On 8 April 2022, a Palestinian gunman entered a crowded bar in Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial capital, and opened fire, killing three people and wounding 10. This weekend, on the anniversary of that attack, an Arab-Israeli man rammed his car into pedestrians on the city’s seaside promenade, killing an Italian tourist and injuring seven more people.
That attack followed a shooting earlier in the day in the north of the occupied West Bank that killed two British-Israeli sisters, aged 16 and 20, and left their 48-year-old mother in critical condition after their car veered off the road.
Such indiscriminate violence has become commonplace over the last year. The past 12 months were the deadliest in Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank for two decades: about 250 Palestinians, combatants and civilians, have been killed by Israeli fire, and 43 people, all but one civilians, have been killed in Palestinian “lone wolf” attacks on Israelis over the same period.
Whenever a large amount of blood is shed in this decades-old conflict, people living on both sides of the Green Line brace for the outbreak of a third intifada, or Palestinian popular uprising. Serious escalation last week in the already combustible region, drawing in neighbouring Lebanon, has shown that a wider war on multiple fronts is also a substantial threat.
Internal political upheaval sparked by November’s election of the most rightwing government in Israeli history, the steady erosion of the corrupt Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy in the West Bank and the 16-year-old Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has pushed the captive population to breaking point, all add to the sense that a perfect storm is on the horizon.
As is often the case, the latest surge of violence in the Holy Land was triggered by events in the old city of Jerusalem, home to dozens of sacred Jewish, Muslim and Christian sites.
Occupied by Israel after 1967, and fully annexed in 1980, Israeli control of the eastern side of the “city of gold” is put under the spotlight every Ramadan, the Muslim month of prayer and fasting.
This year, the city is thronged with an unusually large influx of people owing to the rare convergence of Ramadan with both Passover and Easter, and tensions were already running high.
Under a longstanding compromise implemented after the 1967 war, non-Muslims are allowed to visit but not pray at the Temple Mount, known in Islam as al-Haram al-Sharif, and any perceived attempt to alter the arrangement acts as a catalyst for violence.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Israeli police said that security units were forced to enter a prayer hall in the compound’s al-Aqsa mosque after what it called masked agitators barricaded themselves inside after nightly Ramadan prayers.
The sit-in violated an agreement with the Jordanian body that administers the site that no one would be allowed to stay in the house of prayer overnight during the holy month. But that evening, there were particular Palestinian fears that Jewish visitors from an ultranationalist group would attempt to carry out a traditional sacrifice for the start of Passover, upsetting the sensitive religious status quo, and hundreds of people decided to stay.
Video of the confrontations at the third holiest site in Islam showing Israeli police hitting young men with the butts of rifles and batons were met with outrage across the Muslim world, and quickly spiralled into a cross-border standoff with Palestinian militants in Gaza and Lebanon.
Israel and Lebanon are technically still at war, and Thursday’s barrage of about 34 rockets aimed at northern Israel was the biggest flare-up between the two countries since Israel fought a short conflict with the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in 2006. Israel responded overnight on Friday with airstrikes on both territories, leaving the region holding its breath.
Although the Israeli army appeared content to brief that they believed the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas was behind the salvo from Lebanon, Hezbollah must have at the very least given its consent for the attack. And while the lack of casualties along the borders suggested that all sides want to avoid escalation, continued attacks in the West Bank and Tel Aviv means the situation remains volatile.
Iran, which has vowed to destroy the Jewish state, is watching closely for an opportunity in what it sees as a moment of Israeli weakness.
The country has been roiled by political turmoil since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office for a sixth stint as prime minister at the end of last year: huge protests against the coalition’s proposed judicial overhaul have been joined by large numbers of military reservists, raising concerns about operational readiness. Netanyahu was last week forced to convene a security cabinet filled with rightwing extremists who want full annexation of the West Bank, as well as a defence minister he technically fired two weeks ago and did not replace.
The ascent of the far-right in Israeli politics has fuelled speculation that any hope for peace, or a two-state solution, is all but dead: recent polling shows that more and more people in Israeli and Palestinian society appear to be resigned to a one-state reality, predicated on permanent occupation.
But as the Palestinian people chafe under occupation without end, the price Israel must pay to maintain the status quo is rising too.
