For the past few days, situations in Israel took all kinds of unexpected twists and tangles, with Western media mobilized hyped up again to assessing a rash of violent events after a brief lull following the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Gaza. In my last two blogs, I kicked off the discussion by parsing the historical contexts and popular sentiments in the aftermath of Jewish settlement expansion passage in East Jerusalem and the closure of the Temple Mount.
Before I dip into the theme today, I would like to answer one question about Israeli media system in reporting sensitive incidents involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts..
Reasonably, the uninformed would always be bewildered by the rate of rapid escalations of one seemingly isolated events in the Conflict, and they oftentimes shook their heads in disbelief and ask: Why so many dominoes are falling after a single episode that seem befall from sky in this region?
To start with, they already answered the question themselves. As far as the Arab-Israeli conflict goes, a cigarette butt left burning could lead to a regional conflagration. Because intercultural feud between Jews and Arabs have perpetuated before the State of Israel was even born in 1948, any events containing intentional harms of others are translated into a zero-sum game by the perpetrators.
Second, which relates directly to my first point, because the various parties in this conflict often look past superficial behavioral patterns of individuals and make them stick out in the picture by crowning them with large-than-life descriptions, such rhetorics usually exceed reality and resort to overgeneralization and exaggerations. For example, if a Israeli is stabbed by an Arab, two things have proven to appear in media speculation. First, the act of murder is immediately branded as an act of terro
rism, and it goes beyond saying that harming others is an act of terrorism itself, Israel’s reference to terrorism usually indicates conspiracies and meticulous plannings. Second, such attempted homicide would almost certainly lead to the honorification of the victim, phrases like “martyrs of terrorism” and “national hero in combating terrors” figured in media coverage frequently. Conversely, if an Arab Palestinian is victimized in the same manner, the Palestinian Authority, which manages and administers Occupied Territory in the West Bank, would repeat the same trope, that he “died fighting the evil Zionist occupiers” or that “he became the latest Islamic freedom fighter under the continuing tyranny of Israel.”
Readers at this point may notice a trend: When members of one party are attacked by others from the rival party, both Israelis and Palestinians confer glorification and sanctification in their public announcements of these lethal incidents, but Palestinians tend to punctuate both “fascist” and “racist” colonial nature of Israel, whereas Israelis are more inclined to magnify the ubiquitous threat of Islamic terrorism when addressing illicit bodily harms. As we will see in today’s content, this dichotomy of rhetoric becomes obvious in government responses and media coverage.
in a headline story in the New York Times today by Isabel Kershner, a Palestinian driver plowed into a stretch of sidewalk near a light rail station near Jerusalem, flooring pedestrians as the vehicle barreling down dozens of yards more. In a scene of chaos and confusion, the driver stepped out of the vehicle, his hands wielding a iron rod. Before he could confront the horrified crowd, he was shot repeatedly by Israeli soldiers and subsequently died of his injuries. According to official tally from the Israel Defense Force, the man killed one another Israeli, who turned out to be a Druze, a mystical minority belonging to Shia Islam, while injuring at least four pedestrians. Along with the report, the reporter also uploaded a video with interviews conducted on the scene, which can be viewed next to the top of the story. A reenactment of the crime timeline is posted below.
In a peculiar reminder, the reporter wrote that today’s crime is the second of such instances in two week. On Oct. 22, another Palestinian from East Jerusalem sped into the platform of a light rail station in Jerusalem, killing two and injuring half a dozen. In that specific case, the Palestinian driver, who was said to be in his early 20s,attempted to escape on foot after the impact and was smitten by a volley of bullets fired by Israeli securities, and he later died of his wound too.
If we compare these two similar events, the second was greeted with considerably more reactions from both Israeli and Palestinian governments as illustrated in a handful of news reports and videos after the crime transpired. To understand the disparity of political and media treatment, it is necessary to review the identities of the two drivers.
The first driver who died last month, Abd al-Rahman al-Shaloudy, was a resident of Silwan. Earlier news reports found Silwan to be a Palestinian village near the Temple Mount where Israeli settlers have purchased properties from mysterious Arab brokers in further attempt to increase the Jewish population in East Jerusalem. He was also said to have just been released late last year after serving 16 months in Israeli prison.
Later investigations conducted by Israeli security personnel revealed that “Shaloudy was reported to have been the nephew of a leader in the military wing of Hamas…who was killed in 1998.”
Although in this case, the link between Shaloudy and terrorism group was found, the connection remained sparse other than an official announcement from the government. No one in the Hamas claimed the responsibility for Shaloudy, which I believe could be for several reasons. First, Shaloudy himself may not actually belong to the military wing of Hamas despite he may have voted for Hamas in Palestinian partisan elections. Second, it is more natural and convincing that Shaloudy committed the crime out of Palestinian nationalistic sentiment instead of religious drive because of his long-time residence in Silwan, the town in which Jewish property owners have been rising. Third, Shaloudy was only a young adult, and Hamas may have felt that it’s far more likely that he acted alone in a crazed release of adrenaline rush driven by hatred than religious fervor.
Today’s criminal act, however, was met with a flurry of public statements from multiple parties, including the following reported in the original article below:
“We send our congratulations to those who carried out the attack,We believe it is a natural reaction to Israel’s crimes. Israel is violating international law and Judaizing Al Aksa mosque. We don’t have any other choice but to defend our holy land by all means of force.”—Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman.
Wednesday’s attack in Jerusalem was “a direct result of the incitement of Abu Mazen and his partners in Hamas.”—Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
Similar comments were also heard from Tzipi Livni, the Israeli justice minister and King Abdullah II of Jordan. They either condemned or praised the attack.
The driver who died after the street crime today was identified by the Israeli sources as Ibrahim Akari, “a married father of five and a low-level Hamas activist who had never been jailed in Israel,” according initial reports released to journalists. It was also mentioned that his brother, Musa Akari, was sentenced for a long jail term in the 1990s for kidnapping and killing an Israeli policeman and was later deported to Turkey as a result of a prisoner exchange in 2011.
The driver,Ibrahim Akari, was shot dead by police after the hit-and-run. Photo Credit: Associated Press
In the police briefing of Ibrahim Akari, circumstances are also blurry, but a number of things are clear, He personally belonged to Hamas but remained low-key in his association with the organization. He was in Israeli military database for a long while but never aroused enough attention from Israelis to warrant an immediate manhunt. He was hailed in a militant family with a patent anti-Israeli background. Therefore, intense reactions trailing his death becomes easily justified given Akari’s irrefutable link with Hamas, and law enforcement’s negligence of this potentially dangerous citizen both alarmed Israeli authority and delighted the Hamas leadership at the same time.
Today, the terrorism landscape in the State of Israel has changed palpably compared to the peak of the Second intifada in early and mid-2002, when suicide bombers from Hamas, islamic Jihad and legions of smaller Palestinian militant groups detonated their explosives around dense locations like shopping malls, open-air markets, hotels, restaurants and bus stops.
The top incidents that claimed most deaths in 2002 included:
—Passover massacre at Park Hotel in Netanya on March 27, 2002, when a Hamas terrorist disguised as a woman detonated the explosives in his suitcases at a Passover seder(meal) in a hotel room, killing 30 and injuring at least 140.
—Patt Junction Bus Bombing in Jerusalem on June 18.2002, when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his explosives upon boarding the bus at an Arab neighborhood that was carrying mostly civilians from a Jewish neighborhood, killing 19 in total and injuring dozens.
—Megiddo Junction Bus Bombing near northern Israeli city Afula, when an Islamic Jihad terrorist detonated the prepared explosives near the gas tank of a long-distance bus, killing 17 and injuring more than 40.
As we can easily discover that Israel city streets today are much safer than those at the peak of the Second Intifada, when nameless terrorists from jihadist and many Palestinian liberation organizations infiltrated the Jewish state from all directions, resulting in endemic mass murders especially in major cities and transportations.
However, the two similar occurrence on Oct. 22 and today could be two warning shots of another popular uprising among the vast Arab populations who are disaffected and mortified by the unceasing discriminations against them. Of course, Israel has seen the recent sparkles in the relationship between Jews and Arabs in various parts of Jerusalem. I already reviewed the shooting of a Jewish Orthodox activist Yehuda Glick and the killing of his murderer the next day, the closure of the Temple Mount last Thursday, which drew condemnations from Jordanians and Palestinians alike, regarding this aggression as a “declaration of war” and “a direct challenge to Jordanian’s authority in managing the Noble Sanctuary(the Temple Mount).” These previous episodes are now seen as hurtling the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority into a critical historical moment with extremely delicate liabilities and consequences. (Today, Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel for emergency consultations of the recent instability, another sign of diplomatic crisis between Israel and its Hashemite neighbor.)
With all said, it should become a transparent reality that the chain effect of inter-ethnic clashes can easily prepare the State of Israel for national security and public relations crises. At the surface of it, such unequal comeuppances appear to be grossly unjust to Israelis, but sadly they have to bear the consequences when their neighbors, who had lived next door for decades, still crouched stateless and destitute. We can mourn the deaths of civilians wholeheartedly, but the tension has again resurfaced into physical confrontations, and it is simply reprising another cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. One more reflection, the war between Israel and Gaza was just four months ago.
