Ruadhán Mac Cormaic: Violence fills political vacuum in Israel

The shaky mobile phone footage shows the prostrate figure of a young man, writhing in a pool of blood as people rush past. A small crowd gathers around the man as he is lying on the tiled floor, under a stool held over him by a security guard. Some chairs are dumped on his head before he is kicked by at least two people. Others spit and swear at him.

The victim, who later died of his injuries, was Mulu Habtom Zerhom, a 29-year-old Eritrean migrant who worked at a local plant nursery and happened to be at the bus station in Beersheba, the southern Israeli city, when an attacker entered last Sunday and began shooting and stabbing people.

The assailant, who police said was a Bedouin citizen of Israel named Muhannad al-Okbi, killed an Israeli soldier, Sgt Omri Levi (19), and wounded at least nine others before he was killed in a shoot-out with police officers as he tried to flee. In the chaos that ensued, Zerhom – an innocent bystander – ran from danger. A security guard mistook him for an accomplice and shot him. Sagi Malachi, his employer, described Zerhom as a quiet, modest man who had travelled to Beersheba to renew his visa. "It seems he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

These are tense, dangerous times in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Nine Israelis have been killed in Palestinian stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks since the start of October, while 48 Palestinians, including 24 attackers, among them children, have been killed by Israeli security forces in response. The violence has spread from Jerusalem and the West Bank to Israel’s interior and the Gaza strip. In one of the latest incidents, on Wednesday, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian who stabbed and wounded a soldier near the Jewish settlement of Adam in the West Bank.

It's the worst spell of street violence for years, stoking fears that what appears to be a series of disconnected "lone wolf" attacks could spill over into a third Palestinian uprising, or intifada. On a hastily arranged visit to the region this week, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon urged Palestinians and Israelis to step back from a "dangerous abyss".

Rudimentary weapons

Israeli prime minister

Benyamin Netanyahu

told parliament the knife attackers would be defeated just as suicide bombers were defeated a decade ago, but Israel has seemed unsure how to respond to the diffuse threat. Many of the attackers are residents of East Jerusalem, a status that allows them relatively free travel across Israel.

The stabbings appear to be spontaneous and unco-ordinated, the weapons are rudimentary (kitchen knives, screwdrivers and even potato peelers), and the attackers are largely unaffiliated young people inspired in part by viral videos circulated through WhatsApp or Facebook.

In an attempt to contain the violence, Israel has poured hundreds of troops into its cities and set up roadblocks and barriers in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. Authorities in the cities of Tel Aviv, Rehovot and Hod Hasharon announced that maintenance workers and cleaners – many of whom are Palestinians – would not be allowed into schools for security reasons. The city of Modi’in-Maccabim-Reut said “minority members” – a reference to Arab citizens who make up 20 per cent of Israel’s population – would be banned from working in its schools.

The spark for the latest round of violence was what Palestinians say are signs of encroachment by Israel on the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's holiest site outside Saudi Arabia but also a site revered by Jews as the location of two ancient Jewish temples. Under long-standing arrangements, Islamic religious authorities run al-Aqsa while Israel allows Jews to visit but not pray in the compound, located in Jerusalem's walled Old City. Netanyahu insists no changes have been made to the rules at the site. He accused the Palestinian leadership of inciting the violence, whereas Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has blamed "acts of aggression" by the Israelis, the expansion in illegal settlements and frustration over the stalled peace process.

It's true that violence is filling a political vacuum. Even though the broad shape of a negotiated settlement has been known for decades, the peace process is moribund and the extremes on both sides are in the ascendant. With Hamas talking up the possibility of a new intifada and moves to unify Palestinian factions having stalled, Abbas is under increasing domestic pressure to end security co-operation with Israel in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu, in his election campaign last spring, seemed to resile from a previous commitment to a two-state solution, while the United States – the key mover in any attempt to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the table – is showing little inclination to take the initiative.

US-Israeli tensions

Even if

Washington

wished to kick-start the process, US-Israeli tensions over the

Iran

nuclear deal and the icy relationship between Netanyahu and

Barack Obama

wouldn’t exactly enhance the chances of success.

Many of those taking to the streets to throw stones at Israeli soldiers were not even born at the time of the 1993 Oslo agreement. They have the same grievances their parents had – restrictions on their movement, harassment from the Israeli military, the eastward push of the settlers – yet they have none of their parents’ memories of the suffering of the second intifada, which left thousands dead.

"People have nothing to lose any more," 27-year-old Assad Shahran told me in the summer of 2014 at his window-frame workshop in al-Amari, one of Ramallah's sprawling refugee camps. Older people were "demoralised", he said, but his generation believed the time was ripe for a rebellion.

Talk of a third intifada, along the lines of the organised uprisings that broke out in the 1980s and early 2000s, may be premature, but violence can produce its own momentum.

An escalation could lock Palestinian and Israeli leaders into a violent confrontation they neither want nor quite know how to control.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is Foreign Affairs Correspondent