More violence is feared after Arab-Israeli drove his vehicle into the city’s busy dance following the shooting in the West Bank.
On April 8, 2022, a Palestinian gunman entered a crowded bar in Tel Aviv, Israel’s advertising capital, and opened fire, killing 3 other people and wounding 10. This weekend, the anniversary of the attack, an Arab-Israeli crashed his car into pedestrians on the city’s waterfront, killing an Italian tourist and injuring seven others.
The attack followed an earlier daytime shootout in the northern occupied West Bank that killed two British-Israeli sisters, aged 15 and 20, and left their 48-year-old mother fit after her car veered off the road. On Saturday night, the two sisters killed were named Rina and Maya Dee through Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This type of indiscriminate violence has become commonplace over the past year. The past 12 months have been the deadliest in Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank in two decades: an estimated 250 Palestinian fighters and civilians have been killed by Israeli fire, most in a major year-long army operation against the cities of Jenin and Nablus. A total of 43 people, all civilians, were killed in Palestinian “lone wolf” attacks on Israelis in the same period.
Every time a great deal of blood is shed in this decades-long conflict, others on both sides of the Green Line prepare for the outbreak of a third Palestinian intifada or popular uprising.
Last week’s serious escalation in the already flammable region, which attracted neighboring Lebanon, showed that a broader multi-front war is also a threat.
The internal political upheavals provoked by the election in November of the highest right-wing government in Israel’s history, the steady erosion of the legitimacy of the corrupt Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza. Strip that has brought the captive population to the breaking point, everything gives the impression that a better typhoon is on the horizon.
As is the case, the latest outbreak of violence in the Holy Land was sparked at events in Jerusalem’s Old City, home to dozens of Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites.
Occupied by Israel after 1967, and completely annexed in 1980, Israel’s eastern part of the “City of Gold” is pushed toward the climax of every Ramadan, the Muslim month of prayer and fasting.
This year, the city is overrun by an influx of other people due to the infrequent convergence of Ramadan with Passover and Passover, and tensions were already high.
Under a long-standing commitment implemented after the 1967 war, non-Muslims are allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, known in Islam as al-Haram al-Sharif, and any perceived attempt to adjust the arrangement acts as a catalyst for violence.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Israeli police said security teams were forced into a prayer room at the compound’s al-Aqsa Mosque after what they called masked agitators barricaded themselves after nightly Ramadan prayers.
The sit-in violated an agreement with the Jordanian framework that administers the site that no one would be allowed to stay in the prayer area during the night of the holy month.
But that night, Palestinians were involved in Jewish visitors from an ultra-nationalist organization going out to perform a classic sacrifice for the beginning of Passover, ending the delicate and devout prestige quo, and plenty to stay.
A video of clashes at Islam’s third holiest site showing Israeli police beating youths with rifle butts and batons sparked outrage across the Muslim world and temporarily escalated to a border crossing with Palestinian militants in Gaza and Lebanon.
Israel and Lebanon are technically still at war, and Thursday’s barrage of some 34 rockets aimed at northern Israel is the biggest outbreak between the two countries since Israel had a brief standoff with the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant organization Hezbollah in 2006. Israel responded late Friday with airstrikes on either territory, leaving the region in apnea.
Although the Israeli army gave the impression of being content to say that it believed the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas was Lebanon’s salvo, Hezbollah had to at least consent to the attack.
And while the lack of casualties along the borders suggests all sides must escalate, continued attacks in the West Bank and Tel Aviv mean the scenario remains volatile.
Iran, which has vowed to destroy the Jewish state, is starkly watching what it sees as a moment of Israeli weakness.
The country has been rocked by political turmoil since Netanyahu forcibly returned for an expired sixth term as prime minister last year: huge numbers of army reservists have joined mass protests opposing the coalition’s proposed judicial reform, raising considerations about operational readiness.
Netanyahu last week forced the convening of a security closet made up of right-wing extremists who need complete annexation of the West Bank, as well as a defense minister whom he technically fired two weeks ago and has not replaced.
The far right in Israeli politics has fueled the hypothesis that any hope of peace, or a two-state solution, is dead: a recent vote shows that more and more people in Israeli and Palestinian society seem to be resigned to a one-state reality, founded on permanent occupation.
But as the rest of the Palestinians suffer under endless occupation, so does the price Israel will have to pay to maintain the prestige quo.