The New York Times - US newspaper A Leaderless #Palestinian Revolt Proves More Difficult to Curb ASKAR REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Sawsan Abu Hashieh said she packed a bag of clothing on Sunday for her 18-year-old son, Nur al-Din, who told her he planned to sneak into Israel to work for two weeks. Instead, he was arrested in Monday’s fatal stabbing of a soldier near a crowded Tel Aviv train station. Though relatives insisted that Mr. Abu Hashieh was uninterested in politics, youths in the graffiti-pocked alleys of this Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus revealed a different side. Calling up his Facebook page on their smartphones, they showed a photo of him at a protest, holding a placard that said: “We are people who love death while our enemies love life.” “He is not a member of any faction,” said Fares Rifai, 24. “But he supports the armed struggle.” Mr. Abu Hashieh, who became a heroic figure to Askar’s young people overnight, is a militant in what many Palestinians see as a new kind of armed struggle, a leaderless uprising of sporadic outbursts against the Israeli occupation and policies. With no peace process to speak of and a political leadership that lacks the public’s confidence, Palestinians described the emergence of a smoldering, improvised intifada unlike the organized suicide bombings of a decade ago or the stone-throwing protests of the late 1980s. The violence, rarely condemned, is at least tacitly condoned by Palestinian leaders and is encouraged by cultural memes like a song called “Run Over the Settler” that has circulated along with similarly themed cartoons on social media in recent days. But without clear evidence of coordination by Fatah or Hamas, the rival political factions that dominate the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has no straightforward way to curb the attacks or hold the authorities accountable. Six Israelis have been killed in the past month — two in separate stabbings on Monday, which followed a pair of deadly vehicular assaults in Jerusalem — up from five in comparable attacks over the past two years, the Israeli news site Ynet reported. Palestinian artists, activists, students and street merchants all cited the same spark for the escalation in separate interviews on Tuesday: fear of a Jewish takeover of the Al Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City. “Once you actually come and touch the Aqsa mosque, that’s the red line; that’s when everybody is taking orders from their own mind that something has to be done in response to that,” said Hamed Qawasmeh, a community leader in the West Bank city of Hebron. “The whole atmosphere is poisoned,” he added. “It depends on an individual how far is he going to take it. Is he just going to curse Israel on Facebook, or is he going to say, ‘This is an act, and there’s going to be another act to go along with it’? ” On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority warned that a “devastating religious war” would engulf the region if Israel allowed Jewish prayer at the revered plateau, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. nytimes/2014/11/12/world/middleeast/a-leaderless-palestinian-revolt-proves-more-difficult-to-curb-.html?ref=world&_r=0
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:46:06 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015