AP Photo/Ariel Schalit
The day passes quietly, which only seems like a deception. At 7:55 in the evening, the phones in the house start beeping news alerts. Sanity would require turning off the news notifications. Anxiety requires keeping them on.
The first bulletin on that particular evening says there is a shooting attack in the central bus station in Beersheba, in southern Israel. (I choose which attack to tell you about nearly randomly; the beeping news feels the same each time.) At least five people have been wounded. The number will go up; it always does. The next alert, nine minutes later, says there are two terrorists in the station. By 8:17 p.m. a two-sentence bulletin says one attacker has been shot dead, and the other wounded, but an angry crowd won't let the ambulance crew get to him. At 8:36, one of the people who was shot while waiting for a bus is dead. A little after nine at night, the picture shifts: The second "terrorist" was an Eritrean asylum-seeker, shot by the bus station security officer, who mistook him for a terrorist. The morning news will report his death, along with a police investigation of people in the crowd who assaulted him after he was shot.
The fact that the terrorist used a gun was unusual. Knives are the most common weapon, followed by cars. The Beersheba attacker was a 21-year-old Israeli Bedouin. That, too, was an exception. The standard profile is a young Palestinian from East Jerusalem. The youngest was 13 years old. It can happen anywhere.
Summer has ended, and with it the illusion of calm. The new season is one of fear. It makes sense to be afraid, because when you get on a bus you can't help thinking that in a minute someone could pull out a kitchen knife. It makes no sense to be afraid, because fear itself takes lives, like that of asylum-seeker Habtom Zarhum in Beersheba, like that of an Israeli security guard shot dead a few days later in Jerusalem by a soldier who thought he was a terrorist.
In the Beersheba attack, a soldier's gun played a different role: The terrorist was initially armed with a pistol, but he shot an off-duty soldier, took his gun, and began firing it. Since the knife attacks began, the army has gone back to having soldiers take their guns with them when off their bases. Instead of increasing security, the policy is escalating danger.
Already, very quickly, many Israelis talk about what's happening as a third Intifada, a Palestinian uprising. It could become that, but the label is being applied too quickly. The first Intifada began in 1987 with Palestinians pouring into the streets in Gaza and the West Bank to confront Israeli soldiers. The second began similarly in 2000. Afterward, Palestinian organizations-Fatah, Hamas, and others-began to direct what started as mass anger.
That could happen again, but so far demonstrations have been small. The Israeli security services are skilled at tracking terror cells, but in the current spasm of bloodshed there have been no cells to track or penetrate. A few dozen people, virtually all acting on their own, have carried out the attacks. Their weapons come from their kitchens, not from the explosives experts of an underground. No security agency yet knows how to read the thoughts of a lone person deciding that there's more meaning in dying violently than in living.
This isn't yet an uprising. It's despair expressed with knives.
It is absolutely political, because the despair is the product of Israeli policies under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of the failure of Palestinian leadership under Mahmud Abbas. It is apolitical, in that follows no strategy and has no goals. It is terror, in that the victims are mostly civilians, chosen randomly. And at the same time, the momentum of the attacks is a speeded-up version of American mass shootings. The social-media renown one killer gets in death spurs the next to act.
And not just social media: Jibril Rajoub, one of the leftover Fatah figures from the Yasser Arafat era and a self-appointed potential heir of the aging, exhausted Abbas, said on Palestinian television this week that he was "proud" of the attackers. Abbas's own astoundingly stupid comment that the 13-year-old who'd carried out a stabbing had been "executed" by Israel, when he was actually alive and being treated in an Israeli hospital, provided Netanyahu's PR machine with several days' fuel for his campaign accusing Abbas of incitement. Israeli military sources, meanwhile, tell reporters that Abbas's Palestinian Authority security services continue to cooperate with Israel to stop violence. And Netanyahu's comment blaming the Holocaust on a Palestinian nationalist, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, has utterly overshadowed Abbas's remark.
What could most easily transform a spate of attacks into a mass upheaval is an Israeli response that affects tens of thousands of people-and that's already happening.
At the entrances to Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, police have set up roadblocks and checkpoints, making everyday travel into an ordeal for the city's Palestinians. Ironically, the tactic demonstrates again that Jerusalem is not united, that the Arab side of the city is the first-class cabin of occupied territory.
East Jerusalem is the laboratory of the Israeli right's half-articulated vision of the future: a single state in which Palestinians are excluded from the polity. Nearly all East Jerusalemites have the status of legal residents but not citizens of Israel. The number who have found a place in the Israeli economy as professionals has risen in recent years. For many years, East Jerusalemites who depend on the Israeli economy have told me that they just try not to think about the future, because the present is untenable but so is dividing the city politically if that means splitting it economically. Israelis see Palestinian pharmacists in every drugstore. They do not visit East Jerusalem neighborhoods where there are no sidewalks, where there is a drastic shortage of classrooms, and where the dropout rate from high school is five times higher than in Israel. A few young people who see only this have decided that the glory of martyrdom is the best future they can imagine.
Since he entered politics, and certainly since he returned to the prime minister's office in 2009, Netanyahu has promoted a political mood that could be translated into American as, "When it don't rain, the roof don't leak, and when it rains I can't fix it, no how." When there's quiet, there's no reason to negotiate with the Palestinians. When there's violence, negotiating would be surrender. When there's violence, the only explanation that Netanyahu can offer is that Abbas is inciting it.
Netanyahu has marketed occupation as a sustainable status quo, as normalcy. Now normalcy has becoming waiting for phones to shiver and beep with the next bulletin of an attack, to hope it's not someone you know, and to hate yourself for hoping that.
