Last week, the police came again for Tariq, this time at 1.30am, accusing him and two other cousins of throwing stones at the light railway trains that run through East Jerusalem – a charge he denies.
“They took me for interrogation to the police station in Neve Yaakov,” he says. “It was full. There were young guys in there accused of everything – from throwing stones and fireworks. Everything.”
Tariq Abu Khdeir is one of more than 700 Palestinians from East Jerusalem, 260 of them children as young as 13, who have been arrested in the continuing crackdown on what those on both sides have tried to define as the beginnings of a “kids’ intifada”.
However the events are defined, the situation in Jerusalem is as tense and fraught as it has been in years, a state of affairs that has intensified since Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder, carried out in revenge for the kidnap and murder of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank.
On Friday, Abbas said that the peace process was dead at the UN General Assembly, and demanded the UN set a clear deadline for Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, but many believe the current crisis has been far longer in the making.
Gunfire has been directed at the Israeli settlement of Pisgat Zeev on two occasions from Shuafat refugee camp, which, despite being within Jerusalem’s municipal boundary, is cut off by the Separation Wall. Stones have been thrown at the light railway and at Road 20 in the same part of the city. Two weeks ago, a petrol station was set alight in the Palestinian neighbourhood. While Israelis have been attacked after entering Palestinian neighbourhoods, Arabs too have been assaulted by Jewish extremists.
The focus of the problems has been the city’s east – the areas captured by Israeli forces in 1967 which, despite being claimed by Israel as part of its “undivided capital”, are regarded by the international community as under Israeli occupation.
If many of the more serious outbreaks of violence have had proximate causes for each flare-up, many now believe they are becoming part of a pattern of newly heightened antagonism in the city.
A common message on both sides is the anxiety around the ‘other’ – and the steps people have taken to protect their families.
After the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, say Palestinian community leaders, parents responded by insisting their children are indoors by 8pm.
For Israelis living in areas such as the settlement of Pisgat Zeev it has also meant a change in behaviour.
“It’s going to explode in our faces, like the tunnels in Gaza,” said Yael Antebi, a Jerusalem councillor who lives in Pisgat Zeev told the Associated Press earlier this month. Since then she has not modified her line. “It is a very serious problem,” she told the Guardian last week, questioning whether the government of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was willing to deal with the situation.
“Especially at night people don’t feel safe. They are avoiding certain roads or the light railway, which has been stoned.” In recent weeks there have been calls from some Israeli quarters to change the route of the railway line.
The latest flare-up occurred after a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Sunuqrat, died on 7 September after being severely wounded by an Israeli rubber-coated bullet in a clash the week before.
The issue of the unrest in Jerusalem and precisely how it should be defined has become an increasingly high profile issue in the Israeli media, prompting both news pieces and opinion pieces, including most recently in the rightwing Israel Hayom, alleging that the disturbances were being “organised” – an allegation most discount.
The simmering tensions are also being exploited, however, by those with their own agendas – not least on the Israeli right, like the author of the Israel Hayom piece, David Weinberg, who has insisted Israel is losing its claimed “sovereignty” over East Jerusalem.
Framing the issue in stark terms he, like others, has demanded the “re-securing [dare I say re-liberation] of Jerusalem”, calling on the government to “wield a big baton against Arab insurgents that are threatening the stability of the city”.
For Palestinians in flashpoint areas, the situation is defined differently: by what they say is a heavy-handed police presence and by the almost daily arrests.
In Silwan, a neighbourhood of steep, narrow streets beneath the walls of the Old City, Jawad Siyam runs a youth project. He meets the Guardian an hour or so after the latest arrests in the neighbourhood – a boy of 13 and a 19-year-old.
“It won’t stop,” Siyam says of the pattern of arrests and disturbances. “This isn’t just because of Gaza and the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. There has been a growing feeling in East Jerusalem that people do not want to live under occupation. We want to be part of a Palestinian state. There are other causes: the increasing number of settlers who have been coming to the Aqsa mosque. Everyone said a third intifada would start in Jerusalem. For us it has already started.”
If Siyam is surprised by the events of the summer and autumn, it is how the disturbances have spread to areas such as Shuafat [an area separate from the refugee camp of the same name] and Beit Hanina.
“For me the people in Shuafat and Beit Hanina were like part of Israel. They didn’t care about the other side and what was happening in places like Silwan.” It is an old accusation: that wealthy neighbourhoods like Beit Hanina and Shuafat have historically remained more passive than other poorer neighbourhoods.
“But after the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the slow Israeli police investigation the Israelis lost credibility there.”
Siyam says many of those involved are also increasingly critical of the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas on the West Bank who has opposed any moves towards new intifada – accusing him “of protecting the occupation”.
The reality is that the growing problems in East Jerusalem have been fuelled by multiple factors, including a long-standing political vacuum at the leadership level under the continuing occupation. The closure of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem by Israel during the second intifada coincided with the death Faisal Husseini 13 years ago – by general agreement the last effective leader and advocate for Palestinian issues in the city.
This has all contributed to a growing sense of political separation of East Jerusalemites from the Palestinian political leadership on the West Bank. That too has come amid an increasing incursion by Israeli settler organisations into the very heart of the city’s Arab neighbourhoods – including Wadi Joz, Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, amid a widespread view that the peace process is moribund. Many in the younger generation, Siyam argues, have instead taken their cue for activism from images it has seen on television from the recent war in Gaza.
Most who have used the word ‘intifada’ to describe recent events, however, insist that if does exist it is closer in nature to the first intifada from 1987 and 1991, which was characterised in Jerusalem by stone-throwing clashes, than the second intifada, which brought a string of suicide bombings to the city.
However, Israel’s police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld firmly rejects both the use of the word intifada and the idea that the disturbances have been organised. “We have seen sporadic problems including some more serious incidents including the attack on an Israeli motorist in Wadi Joz whose car was stoned,” he said.
He attributes much of the problems to the “atmospherics” of the summer including the war in Gaza, but added that security would be tightened ahead of the upcoming Jewish holidays across the country.
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem, also cautions against whether it is possible to define the current events as an intifada.
“For me, the first two intifadas were characterised by sustained incidents over a longer period of time. I am not sure whether we are there yet. I think there is a possibility that in a few months it may settle into a new and very fragile equilibrium.”
The biggest risk in the coming weeks and months, he believes, is that months of continuing and escalating pressure from rightwing religious Jews to gain more access to al-Aqsa mosque and Temple Mount, which the Israeli government has done little to check, will trigger a “non-routine violent event” in the site sacred to both religions with far reaching ramifications.
If there is one factor that may calm things down, says Abdul Majid al-Ramadan, a community elder, or mukhtar, from Beit Hanina, it is the ending of the school holidays. He does not, however, seem convinced.
“I don’t think it will calm down,” he says. “I think it will get worse. Things have been getting worse economically in East Jerusalem. The young people have lost hope.” And like Jawad Siyam he notes a younger generation taking inspiration from Hamas’s recent fighting in Gaza.
At his house on the edge of Shuafat overlooking a valley planted with vines and olive trees, Tariq Abu Khdeir, who was released last week, and his 63-year old father Abdel Aziz agree.
“The pressure has been growing for years,” says Abdel Aziz, who is angry both with the Israelis and with the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas. “But the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir was a very ugly act. Something like that should spark a third intifada”
Original Article
Source: theguardian.com/
Author: Peter Beaumont
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