Vigilantes and infighting are the new narratives

If the current violence spirals into an intifada, it will be one of vigilante extremists, masked Israeli soldiers and violent Palestinian infighting, argues Joseph Dana

Israeli soldiers with their faces covered stand over Palestinians wounded during clashes in the West Bank on October 7, 2015. Majdi Mohammed / AP Photo

After months of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, most observers can barely contain their views on whether this is the start of the third Palestinian intifada. In the past few days, Israel has arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a Palestinian woman blew herself up near an Israeli settlement, injuring one police officer, and the Israeli air force fired missiles into the Gaza Strip, killing a 30-year-old pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter.

It is still too early to call this cycle of violence an intifada but the direction of events on the ground doesn’t bode well for an immediate cessation of fighting. Regardless of the outcome, there are several salient aspects to this latest uptick of unrest that will have a lasting effect on the conflict as a whole.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, under the Oslo Accords, has proven itself to be an effective enforcer of Israeli security and occupation, even better than the Israeli military or Shin Bet. For several years, the PA security forces have routinely crushed any form of Palestinian dissent towards Israel or the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. Without the PA keeping a lid on Palestinians, there would have been a third intifada months ago.

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Read more about the current wave of violence in Israel and Palestine:

■ In Jerusalem, justice is rarely served equally

■ This is not the third intifada, but it could become one

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Thanks in part to the PA’s ability to police Palestinians, Israelis have grown comfortable with the idea that the occupation can cost them very little to administer. While the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has empowered global civil society with a viable and non-violent way of applying pressure to Israel to correct this sad reality, it is still finding its feet and is yet to dramatically challenge the Israeli economy or livelihoods.

As such, Tel Aviv has been busy promoting the country and trying to extend the reach of its brand across the world with surprising results. Such a branding campaign would have been impossible in an atmosphere of sustained instability in the occupied territories. There have been wars with Gaza in the last decade but thanks to Israel’s policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank psychological and physically, they have been packaged as something far removed from the localised violence associated with the Second Intifada.

Concurrently, nationalist extremism has skyrocketed throughout Israeli society. From organisations like Lahava that incite violence against mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, to rampant settler violence in the West Bank that has included the arson attack in the Palestinian village of Duma that killed three members of the Darawshe family and the rightward slide of the Israeli parliament, right-wing extremism has never been so powerful as it is now.

This is especially worrying in light of the recent surge of violence. Last week, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat urged gun- owning residents to carry their firearms at all times. Videos have flooded social media of alleged Palestinian attackers surrounded by Israeli security forces and being shot at close range although they appeared unarmed or posed no immediate threat.

As the violence between Israel and the Palestinians continues to rise, the next few months may well be typified by vigilantism, with heavily armed and aggressive Israeli civilians going after Palestinians with impunity.

Such aggressive behaviour from civilians visibly proud of their actions comes as the Israeli army appears increasingly embarrassed by its own conduct. After a video of undercover Israeli forces shooting Palestinian stone throwers at point-blank range in a West Bank demonstration emerged last week, the international community was shocked to see the brutality of the tactics used by the world’s most advanced military force in handling unarmed, stone-throwing teenagers.

More shocking than the brutality was the fact that the majority of the soldiers, uniformed and undercover, carried out their mission with their faces covered by balaclavas or kaffiyehs. Israeli soldiers in the field appear to be covering their faces in greater numbers than ever before. This could be out of shame or cowardice, or a tacit admission that their behaviour could be subject to war crimes trials or some other form of retributive justice thanks to the explosion of social media. The image of a masked Israeli soldier holding down an adolescent Palestinian boy with a broken arm while trying to arrest him during a demonstrations in a West Bank village went viral last month.

The Israeli army is sending the implicit message that it is ashamed of the tasks its soldiers must perform to perpetuate the occupation. At the same time, the army has clearly decided to be more brutal in handling Palestinian protesters than during previous flare-ups of violence.

As Israelis wrestle with the moral implications of their occupation, Palestinians have been living like prisoners in their own land, sold out by their own leadership in favour of Israeli security, and given few options to achieve just liberation. Palestinians are divided, and recent attempts by the Hamas leadership in Gaza to stoke an intifada provide additional proof of this political division.

Without a unified leadership and clear commitments to either violent or non-violent means of defeating the occupation, this intifada will be nothing but sustained clashes that will leave the Palestinians in a worse position. A genuine intifada necessarily must start and end with the reformation of the Palestinian leadership.

Ultimately, Israel remains in complete control of the situation, for it oversees the occupation with an advanced fighting force. If the violence spirals into an intifada, it will be one of vigilante extremists, masked Israeli soldiers and violent Palestinian infighting – a far cry from the halcyon days of non-violent marches and civilian boycotts that marked the First Intifada and a traumatic reminder of the violence of the Second Intifada.

On Twitter: @ibnezra