Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and Israeli authorities are struggling to contain a wave of violence, which is now entering its third week. Yesterday three Israelis were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded.
Mr Netanyahu convened his security cabinet to discuss its response as Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s hardline mayor, called on government to impose a closure on Arab neighbourhoods to contain the violence, which so far has left seven Israelis and about 25 Palestinians dead.
Some Palestinians are calling the unrest the “Jerusalem intifada”. The perpetrators of all of yesterday’s attacks were from the city’s Arab eastern half where Palestinians hold Israeli IDs allowing them to move around the country freely.
But analysts say the violence differs from the two past Palestinian uprisings in the 1980s and early part of this century because it seems to be lone-wolf incidents that have caught Israel’s police and Shin Bet security service off guard. Most of the attackers – many young and middle-class – have been previously unknown to authorities and appear to be working without explicit political support or in organised militant cells.
The outbreak of stabbings and other attacks are so far exacting a smaller death toll than bombings of the second intifada, but coming with greater frequency and spilling from Jerusalem and the West Bank, to other cities in Israel and its border with the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli troops in the past week.
Meat cleaver
Yesterday, two Palestinian men attacked a bus in Armon HaNatziv, a Jewish-inhabited part of East Jerusalem, and assaulted passengers with a knife and pistol. Witnesses said they shut doors to trap passengers. They killed two people and wounded seven others before police arrived, shooting one attacker dead and wounding the other.
Soon after, a Palestinian employee of Israel’s Bezeq phone company drove his work vehicle on to a pavement in west Jerusalem and rammed a bus shelter before emerging with a meat cleaver, killing one person and wounding three. Five people were also wounded in two knife attacks in Ra’anana, a suburb north of Tel Aviv.
Analysts say the violence reflects in part Palestinians' disenchantment with a stalemated political process and Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, which many feel Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority has been ineffective at preventing.
“There is frustration with the international setting: the perception that the world is preoccupied with other things,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey research, a polling group in Ramallah. “Palestinians are on their own, so they take matters into their own hands.”
A poll published by Mr Shikaki’s group found a decline in support for a two-state solution and a clear majority in favour of a return to armed intifada.
The violence has been fanned by often florid news and social media coverage of Israeli-Palestinian tensions over Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound, as well as graphic images of attacks and shootings of suspects by Israelis. Palestinians traded camera-phone footage of the shootings, accusing Israeli authorities of using excessive force against innocents and calling them “executions”.
‘Hatred’
The Palestinian assailants have included teenagers and university students too young to have taken part in the second intifada in 2000-2003.
Some attackers have voiced religious motivations for their actions. Baha Alayan, one of the bus attackers, posted on Facebook last December "The Ten Instructions of the Shahid", a martyr's last will of someone about to give up his life.
"This wave of violence is different than what we experienced in the past," said Mike Herzog, an international fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a conference call organised by the Israel Project, an advocacy group. "Some elements are the same – hatred, incitement, frustration, despair – but the background is different."
The violence has erupted amid Palestinian fears that right-wing Israeli leaders will tamper with a long-standing status quo prohibiting Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa mosque compound, an area also holy to Jews who know it as Temple Mount. Mr Netanyahu has denied he will do so, and has barred politicians from visiting it, but some members of his ruling camp support a change.
– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015)