Analysis OP-ED

The irresponsible rush to blame Abbas

Violence in East Jerusalem is rising relentlessly, and the prime minister's inclination to place blame at the door of the PA president is deeply disingenuous

By Avi Issacharoff
  • Avi Issacharoff, The Times of Israel's Middle East analyst, fills the same role for Walla, the leading portal in Israel. He is also a guest commentator on many different radio shows and current affairs programs on television. Until 2012, he was a reporter and commentator on Arab affairs for the Haaretz newspaper. He also lectures on modern Palestinian history at Tel Aviv University, and is currently writing a script for an action-drama series for the Israeli satellite Television "YES." Born in Jerusalem, he graduated cum laude from Ben Gurion University with a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies and then earned his M.A. from Tel Aviv University on the same subject, also cum laude. A fluent Arabic speaker, Avi was the Middle East Affairs correspondent for Israeli Public Radio covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq and the Arab countries between the years 2003-2006. Avi directed and edited short documentary films on Israeli television programs dealing with the Middle East. In 2002 he won the "best reporter" award for the "Israel Radio” for his coverage of the second intifada. In 2004, together with Amos Harel, he wrote "The Seventh War - How we won and why we lost the war with the Palestinians." A year later the book won an award from the Institute for Strategic Studies for containing the best research on security affairs in Israel. In 2008, Issacharoff and Harel published their second book, entitled "34 Days - The Story of the Second Lebanon War," which won the same prize.
 23 October 2014, 11:16 am
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (C) prays prior a meeting with his leadership in the West Bank city of Ramallah on July 9, 2014 (photo credit: AFP/ABBAS MOMANI)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Wednesday’s Jerusalem terror attack, carried out by a Palestinian from Silwan, was an assertion that this is how Mahmoud Abbas’s partners in government behave. Netanyahu’s point was that Hamas — Fatah’s partner in backing the so-called Palestinian reconciliation government — has declared that the killer, Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi, is a member and a relative of Mohiyedine Sharif, the former head of Hamas’s armed wing and its chief bombmaker who was killed in 1988. Thus Netanyahu created an apparently damning connection between Abbas and the murder of three-month old Chaya Zissel Braun.

What Netanyahu neglected to mention is that Hamas is his own partner, too, in the negotiations over the Gaza ceasefire and the rehabilitation of the Strip. What also evidently slipped his mind is that in the wake of the summer’s war, Israel agreed to cooperate with the selfsame Hamas-supported Palestinian government. Netanyahu has proved time and again in recent months that he can tolerate Hamas as long as it keeps Gaza quiet, while he continues to attack Abbas as though the PA president is the source of all of Israel’s problems.

It seems as though Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and the rest of the senior coalition partners refuse to recognize the reality in the West Bank and, most pertinently, Jerusalem. Ever since the early July murder of the Palestinian teenager Muhammed Abu Khdeir — an apparent revenge killing by Jewish terrorists for a West Bank Hamas cell’s murder of three Israeli teenagers on June 12 — East Jerusalem has become a powder keg.

Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch rushed on Wednesday to assert that this is not an intifada, and by comparison with September-October, 2000, when the Second Intifada erupted, he may be right. But by comparison with the situation in the city a year or two ago, there is no question that violent protest is on the rise. The number of violent incidents is growing all the time, and friction on the Temple Mount becomes more potentially incendiary for the region every day.

The natural tendency of many in Israel is to blame the Islamist movements like Hamas, and Abbas, for inciting violence. But it’s not that simple. An entire generation of East Jerusalemites is thoroughly fed up with the economic and political situation in which is has been living and the lack of real hope on a personal or national level. These youths, such as Wednesday night’s murderer, are prone to be swept away by spiritual leaders affiliated with Hamas or the inciting sermons they hear in their mosques in East Jerusalem. This incitement is not produced in areas under the control of the PA, but rather in the villages of East Jerusalem, the municipal territory of Israel’s ostensible eternally unified capital.

Added to this are Israeli right-wingers seeking to make political capital out of the situation on the Temple Mount, and gangs of Jewish racists attacking innocent Palestinians. This all makes for a dangerous concoction — one which means that the gulf between East and West Jerusalem yawns wider than ever.

In the midst of all this chaos sits the Jerusalem police, conspicuous in their impotence as the wave of violence has swept the city in recent weeks. On Tuesday, Moshe (Chico) Edri took over as the Jerusalem District police chief. Edri has years of experience in elite units confronting Palestinian terrorism and would appear to be the right man for the job, although perhaps at the wrong time. The task facing him, of restoring at least relative quiet to the city, is looking rather like a mission impossible.

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