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Unrest by Palestinians Surges in a Jerusalem Neighborhood
Mohamad Sami, a Palestinian truck driver, was eager to offer a tour of the landmarks from this summer’s violence in his neighborhood, Issawiya.
Down the road from the Israeli-owned gas station that was looted by masked youths who broke a pump and smashed windows earlier this month were seven concrete squares that the police used to block the road. On the side of the neighborhood was a floor-tile store Mr. Sami said was destroyed by tear gas that Israeli forces used to disperse a demonstration. On a hill near where Jesus is said to have sat under a carob tree with his disciples, five boys made crude gestures toward Israeli soldiers leaning over a fence.
“The clashes are here,” Mr. Sami, 25, said as he passed Like Café, an ice cream shop. “Sometimes the clashes reach here,” he added, driving deeper into the valley, amid fresh graffiti hailing “resistance” and the Gaza-based militant movement Hamas. And deeper still, “Sometimes the clashes are here.”
The clashes were practically everywhere in Issawiya and across East Jerusalem during and even after Israel’s intense seven-week battle with Hamas in what the authorities and activists alike say was the strongest and most sustained uprising by the city’s Palestinian residents in a decade. Some 727 people have been arrested, 260 of them under 18, for throwing rocks and other actions in near-daily demonstrations that were met with increased force. More than 100 police officers have been injured and 15-year-old Mohamed Sinokrot was killed by what a Palestinian doctor determined in an autopsy was a sponge-covered police bullet that hit his head.
The events that led to the latest spike in tensions between Israelis and Palestinians were the abductions and murders of three Israeli teenagers, followed by the gruesome abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat on July 2, by Jewish extremists. The violence raged on even after the Aug. 26 cease-fire that halted hostilities in Gaza, and though things have begun to calm down, 26 Palestinians were arrested just this week. “I see the third intifada started already,” said Jawad Siyam, director of the Wadi Eilweh Information Center, which tracks demonstrations and arrests, using the Arabic shorthand for the waves of violence that plagued Israel in the late 1980s and early 2000s. “We said from the very beginning: It will stop in Gaza but it will continue in East Jerusalem.”
East Jerusalem is as much a concept as it is a specific location. Palestinians claim it as their future capital. Israel captured it from Jordan, along with the West Bank, in 1967, and later annexed some 27 square miles that include about a dozen hilly Palestinian enclaves, and a similar number of Jewish areas that most of the world regards as illegal settlements.
More than 300,000 of Jerusalem’s 830,000 residents are Palestinians. They are not citizens, but get social-welfare benefits from Israel and travel fairly freely. Most boycott municipal elections, but also feel alienated from the Palestinian political leadership; they have complained for years about shortchanged services, including a severe lack of classrooms and slow garbage pickup. The Al Aqsa compound in the Old City has long been the site of sporadic clashes between Muslim and Jewish worshipers — and the troops that try to keep them apart.
These simmering issues seem to be boiling over: The authorities counted 42 “riots” — participants call them protests — on a single night in July. There have been nearly 100 attacks on the light-rail line that snaked through Shuafat and was once seen as a unifying artery; ridership dropped 20 percent this summer. Palestinians report attempted kidnappings, aggression and racist taunts by Jews. Residents of East Jerusalem have demanded that stores replace Israeli yogurt, cheese and juices with Arab-made products, part of a boycott campaign that equates buying Israeli goods with buying Israeli bullets and bombs. Jews who used to get their cars fixed or eat hummus in Arab areas have been staying away.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a skullcap-wearing Jew who lives in the area called French Hill, which overlooks Issawiya, said he noticed a woman in a Muslim head scarf eyeing him nervously during a recent evening walk. Then he realized that he himself tensed up as a car filled with young Palestinian men passed.
“We look at each other now as each side being capable of sudden pathological outbursts,” said Mr. Halevi, who gets his gas at the looted station. “There’s a feeling that the bottom has fallen out and really anything can happen.”
Asi Aharoni, a spokesman for the Jerusalem police, said officers had seen a shift on the street. Where Palestinians used to throw stones and a few Molotov cocktails, they now throw many Molotovs and firecrackers aimed directly at troops. Offenders are getting younger, Mr. Aharoni said, showing a picture on his phone of a 9-year-old boy caught on Tuesday hurling rocks.
The police, too, have changed tactics. In July, they unleashed so-called skunk water, a nonlethal but horrific-smelling spray, in Jerusalem for the first time, and then “used it every night,” Mr. Aharoni said. There were 3,000 officers on patrol in Jerusalem, up from 1,300, and the police created a new patrol district, Kedem, to cover the east more intensively.
Israeli politicians are pushing courts to punish violent protesters more severely. “The people who took the law into their own hands are going to pay a price,” Mayor Nir Barkat said in an interview. “If a 17-year-old throws stones or creates huge damage and he’s being charged in court and released after a week, then it gives him more motivation to do it again and a third time.”
The authorities and the activists agree that the summer’s outbursts lacked organized leadership. Mr. Siyam, the father of a 10-year-old, whose center also runs activities for 500 children in the Silwan neighborhood, said: “I’m not trying to convince them not to throw stones. I’m not going to tell them not to burn the gas station.”
“I believe it is their right to decide the way they want to struggle,” he said. “My father’s generation, after the 1967 war, thought Israel is too strong, we’ll just earn our money. My generation, the first intifada generation, thought Israel is strong but we can cause it some pain. My son’s generation thinks he can win against Israel. I’m not going to stop him thinking he can win Palestine’s freedom.”
Darwish Darwish, 63, a community leader whose family dates back 800 years in Issawiya, said, “We are in the most wretched days ever,” adding that the outburst was “provoked by the settlers’ violence.” He persuaded the police to remove the roadblock two days after the gas-station attack, but another neighborhood passage remained shut.
About 15,000 people live in Issawiya, Mr. Darwish said, and there are three restaurants, four bakeries, three schools, six shops selling furniture, three blacksmiths, three taxi services, a bus company and two mechanics. During weddings this summer, Hamas war anthems replaced love songs. “I hate all Jews — I don’t want to see them anymore,” said Nili Obaid, 34, a mother of five who was briefly hospitalized after inhaling tear gas while watching a clash. “I tell even children to go and throw stones. It is normal. It is a reaction to what the army is doing.”
Ra’afat al-Bakri, 28, a chef who was active in a group called Taste of Peace and collected food for people in Gaza this summer, counts himself among the war’s victims. He said the Israeli police shot him with a rubber-coated bullet in the right eye in July when he went to see his fiancée and got caught in crossfire on Issawiya’s main street. His fiancée called off the engagement; he cannot work or even chew food.
“I used to see beautiful things in my right eye,” said Mr. Bakri, who now has a plastic eye with scars around it. “Now I see only ugly things around me.”
Jodi Rudoren
New York Times