Issue no 111

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Issue No : 111 1st December , 2014

Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia | 1


Palestinian Cultural Organization MalaysiaMalaysiaM

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Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia

Hamas delegation meets with high-ranking Malaysian and Indonesian officials

Netanyahu: Jewish-state bill closes the door to Palestinian right of return

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FEATURED STORY

Articles & Analyses

Read in This Issue

Rage in Jerusalem

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Israeli law permits the deportation of Arab-Jerusalemites

Waiting for Rafah crossing, Gaza patients slowly die (Report)

U.S to provide Israel 3,000 smart bombs

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Israel takes record for World’s Youngest Prisoner, 11 months old

P10Malaysia & Palestine

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CONTENTS

News of Palestine :

Netanyahu: Jewish-state bill closes the door to Palestinian right of return 4

Hamas: U.S. statements on “Jewish state” encourages racism 5

Israeli law permits the deportation of Arab-Jerusalemites 6

Waiting for Rafah crossing, Gaza patients slowly die (Report) 7

U.S to provide Israel 3,000 smart bombs 8

Israel takes record for World›s Youngest Prisoner, 11 months old 9

Malaysia & Palestine

Hamas delegation meets with high-ranking Malaysian and Indonesian officials 10

Israel Insider

Livni, Lapid urged to leave Israeli coalition gov’t 11

Articles & Analyses

Rage in Jerusalem 12

Palestinian Cultural

Organization Malaysia

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News of Palestine

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset on Wednesday that the proposed “national law”, or Jewish nation-state bill, would close the door to the Palestinian right of return, Arabs48 news website reported.

He criticised Israel’s “imbalance” between Jewish identity and de-mocracy, saying: “Over the years, a distinct imbalance has been created between the Jewish el-ement and the democratic one. There is an imbalance between individual rights and national rights in Israel.”

The version of the bill that the Israeli cabinet passed on Sun-day ostensibly recognises equal rights, but says only Jews have national rights and the country as a whole is a Jewish state.

“I oppose a binational state,” Ne-tanyahu said. “I want a state of one nation: the Jewish nation-state, which also includes non-Jews with equal rights.”

“I understand why Hamas op-poses the nation-state law, but some of my good friends [also] oppose this nation-state law,” he complained.

Netanyahu: Jewish-state bill closes the door to Palestinian right of return

Netanyahu also questioned why many who support the establishment of a Palestinian state object to explicitly defining Israel as a Jewish state.

“Those who speak domestically about two states for two peoples and oppose the nation-state law are making a contradictory statement: ‘The Palestinians deserve a nation-state of their own, and this state [Israel] will be binational’,” Netanyahu said.

He insisted on proposing his own version of the bill in order to guar-antee the future of the Jewish nation. This bill, he said, undermines attempts to change the national anthem, swamp Israel with Palestinian refugees or seek autonomy in the Galilee and Negev.

According to Haaretz, Likud sources said that the Yesh Atid Party would face difficulties in supporting the bill, but added that it was still possible to reach consensus agreement.

27/11/2014 Source: MEMO

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Hamas: U.S. statements on “Jewish state” encourages racism

Spokesman for Hamas Movement Sami Abu Zuhri said Tuesday that U.S. lat-est statements that Israel is a Jewish state will encour-age racism.

“Such statements encour-age racism and ignore all values of democracy,” Abu Zuhri charged, adding that “It eliminates the Palestin-ians’ right of return.”

The Israeli government had on Sunday overwhelmingly voted in favor of approving the Jewish state law for the state of Israel.

The decision created large controversy among Pales-tinians in Palestine 48 as it threatens their presence in their own lands.

Hamas said that Israel’s decision aims to ignite a religious war in the region.

The Movement added, in the statement, that the law “sets off alarm bells for Pal-estinians, Arabs and Mus-lims about Zionist ambi-tions in the region.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinian unity government said in a press statement that the Israeli government’s ap-proval of the law “paves the way for more racist laws in light of the escalated racist attacks against Palestin-ians.”

The law represents a clear declaration of Israel’s adoption of the Apart-heid system, the statement added.

The statement called on the international community and all the free world “to carry out practical steps not only to halt Israeli actions, but also to bring Israel to account.”

For his part, Palestinian MP Mushir al-Masri considered the Israeli law as a second Nakba (catastrophe) to the Palestinian people, and a new blow to those who still believe in the negotiation process.

In an exclusive interview with the PIC, MP al-Masri said that the law rein-forces Israeli racist and arbitrary policies against Palestinians as it poses a real threat to a million and a half million Palestinians within the Green Line.

In his turn, Chairman of the Palestinian National Initiative MP Dr. Mustafa Barghouti also slammed Tuesday the law, saying that it “exposes Israel’s racist image and Apartheid system.”

“This law reinforces our demands to boycott and impose sanctions on Israel”, according to his statement.

Although a Knesset vote on the bill has been delayed until next week due to the government coalition crisis, Israel’s premier Netanyahu has promised to push forward with the “Jewish state bill,” with or without his coalition partners’ backing.

26/11/2014 Source: PIC

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The ruling Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanya-hu, prepared a draft bill that targets Jerusalemites and permits their citizenship to be revoked if they are found guilty of being involved in what Israel classifies as terrorism.

The Interior Ministry has already taken measures to deport the family of one of the men responsible for the attack on the synagogue in Jerusalem.

The “Anti-terror law” proposed by Member of the Knesset Yariv Levin includes a request from Ne-tanyahu to the Knesset to revoke the Israeli citi-zenship or residency of those committing attacks in Israel and to destroy their family’s homes.

The bill targets Jerusalemites in particular and permits their deportation outside the boundaries of the state, i.e. to the Gaza Strip.

The law consists of eight points, which will be ap-proved without having to go through the Knesset and dictates that the citizenship or permanent residency of those caught committing acts of ter-rorism, according to Israel’s definition, must be immediately revoked and they must be deported within 24 hours of this being carried out.

Israeli law permits the deportation of Arab-Jerusalemites

Lieberman: Israel should pay Arab citizens to leave

In addition to this, the bill also suggests that holding up a flag of a rival country, especially the Palestinian flag, is considered a terrorist act punishable by law. It also has a separate clause pertaining to the families of those described as “terrorists”, stating that their citizenship will be revoked and they will be deported to the Gaza Strip if they support these acts.

In a related context, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested Friday that Israel should offer “economic incentives” to encourage Palestinian citizens of Israel to leave the country and relocate to a future Palestinian state.

Palestinian citizens of Israel “who decide their identity is Palestinian can relinquish their Israeli citizenship and become citizens of the future Palestinian state,” Lieberman said in manifesto of his Israel Beitenu party.

“The state of Israel should even encourage them to do so with a system of economic incentives,” he added.

27/11/2014 Source: Agencies

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Waiting for the news of re-open-ing Rafah Crossing, Siham al-Hindi, 55 years, is keen on the news since she needs to travel to Egypt for medical treatment after her health condition exacerbated. Siham must undergo a major ab-dominal surgery the soonest. She said that the medical tests she had made in Gaza hospitals showed the necessity of a deli-cate surgery in the abdomen, and thus doctors recommended her travel to Egypt for that surgery. The Egyptian au-thorities closed Rafah Crossing on 25th October 2014 with the pretext of the deteriorating security conditions in the north of the Sinai Peninsula.This came one day after announc-ing the death of 26 Egyptian sol-diers in an attack on their post in “Karm al-Quadis” area in El Sheikh Zuwaid. The Crossing pre-viously used to be partially open for a limited number of people.Why?Palestinian citizen, Mona Abdin, is looking forward to re-opening Rafah Crossing in order to un-dergo an open heart surgery in Egypt by which she wishes to put an end to the pain of the severe heart attack she had two weeks ago.Abdin, whose critical need for traveling is prevented by the clo-sure of the Crossing and who is receiving medical care at Abu-Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital, said that she had got a medical refer-ral to Egypt.She added, “I call upon Egypt and its officials to look at us with the eye of mercy and to open the [Rafah] Crossing. We do love the Egyptian people but we don’t un-

Waiting for Rafah crossing, Gaza patients slowly die (Report)

derstand why they are treating us in such a way.”Al-Hindi and Abdin are only ex-amples of thousands of Palestin-ian patients dying in Gaza Strip while waiting to get the needed medical attention. This is a se-quel of the lack of medicine in Gaza as a result of the siege which has been imposed on the Strip for about 8 years. It is also a consequence of the Unity Gov-ernment’s evasion of its respon-

sibilities in Gaza.Why Paying the PriceAysha Humaid, 43 years, with a prolapsed disc does not look more fortunate as she awaits for the re-opening of the Egyptian borders with Gaza.She said, “I have a slipped disc and I’m worried about go-ing through the surgery here [in Gaza] due to the conditions. I got a medical referral, but the closure of the Crossing is preventing me from traveling.”“What is our guilt to be besieged and with closed Crossing in front of us? Is it logical to pay the price for Egypt’s internal problems? Is not what we encountered in the last aggression by the Israeli occupation enough?” she ques-tioned.Two Thirds of Patients DeprivedThe Health Ministry spokesman in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qidra, con-firmed that the closure of Rafah Crossing was suffocating the

patients in Gaza Strip as their ur-gent need to travel for medicine increased. He indicated that the closure of the Egyptian borders and the tightening of the blockade imposed on Gaza deprived about two thirds of Gaza patients of their official medical referrals and medical treatment outside Gaza.He said, “Rafah Crossing means a lot to the patients of Gaza who are listed on a quite long waiting

list.”“The patients’ conditions cannot bear any further crises represented in lack of medicine and the fact that the [National] Reconciliation Govern-ment have not paid the catering and the clean-ing companies in hos-pitals, and have not assumed its responsi-bilities,” he emphasized.

No Security ProblemsThe Internal Ministry spokesper-son in Gaza, Eyad Al-Buzum, as-serted that there was no justifica-tion for this closure.He stated that Rafah Crossing “has never been a security bur-den on Egypt’s security, and it has never recorded any security breach. It abides by measure-ments that would guarantee the security of Egypt and Gaza at the same time.”“We have more than 30 thousand humanitarian cases in a desper-ate need for travel. They are stu-dents and people with residen-cies in other countries, foreign passports, and serious diseases. In addition, there are six thou-sand Palestinians stranded in Egypt, and many others stranded in other countries. Their humani-tarian conditions are exacerbat-ing.”


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U.S. Department of Defense, Pentagon, announced that it will supply the Israeli occupation air force with 3000 smart bombs.

The funding for the sale will come from U.S. military aid to Israel. and it will paid until the end of Novem-ber, 2016, Pentagon added.

According to media sources, the cost of the deal estimated $ 82 million, through which the Israeli Air force will get three thousands bombs of G-DAM model .

These bombs can hit its targets precisely by routers. Israeli occupation use these bombs on a large scale against several targets in the last Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip.

In a related context, The British government stated Monday that it will review arms export licenses to “Israel” to ensure that the use of such weapons does not contravenes the international law.

The British government reviewed in August all arms export licenses to Israel after the recent Israeli ag-

U.S to provide Israel 3,000 smart bombs

Britain reviews arms licenses exports to Israel

gression against Gaza. It announced that it will halt 12 arms export license to Israel if Israel resumes its military operations against Gaza.

The government confirmed that it reviews the li-cense after the death of a Palestinian shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip near the bor-der fence. The spokesperson of British government claimed that the review which conducted in August reflects that most licensed exports to Israel do not includes materials that Israel used in its operation in Gaza.

British parliamentary committee issued a report in July saying that the outstanding contracts approved by the government include export of dual-use or military goods to Israel. It estimated that the coast of these goods up to 7.8 billion pounds (US $ 12.3 billion). It Includes contracts to provide body armor components and unmanned aircraft and missile parts to Israel.

29/11/2014 Source: Agencies

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11-month-old Balqis Ghawadra became the youngest prisoner in the world, after visiting her father in Eshel Israeli prison, occupied Beer She-va.

Nihal Ghannam Ghawadra from Bir Al-Basha vil-lage, near Jenin, waited passionately for the per-mission to visit her husband, Mu’ammar, only to be separated from her two little children, and to see her entire family become prisoners, Ahrar Center for Prisoners Studies and Human Rights reports.

According to the PNN, Nihal headed to the pris-on on Wednesday, with her daughter Balqis, 11 months, and son Baraa’, age 2. As soon as she arrived, the three were separated.

Nihal was imprisoned, along with her two children, under the pretext of sneaking a mobile phone to her husband. The entire family has now been im-prisoned, as a result.

Muammar’s mother told Ahrar that her daughter in law called to inform her that Israeli authorities had imprisoned her and her children, and began call-

Israel takes record for World›s Youngest Prisoner, 11 months old

ing on people to help release them from the prison.

Director of the center Fu’ad al-Khuffash declared the move by prison officials a flagrant violation of human rights and a crime against humanity, call-ing on local and international human rights orga-nizations, as well as Palestinian authorities, for a speedy intervention.

Mu’ammar Ghawadra was released in 2011, under the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestinian resistance, after serving 8 years of a life sentence (+ 20 years) in Israeli prisons.

Muammar was imprisoned again, a few months ago, without charge.

Furthermore, according to Director al-Khuffash, 63 of the Palestinian prisoners released in the Shalit agreement were also re-imprisoned without charge, for the purpose of using them as hostages, in or-der to damage resistance in any future prisoner ex-change agreement.

27/11/2014 Source: IMEMC

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Hamas delegation meets with high-rankingMalaysian and Indonesian officials

A high-level delegation from the Hamas Movement met with top Malaysian and Indonesian officials during recent visits to the countries and briefed them on the current situation in the Palestinian arena.

The Hamas delegation had visited Malaysia a few days ago at the invitation of the ruling party in the country, the United Malays Nation-al Organization (UMNO).

A delegation from the Movement led by senior political official Mo-hamed Nasr met with Malaysian premier Mohamed Najib bin Abdul Razak, interior minister Ahmed Za-hid Hamidi and secretary-general of UMNO Tengku Adnan Mansour.

The delegation put the Malaysian officials in the picture of the latest developments in Jerusalem and the dangers threatening the Aqsa

Malaysia & Palestinian Cause

Mosque.

Both sides also explored avenues for strengthening the mutual re-lations and promoting cultural exchanges between Palestine and Malaysia.

Later, the delegation flew to the Indonesian capital Jakarta and met with deputy president Mohamed Yousuf Kalla.

Members of the delegation discussed with Kalla different issues of mutual interest and others related to the Palestinian national reconciliation, the blockade on the post-war Gaza Strip and the obstacles preventing its reconstruction.

A similar meeting was also held between deputy minister of foreign affairs Abdul-Rahman Fakhir.

They also had the chance to meet with speaker of the Indonesian parliament Setya Novanto and his deputy Fahri Mamzah as well as heads of parliamentary committees.

Hamas official Mohamed Nasr, during these visits, expressed his Movement’s appreciation for the prominent roles of Malaysia and Indonesia in supporting the Palestinians’ steadfastness and their national cause.


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Livni, Lapid urged to leave Israeli coalition gov’t

Israeli opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog has called on the finance and justice ministers to leave Israel’s coalition government, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of putting Israel’s interests at risk.

“I call on [Justice Minister Tzipi] Livni and [Finance Minister Yair] Lapid and their parties to join us in chang-ing the face of the country,” Herzog said during a Labor Party meeting on Monday.

“You can still repair the damage – leave the government as soon as possible,” he added.

Herzog said Netanyahu had failed on the economic and security levels, and also in terms of the peace process with the Palestinians.

On Monday, Israel’s coalition government agreed to postpone a scheduled vote on a controversial bill that would enshrine Israel’s status as the “state of the Jewish people” in Israeli law.

Israel’s self-proclaimed status as “Jewish state” has been a point of contention in recent U.S.-mediated peace talks with the Palestinians.

25/11/2014 Source: ALRAY

Israel Insider

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Rage in JerusalemBy: Nathan Thrall

What the government of Israel calls its eternal, undivided capi-tal is among the most precarious, divided cities in the world. When it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem and the West Bank – both administered by Jordan – in 1967, Israel expanded the city’s municipal boundaries threefold. As a result, approximately 37 per cent of Jerusalem’s current resi-dents are Palestinian. They have separate buses, schools, health facilities, commercial centres, and speak a different language. In their neighbourhoods, Israeli settlers and border police are fre-quently pelted with stones, while Palestinians have on several oc-casions recently been beaten by Jewish nationalist youths in the western half of the city. Balloons equipped with cameras hover above East Jerusalem, maintain-ing surveillance over the Pales-tinian population. Most Israelis have never visited and don’t even know the names of the Pal-estinian areas their government insists on calling its own. Munici-pal workers come to these neigh-bourhoods with police escorts.

Palestinian residents of Jerusa-lem have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, but in order to acquire it they have to demon-strate a moderate acquaintance with Hebrew, renounce their Jor-danian or other citizenship and swear loyalty to Israel. More than 95 per cent have refused to do this, on the grounds that it would signal acquiescence in and le-gitimation of Israel’s occupation.

Articles & Analyses

Since the city was first occupied 47 years ago, more than 14,000 Palestinians have had their resi-dency revoked. As permanent residents, Palestinians in Jerusa-lem are entitled to vote in munici-pal (but not Israeli national) elec-tions, yet more than 99 per cent boycott them. With no electoral incentive to satisfy the needs of Palestinians, the city’s politicians neglect them.

All Jerusalemites pay taxes, but the proportion of the municipal budget allocated to the roughly 300,000 Palestinian residents of a city with a population of 815,000 doesn’t exceed 10 per cent. Ser-vice provision is grossly unequal. In the East, there are five benefit offices compared to the West’s 18; four health centres for moth-ers and babies compared to the West’s 25; and 11 mail carriers compared to the West’s 133. Roads are mostly in disrepair and often too narrow to accommodate garbage trucks, forcing Palestin-ians to burn rubbish outside their

homes. A shortage of sewage pipes means that Palestinian res-idents have to use septic tanks which often overflow. Students are stuffed into overcrowded schools or converted apartments; 2200 additional classrooms are needed. More than three-quar-ters of the city’s Palestinians live below the poverty line.

Since 1967 no new Palestinian neighbourhoods have been es-tablished in the city, while Jewish settlements surrounding existing Palestinian areas have mush-roomed. Restrictive zoning pre-vents Palestinians from building legally. Israel has designated 52 per cent of land in East Jerusalem as unavailable for development and 35 per cent for Jewish settle-ments, leaving the Palestinian population with only 13 per cent, most of which is already built on. Those with growing families are forced to choose between build-ing illegally and leaving the city. Roughly a third of them decide to build, meaning that 93,000 resi-

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dents are under constant threat of their homes being demolished.

The government has no short-age of bureaucratic explanations for this unequal treatment, but it doesn’t always try to hide the ethno-religious basis of its dis-crimination. After the recent ter-rorist attacks by both Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, the government demolished the homes only of the Palestinian perpetrators. Pales-tinians who live in houses aban-doned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for Jewish former owners and their descendants, but the reverse has yet to occur.

Jerusalem was once the cultural, political and commercial capi-tal for Palestinians, connected to Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the north. But the construction of the separation wall cut Jerusalemites off from the West Bank and from one an-other. The route of the wall was chosen to encompass as many East Jerusalem and West Bank Jewish settlements as possible while excluding the largest pos-sible number of Palestinians. In the Jerusalem area, only 3 per cent of the wall follows the pre-1967 border. The wall divides the Palestinians in Jerusalem into two groups: three-quarters have found themselves on the Israeli side; a quarter are on the West Bank side, and are now forced to wait in long lines at checkpoints to get to schools and other ser-vices. Some smaller Palestinian villages are completely encircled by the wall.

Because areas on the West Bank side of the barrier are still within Jerusalem’s municipal boundar-ies, the Ramallah-based Pales-tinian Authority is forbidden to enter them. But the Israeli police, in common with the providers of

other basic municipal services, largely refuse to go to these plac-es. Despite this, residents are still obliged to pay municipal taxes, in order to qualify for healthcare and benefits. These neighbourhoods have become a no man’s land where criminals can escape from both Israel and the PA.

In Palestinian areas on the Israeli side of the wall, too, crime has become pervasive. Israeli secu-rity forces tend to enter these ar-eas only when there’s a security threat to Israeli Jews. The Israeli security presence in East Jerusa-lem is made up mostly of para-military units, which are there essentially to quash dissent and prevent attacks on settlers rather than to protect Palestinians. Non-co-operation with Israeli forces, because of rejection of their au-thority or out of fear of being seen as collaborating, has allowed gangs to proliferate. They are in-volved in robberies, drug smug-gling, gun-running and extortion, which affects large numbers of Palestinian businesses. Rising crime and insecurity have helped make East Jerusalem a ghost town at night.

Unrest and ethnic tension have been increasing for some time now, but only since July have people been referring to the growing protests and violence as an intifada. At the end of June, the Israeli army discovered the bodies of three teenage students at West Bank yeshivas who had been murdered earlier that month. The next day, hundreds of Jews demonstrated in West Je-rusalem, chanting ‘Death to the Arabs,’ ‘Mohammad is Dead’ and similar slogans. Several dozen protesters attacked Palestinian workers and passers-by. Before sunrise the next morning, three Jewish nationalists abducted a randomly selected 16-year-old Palestinian called Mohammed

Abu Khdeir, from the upper-mid-dle-class neighbourhood of Sh-uafat, beat him and burned him alive.

In the days following his mur-der, riots broke out in Palestin-ian areas of Jerusalem. A new light railway that passes through Shuafat on its way to the nearby settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev has been repeatedly stoned and the service suspended. Demonstra-tions spread when the war in Gaza broke out a week after Abu Khdeir’s murder. Since then, pro-tests have taken place in East Je-rusalem nearly ever day.

Two of the focal points are Sil-wan, south-east of the Old City walls, where Jewish settlers with state-funded private security guards have taken over numer-ous buildings, and the Haram al-Sharif, known to Jews as Har Ha-Bayit (the Temple Mount), where Israel has been restricting Pales-tinian access and allowing more visits by a small but vocal Jewish minority which boasts a minister and deputy ministers in the pres-ent government and which ig-nores ultra-orthodox prohibitions by advocating prayer and even the construction of a third Jewish temple on the site.

Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, said recently that the number of incidents involving stone-throw-ing and Molotov cocktails had ris-en from two hundred per month in the period preceding the Gaza war to five thousand per month since. More than a thousand Palestinians in Jerusalem, most of them minors, have been de-tained since July – four times the total arrested in East Jerusalem for security-related offences be-tween 2000 and 2008, a period that includes the Second Intifada.

To counter the unrest, the Israeli government has seconded a thousand special forces officers

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to the Jerusalem police; deployed four extra border police units; conducted large-scale raids and increased the presence of para-military forces in East Jerusalem; established checkpoints and bar-ricades around Palestinian areas; called on Israelis who have fire-arms licences to join a volunteer security force; ordered the hous-es of Palestinian attackers to be demolished and their relatives ar-rested; dispersed crowds by hos-ing them with a foul-smelling liq-uid known as the ‘skunk’; erected concrete barricades at stations; formed a police task force to ad-dress the violence; threatened to fine parents of teenage dem-onstrators; proposed prison sen-tences of up to twenty years for throwing rocks; and handed out fines in Palestinian neighbour-hoods for such minor offences as jaywalking and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds.

So far, none of these measures has had much effect. Growing numbers of Palestinians, par-ticularly in East Jerusalem, have been injured and in several cases killed by Israeli forces. In Novem-ber, another Palestinian teenager in East Jerusalem was abducted and beaten, but left alive. Several Palestinians in the West Bank have been deliberately run over by Israelis in recent months. At-tacks on Israelis have increased sharply. A leading supporter of Jewish prayer in the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount was shot. Two axe, knife and gun-wielding Palestinians from East Jerusalem killed a police officer, a worshipper and three ultra-orthodox rabbis at a West Jerusalem synagogue on 18 November. There have been gruesome attacks on Israeli sol-diers and civilians by Palestin-ians using guns and knives and vehicles. More Israelis have died in such incidents in recent weeks than in 2012 and 2013 combined.

The prime minister, Benjamin Ne-tanyahu, and the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as Israeli government spokesmen, have claimed that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is in-citing this violence, but this asser-tion is aimed at thwarting Abbas’s diplomatic initiatives rather than providing a sober assessment of the causes of the unrest. As Isra-el’s senior security officials have stated, recent attacks have actu-ally been the work of ‘lone wolves’ – spontaneous acts of violence, not committed by followers of a particular political faction. They stem precisely from the absence of Palestinian political leadership, unified or otherwise.

Palestinians in general feel dis-connected from their political leaders, but the sense of aban-donment is particularly acute in Jerusalem, where the PA is strict-ly forbidden from acting and to which Ramallah, like most of the Arab world, devotes many lofty words but very few deeds. When he assented to the five-year in-terim arrangements for Palestin-ian self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat agreed to exclude Jerusalem from the areas that would be governed pro tempore by the PA. Local leaders, notably the late Faisal Husseini, refused to agree to this, which is one reason Yitzhak Rabin, who resolutely opposed dividing Jerusalem when he was prime minister and said he would rather abandon peace than give up a united capital, chose to by-pass Husseini and instead pur-sued secret negotiations in Oslo with Arafat’s emissaries.

Palestinians in Jerusalem have been bereft of political leaders since Husseini’s death in 2001. All four of Jerusalem’s represen-tatives in the Palestinian parlia-ment – all of them members of Hamas, elected in 2006 – have

Palestinians in general feel dis-connected from their political lead-ers, but the sense of abandonment is particularly acute in Jerusalem.

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been deported. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, monitors ‘political subversion’, which in-cludes lawful opposition to the Is-raeli occupation. Since all Pales-tinian political parties oppose the occupation, they and their activi-ties have, in effect, been criminal-ised. Even innocuous Palestinian institutions such as the Jerusa-lem Chamber of Commerce have been shut down. Years of Israeli suppression of Palestinian po-litical activity have ensured that when violence erupts in Jerusa-lem, there is no legitimate leader-ship to quell it; and spontaneous, unorganised protests and attacks are far more difficult for the secu-rity forces to thwart and contain.

The notion that Abbas has incited them to protest is laughable to Palestinians in Jerusalem. When permitted entry to the city, his rep-resentatives and associates have been verbally and physically at-tacked by Palestinian residents. A former religious affairs minister and his bodyguards were hospi-talised after an assault while they were in the Haram al-Sharif, and a PA governor was shouted out of the mourning tent of the family of Abu Khdeir. The PA is accused of standing idly by as a withering Palestinian Jerusalem has been encircled, divided and constrict-ed.

Abbas is adamantly opposed to leading an intifada, peaceful or otherwise, and he will almost cer-tainly resign if a new one begins. Understanding his deep-seated abhorrence of violence, Hamas agreed to a joint campaign of peaceful protest with Abbas’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, but Abbas and the security forces under his command have continued to act against such demonstrations. Even now, with Hamas’s rise in popularity after the Gaza war and Palestinian frustration in Jerusalem and cities within Israel, Abbas has refused

even the non-violent means of pressuring Israel that have been available to him for several years, such as supporting the boycott of goods not just from the settle-ments but from the state that cre-ates and supports them, and cur-tailing security co-operation with Israel. Thanks in part to collabo-ration between Israeli and Pales-tinian security forces, Palestinian dissent is more conspicuous in areas outside the PA’s control: hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, boycotts and divestment in the diaspora, and protests and vio-lence in Palestinian communities in Israel and Jerusalem. When the PLO’s political strategy is to submit resolutions to the UN Se-curity Council which it knows in advance will be vetoed, it is little wonder that Palestinians in Jeru-salem are acting on their own.

The current upsurge in protests and violence has been called the silent intifada, the individual inti-fada, the children’s intifada, the firecracker intifada, the car inti-fada, the run-over intifada, the Jerusalem intifada and the third intifada. But what it most closely resembles isn’t the First (1987-93) or the Second (2000-05) In-tifada but the surge in unco-or-dinated, leaderless violence that preceded the largely non-lethal protests in the early part of the First Intifada. Then, as now, such violence was blamed wrongly on the PLO leadership. Then, as now, that leadership appeared defeated and in decline. The PLO had been ousted from Lebanon, Israeli settlements were expand-ing, and Palestinians didn’t see how their leaders could achieve the national movement’s goals. As in 2006, local nationalist lead-ers in the West Bank came to power in 1976 in elections whose results Israel sought to undo. These legitimate leaders were toppled and deported, and more compliant, unelected figures were

The current up-surge in protests and violence has been called the si-lent intifada, the individual intifada, the children’s inti-fada, the firecrack-er intifada, the car intifada, the run-over intifada, the Jerusalem intifada and the third inti-fada.

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put in their place. Then, as now, with no organised leadership in the West Bank and Gaza offering a clear strategy of national libera-tion, sporadic assaults on Israe-lis, not attributable to any political faction, were on the increase.

The crucial difference between the mid-1980s and today is that Palestinian civil society is now much weaker, and so, too, is the likelihood of coherent politi-cal organisation of the kind that emerged soon after the First Inti-fada began. The groups that then channelled political activity have been supplanted, either by the institutions of a technocratic PA whose existence is premised on close co-operation with Israel, or by NGOs whose foreign funders make assistance conditional on the pursuit of apolitical develop-ment projects or vague peace-building strategies that explicitly rule out non-violent confrontation with Israel and any initiative likely to drive up the costs of military occupation. Palestinian society is afflicted with dependency, and it is dependent on forces that wish to preserve the status quo.

Israelis don’t like to admit it, but both intifadas brought significant progress to the Palestinians in their quest for liberation. After a short-term increase in the scope and severity of the occupation, Palestinians were given greater autonomy, not just from Israel but also, in the First Intifada, from Jordan, which renounced all claims to the West Bank in 1988. No less important, after both up-risings Israel, the US and the international community moved closer to Palestinian positions.

Israel, however, took steps to im-munise itself against some of the weaknesses exposed by these uprisings. After the First Intifada, it established the PA, to which it outsourced much of its responsi-

bility for crowd control and coun-ter-terrorism, thereby limiting the exposure of its soldiers. The PA was financed mainly by Europe and the US, which also made Is-rael less vulnerable to economic pressure, such as the non-pay-ment of taxes or the mass resig-nation of public employees. It al-lowed fewer Palestinian workers into Israel, protecting the econ-omy from the effects of strikes. During and after the Second Inti-fada, Israel took measures to pro-tect its population on both sides of the pre-1967 borders, erecting the separation barrier, removing settlers and soldiers from Gaza, and further restricting the move-ments of residents of Gaza and the West Bank.

With all the despairing talk today of the impossibility of a two-state solution and the inevitability of protracted civil war in a single state, it is easy to forget how dif-ferent the conflict looked two in-tifadas ago. Before the First In-tifada, no one of any importance spoke of Palestinian statehood, rather than autonomy. Today statehood is publicly accepted, even if only rhetorically, not just by the US and the UN but by a long-serving Israeli prime minis-ter from the hawkish Likud. Be-fore the First Intifada, Israel and the US refused to engage with the PLO. Dividing Jerusalem was unthinkable, as was the idea of partition along the pre-1967 bor-ders, with equal swaps. Today these are the positions of most of the international community and growing numbers in Israel. Many Israelis, however, see no reason for their country to take substan-tial risks and pay a large cost to change an imperfect but long-lasting and manageable status quo. It would be a great tragedy if nothing less than a third uprising, at a terrible price, could convince them otherwise.

Dividing Jerusalem was unthinkable, as was the idea of partition along the pre-1967 borders, with equal swaps. Today these are the positions of most of the internation-al community and growing numbers in Israel.

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Issue no 111