Throwing rocks versus firing rubber bullets. On Friday, April 22, new clashes broke out between Israeli police and Palestinian protesters on the esplanade of the mosques in Jerusalem. According to the latest assessment, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported 60 injuries, two of them seriously. The situation is particularly tense in this part of the old city, the third holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism. The third Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan coincides this year with the end of the Passover celebrations, the Jewish Passover.
Over the past week, more than 200 people, mostly Palestinians, have been injured in clashes in and around the compound. The presence during Ramadan of many Jews – who can visit the place under certain conditions and at certain times without praying there, according to the current status quo – and the deployment of police forces on the spot are seen by the Palestinians as a gesture of “provocation”†
In response, Palestinian armed groups fired rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israel, which responded with airstrikes — the first in months — on this Palestinian enclave of just over 2 million people. This is enough to raise fears of a military escalation against the background of tensions related to the holy sites in Jerusalem. In May 2021, clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters during Ramadan in Jerusalem, particularly on the mosque esplanade, sparked a deadly 11-day war between Hamas, in power in Gaza, and the Israeli military.
This new violence against the backdrop of religious celebrations comes after a spate of attacks in Israel in recent weeks. These attacks with knives, car rams or firearms, including one carried out on April 7 in the heart of central Tel Aviv, have killed 14 people in Israel since late March. Israeli troops have since been given carte blanche to “overcome terror”, including operations in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory. Assessment on the Palestinian side: more than 20 dead, including attackers of the terrorist attacks.
This Israeli military intervention raises fears of a general conflagration in the Palestinian Territories. Every night, groups of Palestinians attack the army, which retaliates with live ammunition. “It’s an unfortunately classic scenario that crops up regularly for reasons that are always the same”notes Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, professor of political science at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and specialist in the Palestinian issue. “The reality is that we must end the occupation” Israeli, he adds.
“We are in an occupation situation, including Jerusalem, with a tremendous development of colonization over at least twenty years.”
Jean Paul Chagnollaudat franceinfo
Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967. Some 700,000 Jewish settlers currently live in these two areas, in settlements considered illegal under international law. At the end of March, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, Michael Lynk, called on“apartheid” the system introduced by Israel, with “separate roads, high walls and ubiquitous checkpoints”†
In this context of “frustration and despair” Palestinian side, “you will inevitably have these kind of murderous sequences coming back in a loop”, continues Jean-Paul Chagnollaud. For Frédéric Encel, doctor of geopolitics, author of Paths to Power: Geopolitical Thinking in the 21st Century (ed. Odile Jacob), “we are in the syndrome of the first intifada”activated in December 1987 by “a banal road accident in Gaza”† “You can always find sparks, observes the specialist. In the background there is a very large void. It’s the vacuum of politics.”
On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Binyamin Netanyahu’s successor, is playing the tightrope walker to keep his motley crew in power, made up of deputies from the right, left, center and, for the first time, a formation of the Arab minority. “This coalition only exists to the extent that it has made a commitment not to change the status quo on the Palestinian issue”analyzes Frédéric Encel.
On the Palestinian side, the elections scheduled to be held in May 2021 – the first in 15 years – have been canceled on the grounds that the holding of the vote is not “Guarantee” in East Jerusalem. They had to seal a project from “reconciliation” between the secular Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamists of Hamas. Between this “division” history and “a huge loss of legitimacy for the Palestinian Authority” with his population, Jean-Paul Chagnollaud depicts a “situation where all actors are weak. There is nothing worse in a situation as serious as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”†
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “very concerned about deteriorating situation in Jerusalem” and “is in contact with all parties to reduce tensions, prevent incendiary actions and rhetoric”† However, the international community is currently more mobilized by the war in Ukraine and the risk of internationalization of the conflict. “I don’t see what miracle could bring a peace process back on track. The United States, the only power that can power it, is far from it”Judge Frédéric Encel, referring to an American president “impaired” internal and “occupied by the crisis in Ukraine”†
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been relegated to local lawsuits.”
Frederic Encelat franceinfo
The latest American effort in the region, the Abraham Accords, is a “nail driven in Palestinian hope”, continues the essayist. In particular, Donald Trump’s plan for the Middle East, presented in January 2020, envisaged Israel’s annexation of parts of the West Bank. This project was finally shelved by the Jewish state last summer, thanks to an agreement to normalize relations with several Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates. This recognition of Israel by these countries is exacerbating “Isolation of the Palestinians”, said Jean-Paul Chagnollaud. The editor of the magazine Mediterranean Confluence recalls that the last resolution passed unanimously by the UN Security Council to condemn Israeli colonization dates back to 2016 and has still not been implemented. “Yet she gave all the keys to a possible solution.”
