‘THINGS ARE VERY SAD’
Violence reaches Israel’s big cities
Darya Zelenkov was working her shift in a downtown clothing shop in this central Israeli city when she was startled by a knife-wielding Palestinian trying to burst in. The 25-year-old saleswoman quickly slammed the glass door in his face.
“I looked him straight in the eye. He had this lost look about him,” Zelenkov said. “Until yesterday I thought all the troubles were ‘there.’ I thought it had nothing to do with me.”
After years of relative quiet in major Israeli cities, a seven-week burst of violence has brought the Palestinian issue to the country’s heartland and pushed the long-festering conflict back on to the national agenda.
Disillusioned by years of failed negotiations and a controversial withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, most Israelis appear to want to create more distance and separation from their Palestinian neighbours rather than revive peace talks.
Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service and current fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, said despite the fear and anger, the unrest is having some unexpected results. He cited a poll showing more than three-quarters of Israelis ready to hand over Arabmajority neighbourhoods of Jerusalem to a future Palestine, in contrast with the government position that the city must remain unified.
“People only get it when things are very sad,” Ayalon said. “You can’t ignore the situation. People are ready to give up a lot just to make it stop.”
Such findings raise the unsettling question of whether Palestinian violence works.
Twenty years of on-again, off-again peace talks have yielded no solution to the conflict, partly because militant attacks frequently derailed them. But the first Palestinian uprising in the 1980s is widely seen as having hastened Israel’s decision to allow limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank, and rocket and mortar fire on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip was a key factor behind the decision to pull out in 2005.
Israeli cities were frequent targets of violence during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s. But when the violence subsided, residents in central Israel largely put the conflict out of mind, trying to enjoy the comforts of what is known as the Tel Aviv “bubble.”
While Israeli leaders have blamed the latest violence on Arab incitement, Palestinians say this Israeli sense of complacency is a key reason for the unrest. They say Israelis cannot ignore them, and that nearly 50 years of military rule and a lack of hope for gaining independence are driving young Palestinians to desperate acts.
With the attacks migrating away from traditional hot spots to the Israeli heartland, it is becoming difficult for average Israelis to look away.
Standing next to a pile of shattered glass from Monday’s melee, Zelenkov, 24, said the new reality has made her more suspicious of Arabs and no more sympathetic.
It’s a sentiment shared by much of mainstream Israel. Polls show a majority of Israelis still believing in the need for a two-state solution, but often on terms the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept.
The Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem — areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war.
Israeli leftists have said the establishment of a Palestinian state is the only way to preserve the country’s Jewish majority. The alternative would be a binational state in which Arabs eventually outnumber Jews.
They say the current violence, concentrated in Jerusalem and the West Bank, gives a glimpse of what a one-state reality would look like.
Wednesday, a Palestinian rammed his vehicle into an Israeli police officer in the West Bank, seriously injuring him before he was shot and killed, police said.
In a bid to deter attackers, Israel’s parliament this week passed a law toughening penalties against Palestinians for throwing rocks at civilians and security personnel.