A decades-old pattern – in 1929, 1936, 1989, and 2000 – suggests that Palestinians erupt into sustained violence to exploit some minor, even trivial episode. The Palestinian leadership has repeatedly resorted to the same pattern of deploying young men for violent purposes.
August 1929: Zionist activists demonstrated at the Western Wall, raised their flag, and sang "Hatikva" as a way of affirming Jewish possession of this sacred spot. Infuriated by this, Palestinians the next day attacked Jewish worshippers at the wall and a week later launched a jihad ("O Jews, the faith of Muhammad is fulfilled with the sword") that spread throughout Mandatory Palestine, leading to the deaths off 133 Jews over the next week and a half.
April 1936: A much larger scale of violence began with the murder of two Jews by Palestinians, followed by suspected Jewish reprisals. This prompted a general strike by the Palestinians, and that in turn, in the words of the historian J.C. Hurwitz, gradually "developed from sporadic acts of violence and sabotage into open rebellion" that included derailing trains, mining roads, cutting telephone wires, piercing the oil pipeline, assaulting Jewish villages, and setting fires to forests and crops. This, the Arab Revolt, lasted for three years.
December 1987: A traffic accident that set off the intifada. An Israeli truck driver hit a car carrying Palestinian laborers, killing four of them and badly injuring several others. It was an apolitical, all-too-common traffic accident that initially spurred no special interest. Then, "something odd happened: all at once, it seemed, Gaza was abuzz with a wild rumor" that the crash was not an accident but an intentional act of vengeance. Within hours, "the rumor was not rumor but an indisputable fact." The intifada began and lasted for six years.
September 2000: Palestinians used Ariel Sharon taking a stroll on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as a pretext to launch a war. Inspired by the successful Lebanese expulsion of Israeli forces a few months earlier, the goal was clear from the start: to batter Israelis so hard that they withdraw not just from the West Bank and Gaza but also from Tel Aviv and Haifa. As the war reaches its two-year mark, Palestinians are increasingly bold in making this goal clear, speaking ever more overtly about all of "Palestine" being under occupation since 1948 and the need to liberate the whole of it.
During another such spasm of violence, in 1933, prompted Musa Alami, a leading Palestinian official in the British government, commented frankly:
the program of the Arab youth is based only on the use of force and violence. ... The youth prefer an open war. ... The prevailing feeling is that if all that can be expected from the present policy is a slow death, it is better to be killed in an attempt to free ourselves of our enemies than to suffer a long and protracted demise.
These words that could have been written this week.
To blame the Israelis for violence, then, is to ignore history. (September 8, 2002)
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