Recent incidents have stirred fears in Israel of a return to 2002, then in the midst of a second intifada, or armed uprising, when the Israeli government reported 452 people died in suicide bombings and other attacks.
Fatah cancels Arafat memorials after bombings, blames Hamas
On one day alone last week, an Israeli soldier was stabbed to death on a Tel Aviv street while three Israelis were stabbed — one fatally — at the same West Bank hitchhiking post where three Israeli teens were kidnapped earlier this year. This came after several incidents in which drivers ran into crowds on busy streets, and before Tuesday, when two knife- and axe-wielding Palestinian cousins killed four Israelis worshipping at a Jerusalem synagogue.
So does this all mean a third intifada is coming, if it’s not already here?
No — or, at least, not yet, according to experts.
Much has changed, they point out, since Arafat’s death. It’s harder than ever to get from the West Bank into Israel, especially with explosives and such. There has been no call to arms by the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank; instead, analysts say, there has been significant cooperation with Israeli authorities to ferret out potential attackers. And there haven’t been anything close yet to the coordinated, large-scale attacks in Israel like those of the early 2000s.
As retired former Israeli National Security Adviser Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror pointed out last week, what’s happening now “falls far from” the first two intifadas, as far as the overall threat to Israel.
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Elgindy, from Brookings, said more forceful responses by Israel to attacks can backfire, reasoning, “When you respond to violence with more repression, you’re going to get more violence.”
The “primitive assault tactics” now being used against Israelis — knives and cars, rather than rockets and bombs — could help further the Palestinians’ storyline, especially if Israeli security forces respond “with a heavy hand” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after Tuesday’s synagogue attack, expert Assaf Moghadam said.
“(Such tactics) help portray the perpetrators … as people of desperation; they can claim ‘we don’t have better means of disposal,'” said Moghadam, from the Israeli-based International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. “It’s an asymmetric battle militarily of a weaker party against a stronger party.”
It’s the lack of an end game — a result that will bring peace, security and happiness to both Israelis and Palestinians — that has some especially worried. If there’s no political end in sight, what’s to prevent those frustrations from continuing to build?
“It’s probably not going to get a lot worse, and it’s almost certainly not going to get a lot better,” said David Pollock, the director of the Washington Institute’s Fikra Forum. “The best you can say, on both sides, is, ‘Well, at least we’re not like Syria and Iraq.”
CNN’s Al Goodman contributed to this report.
