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14 November 2014

With No Middle East Process, A New Leaderless Intifada Revolt Beginning to Take Shape in the West Bank

Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren
November 12, 2014

A demonstrator waved a Palestinian flag during clashes with Israeli soldiers on Tuesday outside a military prison near Ramallah, in the West Bank. Credit Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press

ASKAR REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Sawsan Abu Hashieh said she packed a bag of clothing on Sunday for her 18-year-old son, Nur al-Din, who told her he planned to sneak into Israel to work for two weeks. Instead, he was arrested in Monday’s fatal stabbing of a soldier near a crowded Tel Aviv train station.

Though relatives insisted that Mr. Abu Hashieh was uninterested in politics, youths in the graffiti-pocked alleys of this Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus revealed a different side. Calling up his Facebook page on their smartphones, they showed a photo of him at a protest, holding a placard that said: “We are people who love death while our enemies love life.”

“He is not a member of any faction,” said Fares Rifai, 24. “But he supports the armed struggle.”

Mr. Abu Hashieh, who became a heroic figure to Askar’s young people overnight, is a militant in what many Palestinians see as a new kind of armed struggle, a leaderless uprising of sporadic outbursts against the Israeli occupation and policies. With no peace process to speak of and a political leadership that lacks the public’s confidence, Palestinians described the emergence of a smoldering, improvised intifada unlike the organized suicide bombings of a decade ago or the stone-throwing protests of the late 1980s.

The violence, rarely condemned, is at least tacitly condoned by Palestinian leaders and is encouraged by cultural memes like a song called “Run Over the Settler” that has circulated along with similarly themed cartoons on social media in recent days.

But without clear evidence of coordination by Fatah or Hamas, the rival political factions that dominate the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has no straightforward way to curb the attacks or hold the authorities accountable.

Six Israelis have been killed in the past month — two in separate stabbings on Monday, which followed a pair of deadly vehicular assaults in Jerusalem — up from five in comparable attacks over the past two years, the Israeli news site Ynet reported. Palestinian artists, activists, students and street merchants all cited the same spark for the escalation in separate interviews on Tuesday: fear of a Jewish takeover of the Al Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.

“Once you actually come and touch the Aqsa mosque, that’s the red line; that’s when everybody is taking orders from their own mind that something has to be done in response to that,” said Hamed Qawasmeh, a community leader in the West Bank city of Hebron.

“The whole atmosphere is poisoned,” he added. “It depends on an individual how far is he going to take it. Is he just going to curse Israel on Facebook, or is he going to say, ‘This is an act, and there’s going to be another act to go along with it’? ”

On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority warned that a “devastating religious war” would engulf the region if Israel allowed Jewish prayer at the revered plateau, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

“We will not allow our holy places to be contaminated,” Mr. Abbas declared at the 10th anniversary commemoration of the death of his predecessor, Yasir Arafat. “The Muslim and Christian worlds will never accept Israel’s claims that Jerusalem belongs to them.”

The funeral Tuesday for Sgt. Almog Shilony. The Israeli soldier was stabbed to death by a Palestinian in Tel Aviv on Monday, extending a recent surge in violence. Credit Baz Ratner/Reuters

While some Israeli ministers and Parliament members have pressed for more Jewish access to the site or even the erection of a third temple there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly promised not to alter the current arrangement, which prohibits open prayer by non-Muslims. On Tuesday, he reiterated his accusation that Mr. Abbas had incited the recent violence by suggesting otherwise.

“Instead of calming the situation, he is inflaming it,” Mr. Netanyahu said of his counterpart Tuesday night. “Instead of speaking the truth, he is disseminating lies.”

Mr. Netanyahu also announced that the military and the police had bolstered patrols in the West Bank and Israeli cities, and that Israel would demolish attackers’ homes and fine the parents of youthful stone-throwers. In one of a spate of West Bank confrontations Tuesday between Palestinian crowds and Israeli forces, troops fatally shot Mohammed Jawabreh, 21, who the military said had aimed a homemade gun at them.

But Israeli security experts acknowledge that the new outbreak is virtually impossible to control.

“Someone gets up in the morning, goes out of the mosque at noon, and says, ‘Today I will kill some Israelis’ — no organization behind it, he doesn’t have to prepare himself, he can take the knife from his kitchen,” Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser, said in a conference call with reporters. “There is no stage where intelligence can intervene and stop it.”

Palestinians said there also seemed to be no effort to harness the actions toward a specific goal. “We don’t have that basic infrastructure” of previous uprisings, said Mr. Qawasmeh, the Hebron activist. “That’s what’s the scary thing; it’s unpredictable.”

In Nablus, a West Bank city that was gripped by chaos with armed gangs roaming the streets during the last Palestinian intifada, the streets on Tuesday were orderly, patrolled by Palestinian Authority police officers, but dotted with angry young men. Ahmed al-Hindi, 24, an unemployed university graduate, called the soldier’s stabbing “an honorable act,” something echoed over and over by others.

Exhausted by years of failed peace negotiations, and entrenched now in the Palestinian Authority apparatus or civil-society organizations that have grown up around it, former grass-roots leaders have not recruited the next generation into civil disobedience. While shunning violence themselves, many see the daily indignities of life under occupation, added up now over decades with no end in sight, as justifiable provocation.

Khaled Jarrar, a Ramallah artist, said his ex-wife would not let their 6-year-old son go on a recent school field trip, fearing the bus might be confronted by settlers or soldiers.

“My son is crying, and I can’t explain to him how dangerous it is to go to the zoo,” he said. “If he doesn’t go this year or the year after, when he is 16, he will think like a man to make revenge on his occupiers.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer who splits her time between Ramallah and Haifa, was among several people interviewed who criticized Mr. Abbas for insisting there would be no third intifada, but not offering an alternative.

“He’s spent a decade wagging his finger at us and telling us what not to do, and he’s never empowered us and told us what to do,” said Ms. Buttu, who used to work for Mr. Abbas at the Palestine Liberation Organization. “For me, a leader is somebody who knows how to use public opinion, public sentiment, and knows how to transform it into something that’s much more powerful.”

Mr. Abu Hashieh, the 18-year-old suspect in the soldier’s stabbing, offered a cruder version of the same sentiment on his Facebook page, exhorting Mr. Abbas to arm Palestinian militias.

“Do something good before you die and defend your own people,” he wrote. “Then we will call you a struggler.”

By Tuesday morning, his mother had cleared their home here in the refugee camp of furniture, fearing that the Israelis would move ahead with their promised demolition.

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