Few See New Palestinian Intifada in Jerusalem Unrest

JERUSALEM — One cartoon circulating on social networks on Thursday depicted a car as the barrel of an automatic weapon, captioned in Arabic, “Revolt and resist, even by your car.” Another showed an odometer with the slogan, “Oh, revolutionary, use more gasoline, so we can have Palestine back.” A third simply had a vehicle in the red, white and green of the Palestinian flag hitting two men with Jewish stars on their black hats.

The new campaign called for a “run-over intifada,” apparently inspired by episodes Wednesday and last month in which Palestinian drivers plowed into Israeli pedestrians, killing three and injuring more than 20. It intensified discussion of whether the violence that has gripped East Jerusalem in recent weeks, fueled by a struggle over a site in the Old City sacred to both Jews and Muslims, amounted to a third intifada, or uprising, by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation.

Most Israeli and Palestinian leaders and commentators deny there is a new intifada, because the current unrest lacks the coordinated leadership, momentum and mass participation of the stone-throwing protests of the late 1980s or the suicide bombings of the early 2000s. But others say the whole question of whether it is or is not an intifada distracts from the roots and dynamics of a new generation’s rage and hopelessness.

“We are sometimes using the tools of the 20th century to analyze a phenomenon of the 21st century,” said Shimrit Meir, the Israeli editor of an Arabic news site, The Source, who monitors Palestinian social media. “The way I see it is kind of a postmodern intifada. So we might see periods of intense violence followed by long periods of containment and calm.”

The literal meaning of intifada is “shaking off.” Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, defined it as a way “to reject the status quo and to seek to change it through concrete and meaningful steps,” and said it has come to stand for “a history-making event, a turning point.”

“Could the current conditions escalate to become a ‘turning point?’ I do not see it yet taking that route,” Mr. Shikaki said in an email interview. “For it to become that, it needs a major spark. Is the ground fertile for a ‘turning point?’ The answer is yes.”

The spark that lighted the first intifada came on Dec. 8, 1987, when an Israeli military truck hit cars carrying Palestinian workers returning to the Gaza Strip, killing four. Funerals that night exploded into a huge demonstration, and within days a new organization, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, was issuing leaflets calling for general strikes, civil disobedience and boycotts.

Most experts say the second intifada was set off by a visit to the holy site by Ariel Sharon, then a candidate for prime minister, on Sept. 28, 2000. The site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is the same revered plateau at the heart of the current conflict. The ensuing years of violence were directed by the Palestinian Authority president, Yasir Arafat. About 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis had been killed by 2005, a trauma still raw in both societies.

There have been several potential inflammatory episodes in recent months, including the July 2 burning alive of a Palestinian 16-year-old from East Jerusalem, a revenge attack for the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. But Ingrid Jaradat Gassner of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem said the underlying conditions had fundamentally changed.

Former grass-roots leaders are now entrenched in the Palestinian Authority or nongovernmental organizations, Ms. Gassner said, with mortgages and other middle-class trappings that make them less willing to take to the streets. Political parties are disconnected from the populace. The separation barrier Israel built after the second intifada, and security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hampers mobilization.

“People are not willing to take risks and to sacrifice and to leave their daily lives if they do not think that they can accomplish something,” Ms. Gassner said. “It’s more like an outburst of frustration and anger than really an uprising that at the end has to have some coordination and some leadership, which we don’t have right now.”

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said clearly in an Israeli television interview last week, “We are not interested in an intifada.” But Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s central council and a leader of the first intifada, issued a news release the next day saying the third one had already begun.

“To me when I say intifada, I mean a general status of public opinion and public readiness to engage in resistance actions,” Mr. Barghouti said in an interview Thursday. “If we follow that definition, we are definitely at a new stage.”

Analysts on both sides agree that the most dangerous accelerant is the tension around the holy site, which is revered by Jews as the place where ancient Jewish temples once stood, and by Muslims as the site of Al Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock.

Right-wing Jews — including several Parliament members — have been agitating against Israel’s prohibition against non-Muslim prayer. Muslim worshipers have clashed frequently with Israeli security forces around Al Aqsa Mosque, a focal point of the “run-over intifada” social-media campaign.

“This is the one thing that could change the analysis,” said Ehud Yaari, a Jerusalem-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Politics and co-author of a book on the first intifada. “In order to have an intifada you need scale, you need it to be spread, you need to see participation of many, many sectors of the population. Al Aqsa, because of its sensitivity, it could propel wider sections of the population into a cycle of violence.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel reiterated Thursday that he would not change the status quo at the site. At the same time, Israel continued its crackdown on East Jerusalem, where Palestinian residents have complained about roadblocks to their neighborhoods and an increase in parking tickets and other fines.

The authorities on Thursday added concrete barriers around light-rail stations, two of which were the sites of the deadly vehicular attacks. The Palestinian driver of a van that injured three Israeli soldiers on Wednesday night in the West Bank turned himself over to the Israeli authorities on Thursday; officials said they had not determined if the crash had been an accident or an attack.

An extra 1,000 officers are patrolling Jerusalem’s streets, and observation balloons now hover over Arab neighborhoods where about 800 youths have been arrested since July for throwing stones, gasoline bombs and fireworks. The Israeli cabinet this week increased the punishment for such offenses to 10 or 20 years in prison.

Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, said these measures might well contain the violence but would do nothing to address Jerusalem’s deep challenges. Israelis and Palestinians both claim the city as their capital. Of its 800,000 residents, a third are ultra-Orthodox Jews who mostly do not work or serve in the military, and a third are Palestinians who refuse to vote in municipal elections to protest Israeli annexation of their neighborhoods.

“It’s a symptom of the dysfunctionality of this place, people don’t have any hope here, this is the most poor and intolerant city,” Mr. Pfeffer, whose five siblings have all moved out of Jerusalem, said of the unrest. “We don’t have a viable group of people who actually are invested in the city’s future, getting together and saying how can we build a city that our kids can live in.”