BICOM

On 13 October BICOM hosted a conference call for journalists with Times of Israel Arab Affairs correspondent Elhanan Miller, to discuss the causes of the current wave of terror attacks in Israel and the motivations of the Palestinian perpetrators. The following is an edited summary of his remarks. You can listen to part of the briefing as a podcast here.

The pattern of events

We’re experiencing a wave of violence of terror attacks focused around Jerusalem but not isolated to Jerusalem. The form of the attacks is reminiscent of the attacks that we experienced in Israel during the First Intifada or Palestinian uprising between 1987 and 1993 – i.e. stabbings and stone throwing – except for a few remarkable differences. First is the age of the perpetrators who by and large appear to be teenagers or at most in their early twenties. The youngest was thirteen. It’s been given the name the ‘Al Quds Intifada’ on Palestinian social media – which means the Jerusalem intifada – but a more apt name would be the teenage intifada. We also see more women participating in these attacks than we have in previous rounds of violence.

In effect this round of violence is a realization of Hamas’ agenda for the West Bank. Since around Operation Protective Edge, Hamas has really been encouraging individual Palestinians to take action and attack Israelis in a sporadic way and that’s what’s happening now. A couple of days ago Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza wrote, on Facebook post that Hamas decided not to fire rockets into Israel because they don’t want the focus to be taken away from the perceived threat on al-Aqsa and they want to keep it on West Bank and a Jerusalem intifada.

Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the Palestinian Authority has been trying to calm things down mostly behind the scenes. Security cooperation between his security apparatus and Israel continues and he has said publicly that he doesn’t believe in violence. The problem though is that his public statements also validate the core roots behind the violence by continuing to say that Israel is trying to change the status quo for the Al Aqsa Mosque even though that’s not in the cards.

The motivations of the perpetrators

Facebook provides a good insight into the motivations of the young perpetrators. Muhammad Haladi was an attacker in Jerusalem who stabbed a family and a rabbi who came to their assistance and killed two men. He was a 19 years old law student in Jerusalem. In his posts before the attack there’s a very strong sense of violated honour, especially the honour of Muslim women, some of whom have been removed from the Temple Mount by Israeli police in recent weeks because they were provoking and attacking Jewish visitors. The videos of these women being removed were shared widely on Palestinian social media and that’s one thing that he commented on. He wrote an allegory likening the al-Aqsa mosque to an orphaned girl who’s being abused and raped by a vicious man who is Israel in this metaphor, and is being forsaken by her brethren.

So there’s very much a sense that Palestinians are on their own and there’s no-one else to come and save them from this perceived Israeli onslaught on al-Aqsa mosque. There’s a sense of loss of control that can be really discerned in Muhammad Haladi’s post and in others. They feel Israel is doing whatever it wants not only at al-Aqsa but elsewhere in Jerusalem and Palestinians don’t really feel they’re in control of their destiny.

There is also a copy-cat phenomenon here. Videos of the attacks and of the injured perpetrators are widely shared on Palestinian social media, presented often as summary executions in the cases where the perpetrators are killed, and that fuels a sense of revenge but also martyrdom and encourages other Palestinians to emulate them.

Because of the young age of the perpetrators there appears to be a very strong anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical trend here. Prime-Minister Netanyahu has been pointing at Mahmoud Abbas and at the Islamic Movement in Israel as causes to this. It’s true that these groups have contributed to the hysteria or the sense of danger around al-Aqsa but I don’t think the perpetrators themselves need authority figures in order to carry out their attacks.

We should also see this in the context of what’s happening in the Arab world, after all the Palestinians are part of the wider Arab world and they’re bombarded constantly via mainstream media or social media with examples of Arab activism in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere. The Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem has been fragmented in the last 15 years, and you have about 330,000 Palestinians, many of them young, unemployed, highly-educated in many cases. Even those who work inside Israel and know Israeli society are feeling increasingly frustrated by inaction and lack of leadership, and as part of the broader Middle East they’re taking things into their own hands.

Coverage in Palestinian media

These attacks are being reported in a vastly different way on Palestinian media than they are in Israeli media. Palestinians are often reporting these as a summary execution by Israeli police. Many Israelis are armed especially in Jerusalem and the reaction is very fast, so the perpetrator has been able to stab one or two people before being either arrested or shot dead, and the videos coming out are the ones of the injured perpetrators. Reports that many of the perpetrators were innocent and the killing was initiated by settlers or by police or army are receiving huge credibility on the Palestinian street. So on the one hand there’s a glorification of the Palestinian vigilantism, on the other hand there’s frustration, with for example the encouragement of Israelis to bear arms by the Mayor of Jerusalem.

How Israelis perceive the events

In perceived Israeli experience there’s no correlation between Palestinian violence and the existence or absence of a peace process. It was during the height of the Oslo process in the 1990s that terrorism really took a turn for the worse and the bus bombings began. So Israelis are looking at posts from Palestinian social media, because Israeli journalists are also reporting on the trends in the Palestinian media, and saying this is completely random terrorism. There is a feeling that even if we called for the members of the Knesset to stop going on the Temple Mount there seems to be a deeper trend here that is out of our control.

Palestinians living in Jerusalem might, in objective parameters, have it better than their counterparts in the West Bank and certainly in Gaza, yet the violence is mainly focused on Jerusalem and even perpetrators in other cities are from Jerusalem. Many of them work in Israeli companies, they’re middle-class, they’re well-educated, they’re not poor. So Israelis really have a hard time grasping or understanding what measures the government could take right now. Even if the peace process began, there’s no indication that the stabbers are frustrated by a lack of peace process per se; they seem to have no faith in any kind of leadership.

The phenomenon of the ‘Oslo generation’

Israelis are also shocked by the age of some of the perpetrators, as well as the victim, such as the case in Jerusalem where a thirteen year old and sixteen year old stabbed a thirteen year old Israeli. It wasn’t like this in previous intifadas. In the Second Intifada the suicide bombers were usually in their twenties, mostly male, and they often were affiliated with either Fatah or Hamas. These Jerusalemites aren’t affiliated with any organization or individual. They’re kids that have been born certainly after 1993 and the Oslo accords and some of them around 2000. They can’t remember the terrible effect of the Second Intifada and the suicide bombings so they have a very different set of experiences to the older generation. These are people who are heavily affected by social media. The Palestinian educational system and their own social network has not managed to divert them away from this type of violence. This isn’t to say the organized groups aren’t riding the wave. Leaders of Hamas are using the hashtag #alaqsaindanger but they’re really followers in this trend more than trend setters.