What the government of Israel calls its eternal, undivided capital is among the most precarious, divided cities in the world. In 1967, when it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem and the West Bank—both then administered by Jordan—Israel expanded the city’s municipal boundaries threefold. As a result, approximately 37 percent of Jerusalem’s current residents are Palestinian. They have separate buses, schools, health facilities, and commercial centers, and they speak a different language. In eastern neighborhoods, Israeli settlers and border police are frequently pelted with stones, while Palestinians have on several occasions been beaten by Jewish nationalist youths in the western half of the city. Balloons equipped with cameras hover above East Jerusalem, maintaining surveillance over the Palestinian population. Most Israelis have never visited and don’t even know the names of the Palestinian areas their government insists on calling its own. Municipal workers come to these neighborhoods with police escorts.1
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, but in order to acquire it they have to demonstrate a moderate acquaintance with Hebrew, renounce their Jordanian or other citizenship, and swear loyalty to Israel. More than 95 percent have refused to do this, on the grounds that it would signal acquiescence in and legitimation of Israel’s occupation. For those who have applied, permissions have been scarce: in 2015, only 2.9 percent of applications were approved. Between the year the city was first occupied and 2014, more than 14,400 Palestinians had their residency revoked. As permanent residents, Palestinians in Jerusalem are entitled to vote in municipal (but not national) elections, yet more than 99 percent boycott them.2 With no electoral incentive to satisfy the needs of Palestinians, the city’s politicians neglect them.
All Jerusalemites pay taxes, but the proportion of the municipal budget allocated to the roughly 316,000 Palestinian residents of a city with a population of 850,000 doesn’t exceed 10 percent. Service provision is grossly unequal. In the East, there are five benefit offices, compared with the West’s eighteen; four health centers for mothers and babies, compared with the West’s twenty-five; and eleven mail carriers, compared with the West’s 133. Palestinian neighborhoods have one-thirtieth as many playgrounds per resident as Jewish neighborhoods. Many roads are in disrepair and are too narrow to accommodate garbage trucks, forcing Palestinians to burn trash outside their homes. There is a shortage of sewage pipes, so Palestinian residents have to use septic tanks that often overflow. Students are stuffed into overcrowded schools or converted apartments; 2,200 additional classrooms are needed. More than three-quarters of the city’s Palestinians live below the poverty line.3
Since 1967, no new Palestinian neighborhoods have been established in the city, while Jewish settlements surrounding existing Palestinian areas have mushroomed. Restrictive zoning and grossly unequal permit allocation prevent Palestinians from building legally. Israel has designated 52 percent of land in East Jerusalem as unavailable for development and set aside 35 percent for Jewish settlements, leaving the Palestinian population with only 13 percent, most of which is already built on. Those with growing families are forced to choose between building illegally and leaving the city. Roughly a third of them decide to build, meaning that 93,000 residents are under constant threat that their homes will be demolished.4
The government has no shortage of bureaucratic explanations for this unequal treatment, but it doesn’t always try to hide the ethno-religious basis of its discrimination. After terrorist attacks by both Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, in summer and fall 2014, the government demolished the homes of only the Palestinian perpetrators. Palestinians who live in houses abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for Jewish former owners and their descendants, but the reverse has yet to occur.5
Jerusalem was once the cultural, political, and commercial capital for Palestinians, connected to Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the north. But the construction of the separation wall cut Jerusalemites off from the West Bank and from one another. The route of the barrier was chosen to encompass as many East Jerusalem and West Bank Jewish settlements as possible while excluding the maximum number of Palestinians. In the Jerusalem area, only 3 percent of it follows the pre-1967 line. The wall divides the Palestinians in Jerusalem into two groups: between two-thirds and three-quarters are on the Israeli side, disconnected from Palestinians in the West Bank; between a quarter and one-third have found themselves on the West Bank side, and are now forced to wait in long lines at checkpoints to get to schools and services.6
Because areas on the West Bank side of the barrier are still within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, the Ramallah-based PA is forbidden to enter them. Although the Israeli police, in common with the providers of other basic municipal services, largely refuse to go to these places, residents are still obliged to pay municipal taxes to qualify for health care and benefits. These neighborhoods have become a no-man’s-land where criminals can escape from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.7
In Palestinian areas on the Jerusalem side of the wall, too, crime has become pervasive. Israeli forces tend to enter these neighborhoods only when there’s a threat to Jews. The Israeli security presence in East Jerusalem is made up mostly of paramilitary units, which are there essentially to quash dissent and prevent attacks on settlers rather than to protect Palestinians. Noncooperation with Israeli forces, because of rejection of their authority or out of fear of being seen as collaborating, has allowed gangs to proliferate. They are involved in robberies, drug smuggling, gun running, and extortion, which affects large numbers of Palestinian businesses.8 Rising crime and insecurity have helped make East Jerusalem a ghost town at night.
Unrest and ethnic tension have been increasing for several years, but only after July 2014 did people begin referring to the protests and violence as an intifada. At the end of June 2014, the Israeli army discovered the bodies of three teenage students at West Bank yeshivas who had been kidnapped and murdered earlier that month. The next day, hundreds of Jews demonstrated in West Jerusalem, chanting “Death to the Arabs,” “Muhammad is dead,” and similar slogans. Several dozen protesters attacked Palestinian workers and passersby. Before sunrise the next morning, three Jewish nationalists drove to the upper-middle-class Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat, abducted a randomly selected sixteen-year-old called Muhammad Abu Khdeir, beat him, and burned him alive.9
In the days following his murder, riots broke out in Palestinian areas of Jerusalem. A light railway that passes through Shuafat on its way to the nearby settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev was repeatedly stoned and the service suspended.10 Demonstrations spread when the war in Gaza broke out a week after Abu Khdeir’s murder. In the following months, there were protests in East Jerusalem nearly every day.
Two of the focal points were Silwan, southeast of the Old City walls, where Jewish settlers with state-funded private security guards have taken over numerous buildings, and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, or Temple Mount, where Israel has frequently restricted Palestinian access while facilitating visits by a small but vocal Jewish minority, doubling the number of Jewish visitors between 2009 and 2014. This minority, which has boasted high-ranking Knesset members, ministers, and deputy ministers, ignores ultra-Orthodox injunctions by advocating prayer and, in some cases, even the construction of a third Jewish temple on the site.11
Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, said that the number of incidents involving stone throwing and Molotov cocktails had risen from two hundred per month in the period preceding the Gaza War to five thousand per month afterward. More than a thousand Palestinians in Jerusalem, most of them minors, were detained in the several months after Abu Khdeir’s murder—four times the total arrested in East Jerusalem for security-related offenses between the start of the Second Intifada and 2008.12
To counter the unrest, the Israeli government seconded a thousand special forces officers to the Jerusalem police; deployed four extra border police units; conducted large-scale raids; increased the presence of paramilitary forces in East Jerusalem; established checkpoints and barricades around Palestinian areas; called on Israelis who have firearms licenses to join a volunteer security force; ordered the houses of Palestinian attackers to be demolished and their relatives arrested; dispersed crowds by hosing them with skunk; erected concrete fortifications at bus stations; threatened to penalize parents of teenage demonstrators; proposed prison sentences of up to twenty years for throwing stones; and handed out fines in Palestinian neighborhoods for such minor offenses as jaywalking and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds.13
None of these measures had much effect. Growing numbers of Palestinians, particularly in East Jerusalem, were injured by Israeli forces; several were killed. In November 2014, another Palestinian teenager in East Jerusalem was abducted and beaten, but left alive. Several Palestinians in the West Bank were run over. Attacks on Israelis increased sharply. A leading supporter of Jewish prayer in the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary, who would become a member of the Knesset in 2016, was shot. Two ax-, knife-, and gun-wielding Palestinians from East Jerusalem killed a police officer, a worshipper, and four ultra-Orthodox rabbis at a West Jerusalem synagogue. There were gruesome attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians by Palestinians using guns and knives and vehicles. More Israelis died in such incidents in fall 2014 than in 2012 and 2013 combined.14
Israel’s ministers and official spokespersons claimed that Mahmoud Abbas was inciting the violence. But that assertion was aimed more at thwarting Abbas’s diplomatic initiatives than at providing a sober assessment of the causes of the unrest. As Israel’s senior security officials stated, the fall 2014 attacks were actually the work of “lone wolves”—spontaneous acts of violence, not committed by followers of a particular political faction. They stemmed precisely from the absence of Palestinian political leadership.15
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The Palestinian sense of abandonment by their leaders is particularly acute in Jerusalem, where the PA is forbidden from acting and to which Ramallah, like most of the Arab world, devotes many lofty words but very few deeds. When he assented to the five-year interim arrangements for self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Yasir Arafat agreed to exclude Jerusalem from the areas to be governed pro tempore by the PA. Local figures, notably the late Faisal Husseini, had refused to agree to this, which is one reason Yitzhak Rabin, who resolutely opposed dividing Jerusalem and said he would rather abandon peace than give up a united capital, chose to bypass Husseini and instead completed secret negotiations in Oslo with Arafat’s emissaries.16
Palestinians in Jerusalem have been bereft of leadership since Husseini’s death in 2001. Jerusalem’s four representatives in the Palestinian parliament—all of them members of Hamas, elected in 2006—have been deported. The Shin Bet monitors “political subversion,” which includes opposition to the occupation.17 Since all Palestinian political parties oppose the occupation, they and their activities have, in effect, been criminalized. Even innocuous institutions such as the Arab Chamber of Commerce and Industry have been shut down. Years of Israeli suppression of political activity have ensured that when violence does erupt in Jerusalem, there is no legitimate authority to quell it, making the spontaneous, unorganized protests and attacks far more difficult for the security forces to thwart and contain.
The notion that Abbas incited the protests was laughable to Palestinians in Jerusalem. When permitted entry to the city, Abbas’s representatives and associates have been verbally and physically attacked by Palestinians. A former religious affairs minister and his bodyguards were hospitalized after an assault while they were in the Noble Sanctuary, and a PA minister was shouted out of the mourning tent of the family of Abu Khdeir.18 The PA was accused of standing idly by as a withering East Jerusalem was encircled, divided, and constricted.
Abbas was adamantly opposed to leading an intifada, peaceful or otherwise, and he would almost certainly have resigned if a new one began. Understanding his deep-seated abhorrence of violence, Hamas agreed in 2011 and again in 2013 to a joint campaign of peaceful protest with Fatah in the West Bank, but Abbas and the security forces under his command continued to act against such demonstrations. Even after Hamas’s rise in popularity following the Gaza War and the subsequent Palestinian agitation in Jerusalem and cities within Israel, Abbas continued to eschew even the nonviolent means of pressuring Israel that had been available to him for several years.19 When the PLO’s strategy amounted to submitting resolutions to the UN Security Council that it knew in advance would be vetoed, it was little wonder that Palestinians in Jerusalem started acting on their own.
The result, in just a few weeks of heightened protest and violence, was a swift reversal of Israeli policies at the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary. In November 2014, Prime Minister Netanyahu flew to Jordan and privately committed to ease tensions at the holy site by barring Knesset members and provocative Jewish activists, limiting the size of visiting religious Jewish groups, and removing age and gender restrictions on Muslim access. When Israel breached these commitments in late summer 2015, reimposing age and gender restrictions on Muslim access and allowing entry to larger groups of Jewish activists, including a government minister, clashes broke out again.20
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The 2014–2015 upsurge in protests and violence was called the silent intifada, the individual intifada, the children’s intifada, the firecracker intifada, the car intifada, the run-over intifada, the knives intifada, the Jerusalem intifada, and the third intifada. But what it most closely resembled wasn’t the First or the Second Intifada but the spike in uncoordinated, leaderless attacks that preceded the First Intifada in 1987. Then, as in 2014–2015, such violence was blamed wrongly on the PLO leadership. Then, too, that leadership appeared defeated and in decline. Then, too, there was the memory of elections, held in the previous decade, whose results Israel sought to undo.21 Then, too, with no organized political structure in the West Bank and Gaza offering a clear strategy of national liberation, sporadic assaults on Israelis, not attributable to any political faction, were on the increase.
The crucial difference between the mid-1980s and 2014–2015 is that Palestinian civil society had become much weaker, and so, too, had the likelihood of coherent political organization of the kind that emerged soon after the First Intifada began. The groups that were then active have been supplanted, either by the institutions of a Palestinian Authority whose existence is premised on close cooperation with Israel, or by NGOs whose foreign funders make assistance conditional on the pursuit of apolitical development projects or vague peace-building strategies that explicitly rule out nonviolent confrontation with Israel and any initiative likely to drive up the costs of military occupation. Palestinian society is afflicted with dependency, and it is dependent on forces that wish to preserve the status quo.
—November 2014