Yohanan Tzoreff
INSS Insight No. 1595, May 8, 2022
Neither restless young people nor a rebellion of adolescents. However, the beginning of escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian arena over the past six weeks was marked by two terrorist attacks in the cities of Beer Sheva and Hadera (March 22 and 28, respectively) and were carried out by Arab citizens of Israel affiliated with ISIS. It continued with two more attacks, in Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv, waged by individual terrorists from the Jenin area, and was followed at the end of Ramadan by a shooting attack in the city of Ariel by two terrorists from a nearby village and an attack on Independence Day in Elad.[1] But the main expression of the escalation is in the popular resistance – ongoing friction between Palestinians and police and soldiers. The points of friction are the holy places in East Jerusalem and its surroundings; Jenin; the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; and other places in the West Bank. The escalation is a planned product of a campaign led by Hamas in cooperation with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front. The younger generation has a part in it but does not lead it, and mainly find in Hamas’s initiative and in the atmosphere of escalation that it is creating an outlet to release the steam that has accumulated for a long time. In other words, one should not infer from the younger generation’s participation in the escalation that there is consensus between it and the Islamic organizations regarding the approach toward Israel and the resolution of the conflict.
As early as January 2022, Hamas began laying the groundwork for the Ramadan escalation. The organization “warned” against Israeli attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque – against breaking into it, expanding Jewish freedom of worship and ascent of Jews to the Temple Mount, and duplicating at the mosque the arrangement at the Cave of the Patriarchs, where, following the massacre by Baruch Goldstein (1994), a new regime was established with a separate timetable for the prayers of Jews and Muslims, which in the view of the Palestinians is biased in favor of the Jews.
[1] The attack in Elad occurred on May 5, 2022, and therefore is not mentioned in the Hebrew version of this article, which was published on May 2, 2022.
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