Two Stabbings Does Not an Intifada Make

Today's post was going to be about Gaza, but I feel it's necessary to delay that post until tomorrow to address the current situation here.

I was supposed to go to Jerusalem the morning Israeli media declared the third Intifada was upon us. At the time, there had been two alleged stabbings in two days.

Since then, it appears from Palestinian media that at least one of those stabbings never occurred.  Instead, nineteen year old Fadi Alloun was shot by police after Jewish Israelis yelled he was stabbing someone and was a terrorist.  There was no investigation into his death, or into the alleged stabbing.  The shooting was caught on tape, and nothing indicates that Alloun had a knife on him, or posed any sense of an imminent threat, at the time he was killed.

Within 24 hours, his home had been marked for demolition. I mentioned yesterday that there is a potential for punitive house demolitions for Palestinians who violate Israel’s security laws. Let me explain briefly how it works, because I always thought I understood the issue of punitive home demolitions but it turns out I didn’t.

What I thought happened was that evidence was gathered of an individual’s guilt through the normal process of an investigation. Once sufficient evidence was gathered – not necessarily enough for an actual prosecution because I knew that didn’t always happen, but enough for at least an indictment – the military, police or prosecutor would ask a court for an order to demolish a home.  The court would grant the order, rarely denying requests but at least requiring a minimum level of evidence, and then the military would carry out the order.

Home demolitions are problematic even with this understanding. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which as I discussed is applicable to Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, prohibits collective punishments. Homes are demolished regardless of who lives in them – thereby punishing family members for what a single member did – and regardless of whether the alleged perpetrator is still alive or not, meaning at times the alleged perpetrator isn’t even amongst those punished for his crime. As a result, punitive home demolition clearly constitutes a collective punishment, inflicted not on the individual but on the family as a whole.

In case you’re tempted to think that the home demolition really is directed at the individual and not the family unit as a whole, it’s worth noting that the current Israeli Minister of Justice Ayalet Shaked once infamously shared the words of an Israeli reporter, Uri Elitzur, in which the latter labelled Palestinians, including Palestinian children, “little snakes.” For as dehumanizing as that seems in the abstract, the full quote is worse:

“They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. … Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

The house demolitions predate Elitzur’s words and Shaked’s reign at the Ministry of Justice, but I believe they are indicative of the underlying sentiment of the house demolitions. The demolitions are not aimed at the person committing the crime, but at destroying homes where Israel fears “more little snakes will be raised.”  Regardless of the underlying belief, the act of destroying homes of Palestinian civilians without military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly constitutes a war crime.

What Actually Happens is Worse.  Remember how I thought the punitive home demolitions occurred after a sufficient investigation and with a court order?  I was wrong.

Apparently home demolitions do not require a court order.  They also don’t require an investigation.  So that young man – Fadi Alloun – despite eyewitnesses stating he hadn’t stabbed anyone but was instead the victim in a mob attack, was the focus of a demolition order.  His family, in addition to having to bury their son, has to worry about being rendered homeless.

After the Stabbings

Following media hysteria – or perhaps causing it?  Sometimes it’s hard to know the relationship of governments and nationalist media – the government cracked down on the rights of Palestinians. Entrance to East Jerusalem was limited only to Palestinians who lived there, though reports from at least some of the entrances to East Jerusalem indicated that IDs were checked discriminatorily, with a person’s looks determining how thoroughly they were checked.

The Israeli government again prohibited men under 50 from entering al-Aqsa mosque for Friday prayers.

The violence escalated.

The Mayor of Jerusalem was apparently raised in Texas (please note that was sarcastic; he was actually born and raised in Jerusalem) and thought guns would be the solution. So he encouraged Israelis to carry weapons with them to protect themselves.  You need a permit to carry a weapon with you; that permit is routinely denied to Palestinians, so he was clearly encouraging a one-sided escalation of violence.

It worked, as stabbings by Israelis against Palestinians increased, leading to an incident in which one Israeli Jewish man stabbed another Israeli Jewish man at an Ikea because the second was believed to be “an Arab.”  While Palestinians accused of stabbings are routinely killed, sometimes left to bleed out on the street, the attacker in this incidence was questioned by police without any violence. (I’m not linking or embedding pictures and videos mostly as a self-care technique to limit how much I subject myself to these images; to share them with you, I’d have to view images more than once.) 

The treatment of the Israeli man was obviously the right course of action -- it's how anyone accused of a crime should be treated if possible. It's what's demanded and expected when the accused does not pose an imminent threat. But this course of action simply needs to be extended beyond Israelis to ensure that Palestinians accused of a crime are also taken into custody without unnecessary violence.  

Between 1 October and yesterday morning, 25 Palestinians and 4 Israelis were killed in the conflict.  There have also been protests in cities like Bethlehem and Ramallah, and in refugee camps across the West Bank.  Protests by checkpoints have grown violent as Israeli soldiers fire live ammunition, rubber bullets, and teargas on protesters.  I’ve been told approximately 1/3 of those injured in Ramallah were shot with live ammunition.

Most of those who have been killed on the Palestinian side are under 25 years old. Several have been 13 years old.

But Seriously… Two Stabbings Does Not an Intifada Make.

Watching the escalation of violence up close (though still with a great deal of distance as I am not present at the protests) has been mystifying because, seriously, I cannot say this enough, but two stabbings do not make an Intifada, and never should have been treated as such.

It’s an escalation of violence. It is part of the cycle that occurs when you isolate a population, degrade them, and them blame then every time any one of them violently resists.

But the Palestinian leadership has not taken up arms, and instead has functioned as a buffer between the Palestinians and the State of Israel.  There is no Katniss Everdeen of the Palestinian Authority who is taking widespread resentment and turning it into action. This sits in stark contrast to the two earlier Intifadas, when Yasser Arafat, an experienced military leader, led the charge on the Palestinian side and turned low-level violence into an actual armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Without that leadership, you do not have an Intifada. You have low-level violence.  That’s what Israel was faced with 10 days ago.

The immediate clampdown on all Palestinians whenever one or two are involved in hate crimes (and the assumption that they are hate crimes as soon as a Palestinian is involved, while they’re just accidental stabbings or legitimate self-defense when Israelis are involved) is problematic legally, politically, and morally.

Let’s start with the legal part.  Collective punishments are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. It’s also a breach of one of the core principles of human rights law – that you cannot discriminate against people based solely on immutable characteristics, like race or ethnicity.  We have a right to be judged on our actions alone, not on the fact that we look like someone else.

White men are able to understand this when women in the US complain about the patriarchy. The response is always a resounding “not all men are like that” (yes, I know what I linked to).  

Police officers do the same whenever complaints emerge about brutality in the US. The immediate response: not all police are racist (seriously, watch the Daily Show clip – it’s really good).

No freaking kidding.

We know – at least whenever we are the victims – that we should never be judged based on the actions of another. 

And that’s the moral issue – we know that treating a collective population as a monolithic being is morally wrong.

It also creates resentment, and that resentment leads to violence, which is why the response is also politically wrong. 

By assuming all Palestinians are terrorists (or terrorist-supporters or terrorist-lovers or… whatever hyphenate you want to follow “terrorist”), the Israeli response to two stabbings creates resentment. 

That resentment piles on top of the resentment already experienced because of discriminatory land access, limitations on free movement and access to holy sites, and a denial of the promise of Oslo that 15 years ago Palestinians would have their own autonomy and sovereignty.

And it’s not surprising that violence spirals.

Palestinian protesters outside an Israeli checkpoint by Ramallah

On that, I need to say one final thought, related to the “bombshell” of a speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly.  Abbas gave voice to the frustration of Palestinians who feel they are routinely required to abide by the Oslo agreements while Israel is not obligated to do the same.  He indicated that if the Palestinians do not see a commitment by Israel to the Oslo Agreements, they will stop abiding by the treaty as well.  What kinds of commitment does Israel need to show?  Well, Oslo provided for many things, but most notably that Palestine will be given an opportunity for full sovereignty and that negotiations over the status of Jerusalem (note: the entirety of Jerusalem, not just the status of East Jerusalem). 

By governing East Jerusalem without regard for Palestinian rights, it appears Israel is attempting to effectuate a coup over the city’s boundaries.  Stopping the eviction of Palestinians, and the building of Jewish-only neighborhoods is one way in which Israel can abide by Oslo.  Withdrawing to the ’67 border is another.  Resuming peace talks on the final status of Jerusalem is a third. 

The ball is in Israel’s court to stop this low-level violence from turning into something more.  Because if the only thing stopping an armed conflict is the absence of a Katniss Everdeen, Israel will eventually be faced with a real conflict.   

The way to do that is not to clamp down further on Palestinians – as Netanyahu’s government has suggested – but rather to engage in Oslo and work for a sustainable peace.

I am well aware there’s another side to this conflict.

I am hoping to interview people in Israel for my research, and assume those interviews will turn into interesting conversations about the conflict. But since I’ve arrived the violence has prevented me from going anywhere.  I’ve had three trips to Jerusalem and a trip to Tel Aviv cancelled.  So at some point, I will likely provide an idea of how this conflict is viewed from the Israeli side – and I have some thoughts already on that related to Netanyahu’s speech at the UN, and comments from friends – but for now, I can only rely on Israeli media reports and I too often find them wanting.

A Note to Our American Readers

Now, I started writing about the Palestinian experience in part so that my American friends and family could understand what I'm working on and what I'm going to be doing here. And so I really briefly want to say something to that American audience ahead of our own elections. When Republicans talk about modelling our anti-terrorism efforts off of Israel, it shows they have no clue what they are talking about.

In the days following 9/11, I remember people discussing the need to follow Israel’s lead on anti-terrorism because Israel had been “dealing with this for sixty years.”  At the time I was flabbergasted – wouldn’t you want to model you response off a state that hasn’t been dealing with it for 6 decades, and instead choose a state that successfully engaged on anti-terrorism issues and now no longer needed to?  Some place like Switzerland or Belgium or Spain.  We don’t need to model our response to terrorism on a state that not only fails to combat it effectively but that takes actions that encourage unrest and violence.  

When Republican candidates point to Israel as the model for our anti-terrorism efforts, it proves they know little about terrorism and less about how to fight it effectively.