'Only surprise is that a new uprising has taken a decade to occur'
The article by Gideon Levy is followed by an interview with Mustafa Barghouti, both from MEE.
The writing is on the wall – do Israelis lift their heads to see it? Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler ActiveStills, April 21, 2013.
3rd intifada?
Intifada: The writing was on the wall
Anyone claiming to be surprised that a third uprising is imminent has been burying their head in the sand for the last decade
By Gideon Levy, MEE
October 05, 2015
Only rarely does a cliché 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.
2015. Palestinian youth kicks a burning tyre during clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank town of Hebron on October 4, 2015. Photo by Hazem Bader /AFP
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.
But all these factors, most of them still in play, cannot over time prevent a third Intifada from erupting. Even if Israeli security forces somehow manage to stuff this re-awakening genie back in its bottle, it won’t stay there for long. And they are unlikely to succeed in any case. At this writing, a day after two Jews were murdered in Jerusalem’s Old City, some 100 Palestinians have already been wounded by the Israeli Army and Israeli police in disturbances throughout the West Bank: an ominous portent.
2014. A Palestinian boy looks on near burning tyres during clashes with Israeli soldiers following a protest against the near-by Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus. Photo by Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters
The writing has been on the wall because Israel’s conduct, in all its insufferable arrogance and imperviousness, cannot fail to lead to another terrible explosion. The West Bank has been quiescent for nearly 10 years, during which time Israel has consistently proven to the Palestinians that quiet will be met only with an intensification of the occupation, settlement expansion, more home demolitions and more mass arrests – including thousands of so-called administrative detainees who are incarcerated without trial, continuing confiscation of land, wholly useless incursions and arrests, and an itchy finger on the trigger resulting in dozens of needless human deaths and countless provocations inflaming Muslim sensibilities regarding al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount.
Are Palestinians to assent to all of this in silence? To show restraint when the Dawabsheh family is burnt alive in Duma and no one is arrested or brought to trial by Israel, while Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon boasts that Israel knows who perpetrated that shocking crime but, to safeguard its intelligence network, will not arrest them?
2013: A Palestinian demonstrator throws a Molotov cocktail toward Israeli security forces during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron on April 4, 2013. Clashes rocked the West Bank as thousands attended the funerals of a prisoner and two teenagers shot dead by Israeli troops. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the killings jeopardized U.S. efforts to rekindle peace talks. Caption by Slate, photo by Marco Longari/Getty Images
What people could maintain restraint in the face of such a sequence of events, with the entire might of the occupation in the background, without hope, without prospects, with no end in sight. No negotiations are underway, even in secret, the two-state solution is apparently permanently dead and Israel has no alternative to offer – and the Palestinians are to accept all of that and sit still? Nothing like that has ever happened anywhere, nor will it ever.
2012 A Palestinian youth kicks a flaming tyre during clashes with Israeli soldiers outside the Ofer Prison close to the West Bank city of Ramallah, following a march in support of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli prisons. Photo by Abbas Momani /AFP
While quiet has been sustained on the other side of the Wall for nearly 10 years, Israel has proven that there is no chance it will act as a partner for serious negotiations about the status of the West Bank, and that it has no intention of ending the occupation, with or without terrorism. A government that has the president of the United States wound around its little finger, incurring no punishment in return, has become drunk with power toward the Palestinians too. That’s what happens when the world permits Israel to run rampant in Gaza and the West Bank, inflating Israel’s arrogance and intoxication of power beyond all boundaries.
Now the bill is coming due. Those who imagined that Israel could go on this way forever, and that the Palestinians would continue to acquiesce, to submit, indefinitely – has simply never read a history book. No people anywhere has ever acquiesced in its own conquest without resistance, and certainly not in modern times. Resistance is its right, incidentally, enshrined in international law.
2010 A Palestinian demonstrator from the West Bank village of Bil’in burns tyres to protest Israeli construction plans in the separated territory. November 2010, photo by Framework, LA Times
Now the bill is coming due: Intifada, the wave of an uprising that has been temporarily forgotten but will now come again, and soon. The truth is, these distinctions don’t matter anymore. The third Intifada is already here or, in the best case, is just around the corner. Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s current government, historically right-wing, nationalist and religious, have no intention of doing anything to prevent the pending eruption, and there will only be more bloodshed, more checkpoints, more arrests, more detentions, more destruction and more killing. This is the only language spoken by the current government of Israel; it has no other. There is no chance that this government will tread a different path.
Given this state of affairs, the current crisis sits squarely at the doorstep of the international community. Absent a responsible entity in Israel, responsibility is devolved there. The international community has long behaved fawningly toward Israel but this method, over half a century, has proven itself a resounding failure.
2009. Palestinian stone-thrower adjusts a burning tyre while others run away to avoid rubber bullets fired by Israeli forces, not seen, during clashes which erupted following a demonstration against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, at the Qalandia checkpoint Friday, Jan. 16, 2009. Top Israeli diplomats headed for Egypt and the United States on Friday in what appeared to be a final push toward a cease-fire to end Israel’s punishing Gaza offensive against Hamas militants. Photo by Muhammed Muheisen / AP
The time has now arrived to change the rules of the game for the international community as well, first and foremost the United States: whoever now continues enabling Israel to run amok while taking no real steps to end the occupation, will also bear responsibility for the next round of violence in the region. And the bloodshed will not be confined between the Jordan River and the sea; in the history of this conflict, its crises have always reached further than that, exacerbating the bloodshed occurring elsewhere in the world. Let the indifferent world bestir itself now and take notice.
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Home demolition is one of the government’s favoured responses to attacks; they know the women and children will be especially hurt. Here a Palestinian woman walks amid the rubble of a house after Israeli security forces demolished the homes of two young Palestinian men behind attacks in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Jabal Mukaber in east Jerusalem Photo by AFP/Getty
3rd intifada?
Barghouti: ‘The Third Intifada has already begun‘
Palestinian lawmaker believes risk of a third intifada has increased rapidly since the killing of two Palestinian teenagers
By MEE staff
October 07, 2015
“The Palestinian Authority must cease all security co-operation with Israel and support the upsurge of Palestinian ‘people’s resistance’ in Jerusalem and the West Bank in what is now being described by some as the ‘Third Intifada'” independent Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti has told Middle East Eye.
Speaking to MEE, Barghouti [L] said the Third Intifada “has already begun,” following deadly clashes and protests in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem over the past few weeks, including the fatal shooting of two Palestinian teenagers in recent days and the killing of several Israelis by Palestinians.
The recent violence erupted after Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces last month in the al-Aqsa compound, Islam’s third holiest site, that is also holy to Jews who call it the Temple Mount. Tensions had begun to mount following an increase in Jewish visitors during the Jewish New Year with relations already fraught due to ongoing settler violence and fears over the status quo at al-Aqsa.
Barghouti’s comments follow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s threat at the UN General Assembly last week to withdraw from all agreements signed between the PA and Israel over the past two decades.
Barghouti, who is leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, said that the PA must end its controversial security co-ordination pact with Israel that sees it assuming a policing role against other Palestinian factions in the West Bank.
“The Palestinian resistance must be supported by the Palestinian Authority… and must also immediately cease security co-ordination with the [Israeli] occupation,” he told MEE.
“The Third Intifada has already begun. There must be no more negotiations with Israel as they have breached all agreements in the past.”
Abbas told the UN General Assembly last Wednesday that “[the Palestinian Authority] will not remain the only ones committed to the implementation of …agreements [with Israel],” further adding that “Israel must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power” without specifying what powers the PA intended to relinquish.
However, he also said on Tuesday: “We [the PA] do not want a military and security escalation with Israel,” suggesting that the PA may be willing to engage in further talks with the Israelis.
In light of the current violence, some armed Palestinian factions, such as Islamic Jihad, have made threats to resume attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli targets which would represent a marked escalation in the current crisis.
The father of Abdel Rahman Obeidullah, the 13-year-old Palestinian teenager killed in Bethlehem on 5 October, leans over his son’s body at his funeral. Photo by AFP
In an attempt to de-escalate tensions, the Israeli army released the results of their preliminary investigation into the fatal shooting yesterday of 13-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. A senior army officer has described the tragic shooting as “unintentional”.
The army investigation confirmed that the teenager was shot with a .22 calibre round by an Israeli sniper who was aiming at an adult standing next to him, without specifying what that adult was doing.
However, this account conflicts with another spokesperson who initially said that no live fire was used by the Israeli army during the incident. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation that documents Israeli government abuses in the Occupied Territories, denounced the death of Obeidallah and condemned the use of live rounds against Palestinians, saying that .22 calibre rounds were “a lethal weapon, which the Israeli authorities present as a reasonable tool…in dealing with demonstrations”.
The Israeli army report is unlikely to reduce tensions as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a raft of new punitive measures to crack down on Palestinian dissent.
Netanyahu has confirmed that Israel would expedite the demolition of Palestinian homes alleged to have been involved in armed attacks, expand the controversial measure of administrative detention and ban people from entering Jerusalem’s Old City.
Yesterday, the homes of two Palestinians were demolished, even though they were shot and killed by Israel’s security forces.
In a statement, Hamas’ spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhri, said that stabbings and attacks against Israeli settlers and security forces were “a natural response to [Israeli] occupation and settler crimes against the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinian people” further adding that “the Palestinian people cannot sit idly by while the Israeli crimes continue amidst international silence”.
When asked what he expected from the international community, Barghouthi told MEE; “I expect the international community to take punitive action against Israel in the form of international sanctions. They need to make it clear to the Israelis that they must immediately cease their violence.”
The Second Intifada started in 2000 when former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon entered the al-Aqsa compound, provoking almost five years of continuous violence and causing thousands of casualties on both sides.