Israel-Palestine violence is no re-run of previous uprisings

Violence has escalated across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a fifth night – killing at least 46 people, including an Israeli–Arab father and his daughter in the town of Lod, hit by rocket fire from Gaza. With further rioting, Lod is now under emergency law, following a visit by acting prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Both sides are ramping up for a sustained campaign. Israeli reserve forces have been called up – especially in the central and southern commands, and the border force.

The Israeli Air Force has carried out further strikes against what they say are Hamas and Islamic Jihad command sites in Gaza. As of Wednesday noon there had been at least 150 air missions. Overnight a tower block said to house Hamas  command posts was demolished – it had been evacuated hours before.

Hamas has said that at least 850 rockets have been fired out of Gaza to meet Israeli aggression. Some have been shot down by the Israel missile defence array of Iron Dome – but quite a number have got through – hitting Tel Aviv and Ashkelon frequently.

Israel has declared Operation Guardian of the Walls, the first major operation against Hamas and its allies in Gaza since Protective Edge, which turned into a local war in 2014 in which hundreds were killed and wounded.

The ignition point of what is looking like a ragged street war this time is Jerusalem and the demonstrations and counter demonstrations by militants of both sides in the Old City. Zionists planned the Day of Flags to commemorate the seizure of East Jerusalem in the Six Days War of 1967. The original route of the march was to go dangerously close to the Temple Mount, Haram al-Sharif and the al-Aqsa Mosque, perhaps the holiest site of Islam outside the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf.

Police rerouted the march at the last minute. But this didn’t stop trouble. Police went into the mosque and beat some Palestinians, saying they were agitators and extremists for Hamas, piling up rocks to bombard the Israeli security forces. Police had also used heavy tactics to break up Palestinians meeting at Damascus Gate after Iftar, the meal at dusk to break the daily fast in Ramadan. “They always say there are extremists,” Mustafa Barghouti, one of the new voices of Palestinian national politics, of the Palestinian National Initiative, told the BBC.

“The third Intifada (shaking, or uprising) has begun and will not end as long as the Israeli occupation – ie of the West Bank and East Jerusalem – has not paid the full price,” Barghouti added.

The drift to conflict – a neighbourhood war in almost any term – has been compounded by frustration and provocation, and a sense of inertia on the ground. This has been aggravated by almost breathtaking political incompetence and short-sightedness by the leadership of both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.

Palestinian activists are infuriated by the Palestinian National Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas cancelling legislative elections yet again. There have been no elections since January 2006, and since 2005 for the presidency. It is believed that the 85 year-old Abbas has put off the elections because he feared his Fatah party, which was founded by Yasser Arafat, would lose heavily to Hamas, who would pick up votes and seats on the West Bank.

In Gaza, however, Hamas is said to fear losing out to Islamic Jihad, and minority parties. So the Gaza Hamas leadership has gone along with the Abbas postponement.

For his part the incumbent Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his own vested interest in electoral inertia. Israel’s latest general election on 23 March, the fourth in two years, failed to give him a handy majority for a working coalition. He needs to hang on to office as he is standing trial currently on three charges of bribery, corruption and reputational damage. Since he has not been able to form a working majority in the 120 member Knesset, the parliament, his time has expired under electoral law. It is now the turn of an unlikely partnership of former allies of Netanyahu – Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett.

Their efforts to stitch together a new coalition have been all but halted by the spreading violence. Netanyahu yet again has projected himself as the leader Israel needs in its hour of challenge and crisis. The longer the trouble goes on, the longer he holds on to office.

This is a dangerous ploy. Events on the ground risk taking the initiative away from the old political leadership, Israeli and Palestinian.

The focus of real grief and violence in Jerusalem is the attempt by Orthodox Jewish settlers to oust Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district. Many Palestinians had hoped that east Jerusalem would become the capital of a Palestinian State. But in a complex case involving conflicting rights and claims from the effects of the wars of 1948 and 1967 in Jerusalem, an Israeli court has upheld the purchase of the site in Sheikh Jarrah by an American-based Jewish settler group.

Palestinians are scornful of their treatment by Israelis in the West Bank – where mainstream Palestinian nationalist opinion increasingly talks of Israel operating an ‘Apartheid System’ across the occupied territories.

Israel’s defence ministry has said it will hit back at the militants in Gaza with all appropriate means. This week a special commando raid assassinated Sami al-Mamluk, claimed to be the commander of the Islamic Jihad rocket launching forces in Gaza. The rockets fired from Gaza have increased range and potency year on year. There is also now the likelihood of coordinated rocketing campaign by Islamic Jihad and Hamas out of Gaza linked with a similar bombardment from the Shiite militants of Hezbollah from Lebanon and Syria in the north.

The UN Special Envoy has decried the slide to war across the lands of Palestine and Israel, though gave little sense of what he could or would do about it. Foreign ministers of the UK and US – Dominic Raab and Antony Blinken – have asked all sides to cool down, but offered little more than standard practice diplomatic hand-wringing.

It would be a terrible mistake to see this as a rerun of the battles in Gaza such as the Protective Edge operation of 2014, or another Palestinian popular rising, a third Intifada like those of 1987 and 2000. Attitudes are changing with the generations on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian Arab, and in a way that the insouciant Raab as well as Blinken seemed hardly to recognise.

Three recent polls and surveys among young Palestinians, revealed in a recent webinar by the Italian ISPI strategic institute, show a profound generational divide. At 40 and below most Palestinians polled rejected all present political parties in their community, and the present political and constitutional setup, which they feel has merely delivered disappointment and stalemate.

“The question revolves round the Oslo peace accords drawn up around 1994,” one pollster explained. “Most young politically aware Palestinians reject them now as going nowhere. They also reject parties like Hamas and Fatah.

“They are looking to a new Palestinian national movement, embracing the entire Palestinian community. This means they want to rethink the whole refugee question and engage with the destiny of their people as a whole.”

This marks an appeal to a community of around 13.5 million worldwide. Currently there are 4.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank, and a further 1.8 million Arabs in Israel as Israeli citizens. So far I have found no commentary in the regional or international media of the new Pan-Palestinian national movement. It is time that the international players – the US, UK , UN, Russia and the EU, even – caught up with the new realities of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

On the other hand, there is a new militancy among young Israeli Zionists – especially in their attitude to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem as the single unified capital of a Jewish state was never in the original thinking of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. This has been pointed out by the Arabic scholar at Georgetown University in Israel’s Haaretz daily in English this week. Herzl only visited the city, and the country, then under Ottoman control, once in 1898. “When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem,” he wrote later, “it will not be with pleasure.”

He thought that Jerusalem should be an international city, open to the major faiths of the region. He didn’t want it to be a point of endless dispute by authorities such as the Vatican, who might use it to block his project for the Jewish state. Now the new Zionists want to use a united Jerusalem to restrict access by others, and most of all for Palestinians to claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

These are ingredients for further conflict: the new national consciousness of young Palestinians, and the militancy over Jerusalem by young Zionists, both novel developments in an old dispute.

Of immediate concern is the attitude of the United States, and the now palpable vibes from Washington of trying to look the other way. The posture of Biden and Blinken is a bad legacy of their previous time in office under Barrack Obama, whose over-intellectualising aloofness has contributed greatly to the geopolitical mess we now see from the shores of the Mediterranean, Syria and Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Much of the delay is very likely down to Biden’s personal antipathy to Benjamin Netanyahu, not helped by the latter styling himself as Israel’s Donald Trump. But high flown rhetoric about “ending the never-ending wars” in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and parts of Africa is self-deceiving nonsense in the geopolitics of today.

It is an extraordinary piece of non-strategic thinking. A pull back or withdrawal today means things getting a lot worse tomorrow, and further and more costly re-engagement the day after. The new Israel-Palestine conflict will be no exception.