east of the al-Bureij refugee camp, and a further 3 were wounded near the Eretz Crossing.
- 9 West Bank Palestinians were wounded by live fire, 3 in Bireh and 2 in Ni'lin.
- Bashar Nidal al-Jabari (15) and Hussam Jamil al-Jabari (17) were shot dead at a checkpoint near the near the Rajabi house close to Kiryat Arba. It is alleged one of the two tried to stab a soldier. A soldier lightly wounded.
That's one day, a rather ordinary one by present standards. The thing is it wouldn't take much effort to radically reduce this cycle of violence, only it has to be started by the people with the power to change things: the government of Israel.