‘Israel no longer the West’s darling’

Pundits who dismiss the contention that Palestinians have launched their third Intifada in 27 years were proven wrong on Tuesday when two men armed with meat cleavers and a pistol killed five people and wounded eight in a Jerusalem synagogue.

The two attackers were shot dead at the scene by Israeli security agents.

The Palestinian perpetrators were from occupied East Jerusalem, a current hotbed of protest over Israeli incursions into the Haram Al Sharif, the compound housing Al Aqsa Mosque and the glorious Dome of the Rock where extremist Jews seek to build a temple.  

Israeli police commissioner Yohanan Danino said the attack was a grass roots, independent operation carried out by “lone wolves”. 

The authors of the attack were Uday and Ghassan Abu Jamal, cousins from the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Jabal Mukaber, which lies next to Silwan, a neighbourhood where Israeli colonists are moving into Palestinian homes and abusing Palestinians they encounter.

Hamas called for fresh “revenge” attacks while a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine welcomed the attack. 

It followed the hanging death of Palestinian bus driver Yusuf Hasan Al Ramuni, which the Israeli authorities claimed was suicide, but for which Palestinians blamed Israeli colonists. 

A Palestinian pathologist argued that it was impossible for him to hang himself in the bus. 

Palestinian assaults on Israelis have surged over the past few weeks.  

Five Israelis and a foreign visitor died after having been deliberately struck or stabbed, and there have been non-fatal stabbings of Israelis and the shooting of a radical rabbi.

A dozen Palestinians have been slain by Israeli police, among them authors of attacks and protesters.

Violence began to escalate on July 2, after colonists kidnapped and burnt alive Palestinian teenager Mohammad Abu Khudair, allegedly in retaliation for the killing of three Israeli youths, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frankel, after being abducted while hitch hiking in the West Bank.

They were buried on the evening of July 1.

Although Israeli police chief Mickey Rosenfeld said the abduction and killing of the Israelis had not been carried out with the knowledge or approval of the Hamas leadership, the movement was blamed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who used their deaths as a pretext for launching this summer’s 50-day war on Gaza, which killed 2,130 Palestinians and devastated the coastal strip.

Hussam Qawasmeh, from Al Khalil (Hebron), is said to have recruited Marwan Qawasmeh and Amar Abu Isa for the operation that was disavowed by Hamas, making it appear to be a “lone cell” or “independent” attack.

As such, it was difficult for Israel’s internal security agency to anticipate.

Individuals not associated with known armed groups who maintain silence about their activities are nearly impossible to identify or track if they have escaped after carrying out an attack and do not brag about it.

This is particularly true of Palestinian “lone wolves” operating in occupied East Jerusalem, where Israel exercises full control, Palestinian towns and villages in Israel proper, and the 60 per cent of the West Bank governed by Israel.

In Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank enclaves, local security forces with more knowledge of residents are in charge.

The third Intifada embraces all these areas and challenges both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Individuals have mounted attacks with knives, screwdrivers, vehicles and guns.

Hamas and Palestinians in East Jerusalem attributed the cousins’ attack to Sunday’s death by hanging of bus driver Ramuni. 

Israel has limited means to respond to the synagogue attack. It routinely arrests family members of Palestinians from East Jerusalem involved in attacks and has resumed demolishing their houses, but because Israel destroyed houses built without permits, this has become a frequent occurrence. 

Also, since Israel has planted settlers in many Palestinian neighbourhoods, it cannot seal them off or conduct sweeping military operations there without involving or inconveniencing settlers.

The violence is likely to escalate. Each individual Palestinian attack encourages others to become “heroes” in the eyes of their communities and prompts street protests against the Israeli occupation.

Israel routinely responds with tear gas, rubber bullets, live fire and arrests, prompting fresh protests and individual attacks.

It may be significant that the synagogue attacked by the cousins is located in the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Har Nof, built on the ruins of Deir Yassin, the Palestinian town where Israeli paramilitaries from the Stern Gang and Irgun massacred more than 100 civilians in April 1948 during the battle for Jerusalem — five weeks before the proclamation of Israel.

While Israel’s underground army, the Haganah, condemned the mass killings, its troops surrounded the village and allowed the paramilitaries to enter — in much the same way the Israeli army introduced Phalangist killers into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatilla, south of Beirut, during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

It may also be significant that one Palestinian was slain by Israeli police when he struck their car in the village of Kafr Kana, where six Palestinians were killed demonstrating against Israeli land expropriations on March 30, 1976, a day marked as “Land Day” by Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories and elsewhere.

Palestinians have long memories.

East Jerusalem is particularly sensitive to both Muslim and Christian Palestinians because Israel has been allowing Jewish colonists to infiltrate both Muslim and Christian Palestinian quarters and Jewish militants to pray in the mosque compound on the acropolis of the holy city, the Haram Al Sharif. 

Jordan, the internationally recognised guardian of the compound, has urged Israel to end restrictions on Palestinians seeking to pray in Al Aqsa and curb Jewish radicals intent on replacing the mosques with a Jewish temple. 

Incursions by Israeli religious zealots and proposals by radical rabbis to replace the mosques could produce an explosion in the Palestinian territories and across the Muslim world. 

It must not be forgotten that Israel’s takeover of Palestine remains a cause Muslims, in particular, resent and a factor that motivates angry and alienated young Muslims in this region and elsewhere to join jihadist groups like the Islamic State and Jabhat Al Nusra, which aim to drive Israel and the Western presence from this region. 

Finally, the climate of opinion in the 21st century is very different from global public reaction to the first and second Intifadas. 

So far, 135 governments out of 193 UN members recognised Palestine as a state, civil society groups organised economic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has urged the Palestinian Authority to sign its statute and prosecute Israelis for war crimes committed during last summer’s war on Gaza. 

Israel is no longer the darling of the Western world; its impunity is waning and its colonisation of Palestinian territory is blamed for the collapse of the peace process.

In the eyes of many non-Muslims around the world, a third Palestinian Intifada is
justified.