Category Archives: Israel-Palestinian conflict

Why would a community leader with faith in Gandhi turn to violence?

Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters had their commitment to non-violence severely tested.

In the West nowadays, however, most proponents of peace face less extreme challenges. It’s much easier to denounce war and stand up for peace if you are neither directly exposed to war nor subject to violent attacks.

For this reason, when it comes to the situation in the Middle East, many observers outside the region are inclined to focus on the innocent victims of war and occupation because they find it too difficult to identify with the armed adversaries. There is an unwillingness to entertain the notion that in certain sets of conditions, almost anyone might turn to violence. It’s much more comfortable to assume that some people have violent inclinations while others do not.

For anyone with this perspective, the story of Bahaa Alian, a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, might be instructive.

Creede Newton and Dylan Collins write: On Tuesday, Oct. 13, two simultaneous attacks rocked Jerusalem in what was the bloodiest day of the current round of violence.

Around nine in the morning, Bilal Ranem, 23, and Bahaa Alian, 22, two Palestinian men from the Jabal al-Mukaber neighborhood in East Jerusalem, boarded a bus in nearby East Talpiot, an Israeli settlement. One was armed with a knife and the other with a pistol. As the bus began moving, the men started shooting and stabbing. Ten were injured, and two killed, including one of the attackers.

Rubi Muhatbi, an 18-year-old Israeli, told Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most widely-read daily, that in that “moment, you feel fear and stress and you don’t know what to do. I preferred running away rather than confronting him… all I was thinking about was I was either going to survive this or I die.”

The attack was shocking by any standard, but it was made doubly so for us after the identities of the attackers were released. We quickly realized that we had met Bahaa Alian, the attacker who was killed, less than a year ago.

From what you’ve read in media reports, these two men were either terrorists who were quickly “neutralized” by Israeli security forces, or troubled Palestinian youth from an impoverished neighborhood, surrounded by Jewish-only settlements.

Perhaps both are true, but neither agrees with the impression Alian made when we met him. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli mob lynches Eritrean after bus station attack

Al Jazeera reports: An Eritrean man has died after he was shot and beaten by a mob after he was mistaken for an attacker during a raid in southern Israel, Israeli police say.

The attack on Sunday night at a bus station in the city of Beersheba saw a Palestinian man armed with a rifle and a knife kill an Israeli soldier and wound about 10 other people.

The Palestinian attacker was killed, while a security guard shot the Eritrean bystander, identified by Israeli media as 29-year-old Haftom Zarhum, thinking he was an accomplice of the assailant. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS launches Palestinian ‘lone wolf’ adoption program

The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State group has launched an unprecedented media campaign calling on Palestinians to step up attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, taking advantage of a wave of violence between the two sides to deliver rare incitement against Israel.

In a video posted Monday, the group urged Palestinians to carry out attacks using every means at their disposal, including knives, vehicles, poison and explosives.

In the past two days, IS posted six videos in which militants deliver speeches to the backdrop of scenes from recent stabbings and other attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. The extremist group also published several articles written by prominent IS writers.

The videos coincide with a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence and ratcheted-up tensions among Israelis after a series of seemingly random lone-wolf attacks by Palestinians.

In the video titled “Return Terror to the Jews,” a masked fighter praised Arabs who are attacking Israelis, describing them as “lone wolves who refused to be subdued and spread fear among the sons of Zion.”

The Islamic State group, which has established a self-declared Islamic caliphate in the third of Iraq and Syria that it controls, operates a sophisticated media machine and often releases high-tech propaganda videos. Although IS operatives often describe Jews and Christians as infidels, the group has rarely issued videos that touch on Israel.

The IS group has no organized presence in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. But dozens of Palestinians in Gaza are believed to be inspired by the group’s extremist ideology, seeing Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers as too soft. [Continue reading…]

Unless there are reports of Palestinians involved in the current wave of attacks who say that they actually were inspired by ISIS, what appears to be behind ISIS’s media campaign is an utterly cynical attempt to elbow its way into the issue.

ISIS calls for attacks and when they happen, it takes credit as an inspirational force.

At the same time, Israeli politicians prattle on about terrorists, and a public that prefers to ignore the political roots of the violence will become amenable to the idea that ISIS is gaining a stronger foothold among Palestinians. The propaganda thence serves both ISIS and the Zionists.

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Four Israeli cities, citing security, ban non-Jewish staff from schools

Reuters reports: At least four Israeli cities, including the commercial capital Tel Aviv, have banned Arab laborers from their schools, struggling to calm public fears fueled by the worst surge of Palestinian street attacks in years.

Israel’s Interior Ministry, which oversees municipalities, declined immediate comment on Sunday on the decision, condemned by a party representing the country’s Arab minority as racist.

Israel’s cabinet also imposed more security measures on Sunday after further Palestinian stabbings on Saturday, widening police stop-and-frisk powers that will effectively allow them to search anyone on the street.

Forty-one Palestinians and seven Israelis have died in recent street violence, which was in part triggered by Palestinians’ anger over what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian dressed as photographer is shot dead after stabbing soldier

AFP reports: A Palestinian disguised as a news photographer stabbed and wounded a soldier Friday at an entrance to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba before being shot dead, the army said.

Military spokesman Arye Shalicar said the way the man was dressed “allowed him to approach the soldier”.

The foreign ministry distributed photos of a man said to be the attacker wearing a shirt with the word “press” stamped on it and a fluorescent yellow vest. [Continue reading…]

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Young Palestinians sound off on current unrest, Israeli occupation

Al Jazeera reports: While media headlines focus on the dramatic stabbing attacks by Palestinians and Israelis on one another in recent weeks, thousands of young Palestinians have at the same time taken to the streets of Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip to demand an end to Israel’s decades-long occupation, protest violence by Israeli forces and settlers, and call for recognition of their human rights.

The stabbings are a new element, of course, while protests are an old story — except that today they involve a new generation of Palestinians, those who’ve grown up in the era of the Oslo Peace process and its attendant frustrations and failures. Like the protests of the First Intifada uprising of 1987, some of today’s demonstrations are peaceful, but others have transformed into clashes with Israeli forces.

As Palestinian veterans and analysts grapple with the question of whether current events bear the hallmarks of a new intifada, Al Jazeera reached out to a number of Palestinians under the age of 30 throughout the region. We asked them two questions:

(1) Where do you see the current unrest headed?

(2) If these protests and clashes continue, how do you expect Israeli forces, settlers and the Palestinian Authority to respond? [Continue reading…]

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Too soon to claim ‘third intifada,’ Palestinian thinkers say

Al Jazeera reports: Protests in the last few weeks are a clear sign that a new generation of Palestinians is rising up against Israel’s occupation, Palestinian activists, politicians and scholars said this week — but they added that it’s too early to tell if the movement can be sustained.

“This phase of popular resistance broke out spontaneously, in reaction to months of fascist-leaning policies of the most racist, settler-dominated and far-right government in Israel’s history,” Omar Barghouti, a founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, told Al Jazeera in an email.

Whether this new uprising will be sustained or fizzle out depends on whether the various groups involved can develop a unifying vision and political leadership, said Khaled Elgindy, a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. [Continue reading…]

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Education under occupation: everyday disruption at a Palestinian university

By Brendan Browne, Queen’s University Belfast

As the clock moves towards 12.45pm I begin to anxiously await the flurry of emails that I’ve come to expect in advance of my 2pm class. The class is on law and human rights. Students email to say that a deterioration in the security situation means they must stay within the relative safety of their own area, their parents naturally apprehensive that travel across the West Bank could potentially be dangerous.

This has become the everyday reality this semester for students attending Al Quds University, and Al Quds (Bard) University – a partnership with the American liberal arts institution.

The university soon gives the call for all staff and students to evacuate. In an entirely depressing but ultimately predictable scenario, Palestinian students will not be able to take their classes in literature, law, biology or media. Those on site make their way to the agreed “safe” area with alcohol-drenched cotton balls handed out by the ever vigilant staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent to ward off the effects of the inevitable deluge of tear gas.

The university has tried to continue life as normal. On October 13, Al Quds university welcomed the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee on campus with great pomp and splendour to receive an honorary degree. Indian flags adorned the beautiful campus grounds and academics dressed in ceremonial gowns to applaud the visit of the world leader.

Welcoming the Indian president on campus.
Brendan Browne., Author provided

But there were also protests from students angry at recent violence against them in Jerusalem, using this platform to draw attention to their ongoing suffering. Within 45 minutes of the Indian contingent leaving, Israeli forces stormed the campus and violently arrested eight students while simultaneously causing significant damage to property, according to the student group Mojama’a Alanshita which posted a video of some of the arrests on Facebook.

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Peace process over, it’s Year Zero for Israelis and Palestinians

Lisa Goldman writes: A month from now, Israel will mark 20 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who signed the Oslo Accord. The night he was shot by a Jewish nationalist, Yigal Amir, Rabin appeared onstage at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, where he joined singer Miri Aloni, delivering an off-key and embarrassed rendition of the famous 1960s anti-war song “Shir LaShalom” (“Song to Peace”). A blood-spattered leaflet bearing the song’s lyrics was found in his suit pocket and became an enduring metaphor for the tragedy.

Worse was to come: Thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis have been killed in the two decades of violence that followed — a cycle once again on the uptick. Today Aloni makes her living as a busker. Twice a week, she cradles her guitar on a stool outside Tel Aviv’s squalid Carmel Market and performs her golden oldies for spare change, yelling at people who try to take her photograph. Thus the fortunes of what was once known as Israel’s peace camp.

Two decades after Rabin’s assassination, the occupation that was supposed to be ended by the Oslo process has been deepened and widened. The physical restrictions under which Palestinians live are far more onerous today than they were in 1987, when the first intifada broke out. Back then, Palestinian residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem could still travel freely throughout the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. And there were several hundred thousand fewer settlers living in those occupied territories. Still, back then Palestinians were also jailed for involvement in any kind of political activity, even for waving a Palestinian flag. And, as today, those living under occupation had no democratic rights in the state that ruled over them and were denied civil liberties. One difference, of course, is that today there’s a willing Palestinian participant in that repression, in the form of the Palestinian Authority’s security services. [Continue reading…]

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Israel still holds all the cards

Noam Sheizaf writes: Over the past decade the Palestinian Authority took upon itself the role of Israel’s operations contractor of the occupation, with an understanding that quiet in the West Bank would create the requisite conditions for progress in peace talks with Israel. That’s what the Palestinians have always been promised, at least — if the violence stops, we’ll talk and you’ll get your state.

But it’s now clear that the dynamic is the exact opposite. The calm on the ground made Israelis believe that they can enjoy peace and prosperity without ending the occupation. The tragic paradox is that it was the intifadas that led to Israeli concessions (Oslo, the Gaza Disengagement), while the peaceful years resulted in more hardline Israeli positions and the expansion of settlements. In weeks like this one, it is sad to recall the commotion Netanyahu raised with his demands that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state,” and not just as “The State of Israel,” as if Israel needs Abbas to define its identity. Be sure that if Abbas had recognized Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu would have invented something new to demand. Anything in order to not reach an agreement.

When the PLO leadership understood that it wasn’t going to get anywhere with Israel, it took a gamble by seeking international pressure — first from the United states and then from Europe. The thing is, Washington will never seriously pressure Israel. If one compares America’s commitment to the Iran deal to its flaccid approach to the Palestinian issue, things come into focus rather quickly. The Iran deal was a matter of American interests for the Obama administration. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was little more than an irritation.

Dramatic developments in the Arab world, particularly in Syria, are the final nails in the coffin of Palestine’s international strategy. Syria has gone from an Iranian-Turkish-Saudi proxy war to an American-Russian one, with massive consequences for the entire region and beyond — and as if that weren’t enough, the Americans are now worried about the stability of Jordan. Under these conditions, Israel’s strategy of strengthening and maintaining the status quo in the occupied territories suddenly seams reasonable to the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Masked soldiers and mass division will define the next intifada

Joseph Dana writes: After months of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, most observers can barely contain their views on whether this is the start of the third Palestinian intifada. In the past few days, Israel has arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a Palestinian woman blew herself up near an Israeli settlement, injuring one police officer, and the Israeli air force fired missiles into the Gaza Strip, killing a 30-year-old pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter.

It is still too early to call this cycle of violence an intifada but the direction of events on the ground doesn’t bode well for an immediate cessation of fighting. Regardless of the outcome, there are several salient aspects to this latest uptick of unrest that will have a lasting effect on the conflict as a whole.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, under the Oslo Accords, has proven itself to be an effective enforcer of Israeli security and occupation, even better than the Israeli military or Shin Bet. For several years, the PA security forces have routinely crushed any form of Palestinian dissent towards Israel or the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. Without the PA keeping a lid on Palestinians, there would have been a third intifada months ago. [Continue reading…]

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There will be no peace until Israel’s occupation of Palestine ends

Marwan Barghouti writes: The current escalation in violence did not start with the killing of two Israeli settlers, it started a long while ago and has been going on for years. Every day Palestinians are killed, wounded, arrested. Every day colonialism advances, the siege on our people in Gaza continues, oppression persists. As many today want us to be overwhelmed by the potential consequences of a new spiral of violence, I will plead, as I did in 2002, to deal with its root causes: the denial of Palestinian freedom.

Some have suggested the reason why a peace deal could not be reached was President Yasser Arafat’s unwillingness or President Mahmoud Abbas’s inability, but both of them were ready and able to sign a peace agreement. The real problem is that Israel has chosen occupation over peace, and used negotiations as a smokescreen to advance its colonial project. Every government across the globe knows this simple fact and yet so many of them pretend that returning to the failed recipes of the past could achieve freedom and peace. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

There can be no negotiations without a clear Israeli commitment to fully withdraw from the Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; a complete end to all colonial policies; a recognition of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people including their right to self-determination and return; and the release of all Palestinian prisoners. We cannot coexist with the occupation, and we will not surrender to it. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinians ‘more isolated than at any point since 1948’

Mouin Rabbani writes: the organisational infrastructure required to mobilise and sustain a widespread rebellion has been systematically dismantled over the past decade, primarily by the Palestinian Authority. It remains committed to security collaboration with Israel, which its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has described as “sacred”.

The chances that Israeli actions will push Abbas over the precipice are nil. Indeed, when he again cried wolf at the UN last month the sheep died of laughter. Because Abbas has systematically foreclosed upon all other options, he will remain more exercised by threats to Israeli security than the security of his own people for the remainder of his tenure. For its part, the Islamist movement Hamas remains committed to the survival of its rule in the Gaza Strip above all else.

The current crisis may yet prove a catalyst for the hard work of reviving a unified, coherent and dynamic Palestinian national movement capable of conducting the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. The hard reality is that, until Palestinians overcome the domestic obstacles to their ability to rebel, they will remain incapable of successfully challenging Israel or effectively taking on those who support its policies. [Continue reading…]

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This is not the third intifada

Joseph Dana writes: When the hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon visited Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa compound in September 2000, Palestinians were on the verge of a second uprising, or intifada, against Israeli rule.

Fed up with the 1993 Oslo Accords that failed to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians made a decision to change the status quo through armed resistance. Five years after that fateful visit, the Palestinians were left with deep wounds in a worse-off position after fighting the Israeli army.

Last week, one of Israel’s largest newspapers ran the front-page headline “The Third Intifada”, regarding the violence currently consuming Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This was deliberately misleading. Palestinians know they must reform their own leadership and its relationship to Israel as part of any genuine uprising against Israeli rule — something that doesn’t appear likely in the short term.

Intifadas are strategic, not simple reactions to isolated events, or even sustained Israeli incitement. The first intifada was a declaration that Palestinians refused to accept Israel’s slow annexation of the West Bank and the expanding occupation. The second intifada was an attempt to use violence to change the status quo.

Since the arson attack that killed a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma in late July, Palestinians have reacted to the rising tensions on the ground with no clear goal or end point. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ reticent approach towards popular uprisings and the fear of repeating the mistakes of the second intifada add to the lack of appetite for full-scale rebellion in the West Bank. [Continue reading…]

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‘Those disguised as Arabs’

AFP correspondent, Andrea Bernardi, writes: It’s fairly common to see Israeli agents infiltrate the crowds of Palestinian stone throwers during demonstrations. I’ve witnessed this plenty of times in Jerusalem. The goal of these “mustarabiin” — literally “those who disguise themselves as Arabs” — is to stop the protesters. They usually take out their weapons without using them, or, more often, point them into the sky, as if they were about to shoot into the air.

But today, I filmed these undercover agents for the first time firing live bullets into a crowd of protesters.

I showed up to cover a “Day of Rage” that Palestinian students staged at the Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. At the end of the demonstration, the protesters headed toward the DCO checkpoint near the Bet-El settlement, which has often been the scene of clashes between the two sides. [Continue reading…]

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Is a third Palestinian intifada on the way – or has it already begun?

Peter Beaumont writes: A weekend of febrile violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem has led to growing fears of a third Palestinian intifada. One of the latest victims was a 13-year-old boy killed by Israeli forces during clashes outside a refugee camp in Bethlehem.

Abdel Rahman Shadi, who lived in Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, was struck in the chest by Israeli fire and died after undergoing emergency surgery in Beit Jala hospital on Monday – the second youth to be killed in 24 hours.

There is concern among diplomats and analysts in the region that the escalating violence could turn into a new intifada, or uprising. Four Israelis were killed in attacks by Palestinians on Friday and Saturday.

The front page of one mass-circulation newspaper on Sunday stated simply: “The Third Intifada.” Elsewhere in the Israeli media, columnists were more circumspect. Some asked whether the latest events fitted the pattern of the two previous intifadas, which began in 1987 and 2000, and if not, how the current escalation could be curbed before becoming one.

Not only in the Israeli media has the question been asked. The issue was given added urgency by the Facebook posting of Muhanad Halabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian student who stabbed two Israeli men to death in the Old City on Saturday, who linked his actions directly to a “third intifada”. [Continue reading…]

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Intifada: The writing was on the wall

Gideon Levy writes: Only rarely does a cliche as well-worn as this one hit the mark so precisely: The writing is on the wall, indeed. My readers will pardon me; no response, explanation or analysis seems more pertinent, at this juncture, when the danger of a third Palestinian Intifada breaking out seems greater than at any time in the last decade. Anyone claiming to be surprised has not been living in the Middle East over the last 10 years. Anyone who claims to be surprised has, along with most Israelis, been burying his head in the sand for a decade. The only surprising thing is that a renewed uprising has taken a decade to occur.

Israeli security figures are still trying to minimise the obvious, insisting that this is only a “wave of terror,” not an Intifada. They said exactly the same thing when the two previous Intifadas erupted. When the first Intifada began, I met members of the entourage of the then Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin, visiting the United States at the time, in a large New York department store. There was no reason to hurry home to Israel, they said; everything was under control. Nor was the second Intifada exactly anticipated. Yet both erupted, intensely, the second worse than the first. The dimensions of the third will be greater still.

Not yet clear is whether the events occurring right now will develop into a full-blown Intifada or not, but meantime there will be no period of quiet between the Jordan River and the sea any time soon. It’s true that there have been various factors preventing, thus far, the outbreak of a third Intifada: the heavy price paid by the Palestinians for the second Intifada that failed to achieve anything whatever for them; the absence of a leadership moving the people toward another broad uprising; internal Palestinian divisions, greatly intensified in recent years, between Fatah and Hamas; the international isolation of the Palestinians amid growing international indifference; and the slightly improved economic situation on the West Bank. [Continue reading…]

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