Palestinian attacks on Israelis are an exception – Amira Hass

The kamikaze attacks committed in less than two weeks by four Palestinians – both in Israel and in the occupied territories – highlight the absence of a leading Palestinian political body that employs a single, clear and unifying strategy. The attacks also reflect internal divisions and the painful awareness of Palestinian weakness and inability to act in the face of Israeli power. On the other hand, the fact that so few choose this path, despite being accessible, indicates the political understanding that such attacks do not serve the Palestinian cause.

The majority express their dissent in the facts: they know that the attacks of individuals driven by despair or revenge have never served, are useless and will not get anything. They will not change the balance of power. Palestinian public opinion in the West Bank understands this without the need for directions from above or explicit public discourse on the subject, while its political organizations, mainly the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, are at their lowest. historical in terms of public power and trust and are in conflict and competition with each other.

Every Palestinian – on both sides of the Green Line that separates Israel and the Territories – has many reasons to want Israelis to feel pain because it is everyone, not just their government, who is responsible for the plight of the Palestinians. It is likely that this was the desire of the four suicide killers, regardless of their background, family situations and individual characters. The Israelis can immediately know – since there is an entire apparatus in charge of disseminating this information – who the attackers were, who had already been arrested, after what attack and with which families the Palestinians celebrated by distributing sweets (with total disrespect for the pain of relatives). But Israelis as a whole are not interested in knowing the extent to which Israel, and themselves as citizens, have consistently and for many decades done harm to Palestinians, as individuals and as a people.

A different way
This huge gap between specific knowledge and deliberate ignorance is enough to explain why public opinion in the West Bank and Gaza is indifferent to recent attacks – whether by Israeli citizens or West Bank residents – and does not obey Israeli demands to condemn them. murders. However, it should be emphasized that – in addition to the fact that the attackers escaped the attention of the Shin bet (the Israeli internal security service) – the majority of Palestinians, while understanding the motivations of the attackers, do not choose to follow this path.

Thousands of Palestinians without work permits enter Israel every day through the numerous breaches in the separation barrier. It has been happening for years, and the police and military are aware of it. As everyone knows, there is an abundance of weapons and ammunition among Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. Thus, many more individual attacks could have occurred that could not have been prevented in advance, carried out by both Palestinian Israelis and inhabitants of the West Bank. Even if imitators crop up in the coming weeks, the number of such attacks pales to Palestinians compared to the scale and systematic nature of the injustice Israel inflicts on them.

All Palestinians have good reason to want to crack the false normality of Israeli citizens, who mostly ignore the fact that their state acts tirelessly, day and night, to strip more and more Palestinians of their lands and their historical collective rights as a people and society. To achieve this, Israel carries on a regime of oppression. This includes bureaucratic violence, including the prohibition on construction, growth and movement that discriminates against Palestinians in favor of Jews in the Negev, Galilee and the West Bank; disciplinary violence through surveillance, raids and night arrests; and physical violence, which includes torture during interrogation and detention, constant assaults by settlers, wounding and death at the hands of soldiers and policemen as well as Israeli civilians. The fact that the perpetrators are the state, its institutions and its citizens does not make this violence acceptable, legitimate or justified in the eyes of the Palestinians, who make up half the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In reverse. The meticulously planned nature of this violence and the incalculable number of Israelis taking part in it gives Palestinians a different sense of proportion when it is their compatriots who carry out violent actions. What Israeli Jews see as a “wave of terror” for Palestinians is an exception, made up of a few young people who have grown weary of general helplessness, including their own, and who choose to kill and die. Many other young men develop addictions to painkillers and other drugs for the same reasons, or pursue their dreams and emigrate.

Unequal balance of power
In private conversations, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza regret the deaths of civilians. The knife attacks and killing of women and elderly people, as happened in Beer Sheva, are said to be more disconcerting than the shooting at passers-by, including policemen and uniformed soldiers. Some point out that the attackers in the city of Hadera on March 27 allegedly shot only border police officers, deliberately avoiding – according to Israeli witnesses – shooting women and children. In a press report in Arabic this distinction between people in uniform and civilians is attributed – by mistake or on purpose, who knows – to the bomber of Bnei Brak, even though he fired indiscriminately at civilians.

For various reasons, grief and personal reservations do not translate into public condemnation (except from President Abu Mazen, who is so unpopular that his opinion does not matter). First, because the attacks of “lone wolves” do not represent ordinary people, who are not responsible for them, but also because the use of weapons has an aura of sanctity and historical legitimacy that is difficult to get rid of. Second, it stems from an instinctive compassion for a Palestinian who has decided to be killed. Third, there is no public condemnation by Israel after acts of violence committed by the state or by institutional or private actors against Palestinians. A Palestinian condemnation would appear as an almost collaborationist behavior towards such unequal forces.

The patina of Israeli normality may have cracked for a few days, finding expression in the form of hysteria and fear, fueled by the Israeli media and Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, which glorify the attacks for their utilitarian political reasons. . Motivated by a desire not to offend the families of dead attackers, even people who are aware of the futility and ineffectiveness of these acts of despair and revenge do not declare it publicly.

The attacks by the settlers and the army and the instigation of the right against all the Arabs, committed immediately after the attacks by the lone wolves, yes, they have attracted the attention of the people.

Despite the traditional emotional support for armed resistance, the majority know that for the moment, even if this struggle resumes (and not just by individuals) and even if it is better planned than its predecessor in the second intifada, it could not defeat Israel. nor improve the lot of the Palestinians. As well as diplomacy, the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and the bloody demonstrations in Beita and Kafr Qaddum have failed and fail to stop the constant and daily appropriation of space and the expulsion of Palestinians. , pushed back into overcrowded enclaves that can be isolated at any time by a handful of soldiers.

(Translation by Francesco De Lellis)