Many people in Israel and abroad are murmuring about a third intifada. Consider the following Internet headlines: “If Ramallah falls in the hands of terror, there will be a third intifada,” read a Walla headline on January 21.
On January 30, the British weekly The Spectator headlined its story on the current uptick in violence: “A Third Intifada looms in Israel.” A day later, this was the headline of The Guardian’s editorial: “The Guardian view on violence in Israel-Palestine: the risk of a third intifada.”
And on February 7, the America-based Foreign Affairs magazine had this as a headline for one of its online stories: “The Third Intifada? Why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Might Boil Over Again.”
Not only headlines
And the specter of a third intifada is not only showing up in media headlines. CIA Director Williams Burns, who was recently in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, had this to say this week at Georgetown University: “I was a senior US diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned – as are my colleagues in the intelligence community – that a lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then, too.”
None of this, of course, is made out of whole cloth.
Last year – when Israel was governed not by a hard-right coalition but, rather, by the most diverse coalition in its history – was the worst year of terrorism against Israelis since the “stabbing intifada” of 2015, with 31 people killed in terrorist attacks. Some 150 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, the vast majority either while carrying out attacks or in clashes with the security forces.
This year has not started out any better.
There was the terrorist attack that killed seven people near a synagogue in Neveh Ya’acov two weeks ago, which followed an IDF raid in Jenin during which 10 people were killed, nine of them members of an Islamic Jihad cell that the IDF said was planning an imminent, large-scale terrorist attack.
This week five members of a Hamas cell, including two terrorists responsible for an attempted murder spree at a restaurant at the Almog junction two weeks ago, were killed in an IDF raid in a refugee camp near Jericho.
Differences from the usual talk
So, yes, one can understand the talk of a third intifada, even though threats of a third intifada are something we are accustomed to hearing at regular intervals – either when there is a spike in terrorism, or when the Palestinians want to apply pressure on Israel. After a while, one gets inured to the threats, though this time the talk of a third intifada seems more serious.
Still, there are significant differences. First, the Palestinian violence today is not being planned, financed and executed by the PA, as was the case with Yasser Arafat when he headed the PA during the Second Intifada. Second, Israel has much better intelligence than it did in 2000, when it had moved out of the Palestinian areas under the Oslo Accords.
Additionally, the security forces are busy night and day pursuing terrorist targets throughout Judea and Samaria, including inside the Palestinian cities and refugee camps, something they did not begin to do during the Second Intifada until March 2002, way after the violence that began in September 2000 was well underway.
While feeling the need to draw historical parallels is understandable – and, as Burns said, there are similarities – this parallel is far from exact.
THOSE LOOKING to compare what Israel is going through now with periods of the recent past might, instead, want to look to a different period: the days preceding the Rabin assassination in the fall of 1995.
It is there – in the toxic atmosphere that prevailed at the time, when the government moved full speed ahead with plans that would profoundly affect the lives of everyone while half the country was passionately opposed – that perhaps closer historical parallels can be drawn.
Here, too, there are obviously tremendous differences between then and now, but these are differences that one could argue makes the atmosphere today even more charged and ripe for political violence. In 1995 there was no Twitter or Facebook, social media – and its ability to amplify extreme positions – did not yet exist. Today it does, and is contributing mightily to the spread of the vitriolic rhetoric being spouted by both sides.
In the days leading up to the Rabin assassination, there were mass rallies against moving forward with the Oslo Accords, and there was talk of din rodef, the concept in Jewish law of the permissibility of killing someone before they try to kill you.
There was also a vote in the Knesset on Oslo II, which created Areas A, B and C in the West Bank and gave the PA broad responsibilities in governing parts of those areas. This was a hugely significant vote. It passed by a razor-thin 61-59 majority with the help of Alex Goldfarb, a renegade MK originally on the Right who supplied the necessary vote after being promised a Mitsubishi and a driver in his role as deputy housing and construction minister.
A month after that vote, Rabin was assassinated. There are some striking similarities today.
TODAY, AS was the case in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people are protesting against government steps that they feel will dramatically change the country for the worse.
Today, as then, there are those talking openly about the possible need to kill the prime minister to save the country. Today, as then, din rodef has seeped back into the public discourse. Today, as then, there are those comparing the prime minister to Hitler. Today, as then, there are calls for massive civil disobedience. And today, as then, there are those who openly express a willingness to take up arms.
Hagai Tal, who was head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operations branch during the period of the Rabin assassination, said in a rare radio interview this week that both the public atmosphere and the stakes of what is at issue are reminiscent of the supercharged summer of 1995.
“Things are going in the wrong direction, and I hope for compromise, a way that will join together the different sides. Everyone is certain that they are right and the other is wrong, and – like always – the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
Asked if he thinks a political assassination could happen again in Israel, he replied that he believes it could. “First of all, because we have the painful experience of 1995, and if it happened then, it could happen today. The discourse is more extreme than ever, and social media – which was not around in 1995 – only fans the flames and turns into a blitz of comments, and reactions... I certainly think that someone, in the end, could get confused and try to save the motherland, in one direction or the other, and do something. And then woe unto us.”
Tal said he believes that Netanyahu, because of the tight security around him, is less in danger from a sole assassin. “I am less worried about that situation, but don’t forget there are many people in positions who are leading the [judicial reform] processes or opposed to the processes.”
He said that the threat is not only to those leading the reform, such as Justice Minister Yariv Levin, but also to those leading the opposition to it. “It is possible that someone is very angry with them. We don’t have control over which side will react and which side won’t. It works both ways.”
Point of fact: 40 years ago today, on February 10, 35-year-old Emil Grunzweig was killed at a Peace Now rally in Jerusalem calling on then-premier Menachem Begin to accept the Kahan Commission of inquiry findings regarding the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Tal also spoke of a possible third intifada, saying, “While we are fighting among ourselves about the language of one law or the other, we could find ourselves dealing with a third intifada, and then we will be in much more trouble than we are today.”
PRESIDENT ISAAC HERZOG tried to step into the “responsible adult in the room” role this week and called for everyone to hit the pause button, sit down and talk.
“Stop the whole process for a minute, take a deep breath, allow dialogue to take place, because there is a huge majority of the nation that wants dialogue,” he said during an event with new Golani recruits at his residence.
“When I see people threatening to murder the prime minister.... One must not use these types of expressions at all in this debate. The debate is heating up to dangerous places, and from here I call on everyone involved in the disagreement: stop a moment, breathe.”
Among those leading the reform and those leading the opposition to it, however, there were few takers for Herzog’s appeal. In response to Herzog’s call, Levin said there would be no pause, “not even for a minute,” and Supreme Court President Esther Hayut said days before Herzog’s comment that there would be no dialogue on the issue while the legislative process moving it forward continued.
And in the meantime, no one is taking a breath: neither the government nor the opposition.
A vote on the first reading of the clause in the reform calling for changing the way this country’s judges are selected is expected to make it through committee this week and onto the Knesset plenum’s floor for a vote on the bill’s first reading. Some pundits are saying that when this is done, when it is clear that the reform has been launched and cannot be killed by the establishment of a committee, then the government will pause and discuss changes it is willing to make.
Or maybe it won’t. Or maybe those opposed will continue to say “one can’t negotiate over democracy.”
Meanwhile, the opponents to the reform are taking no chances, and will be stepping up action against the move. More massive protests are planned for Saturday night, and on Monday the protest organizers are calling for a nationwide strike – even though the Histadrut said it would not join – and a massive rally outside the Knesset.
Not only are the sides not, as Herzog advised, pausing a moment and taking a long breath, but they seem to be hyperventilating.
And just as there is a health risk for individuals when they hyperventilate, so, too, might a nation hyperventilating lead to all kinds of unforeseen problems and complications – including political violence.