Throwing stones versus firing rubber bullets. New clashes broke out between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators on Friday, April 22, on the esplanade of the Jerusalem Mosques. The latest assessment reported sixty injured, two seriously, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. The situation is particularly tense in this part of the Old City, the third holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism. The third Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this year coincides with the end of the Passover celebrations, the Jewish Passover.
Over the past week, more than 200 people, mostly Palestinians, have been injured in clashes in and around the compound. The presence during Ramadan of many Jews – who can visit the place under certain conditions and at specific times without praying there, according to the status quo in force – and the deployment of police forces on the spot are perceived by Palestinians as a gesture of “provocation”.
In response, Palestinian armed groups fired rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, which responded with airstrikes – the first in months – on this Palestinian enclave of just over 2 million people. . This is enough to raise fears of a military escalation against the backdrop of tensions linked to the holy places in Jerusalem. In May 2021, clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian demonstrators during Ramadan in Jerusalem, notably on the esplanade of the Mosques, led to a deadly eleven-day war between Hamas, in power in Gaza, and the Israeli army.
This new violence against the backdrop of religious celebrations comes after a wave of attacks in Israel in recent weeks. These attacks with knives, car rams or firearms, including one carried out in the heart of downtown Tel Aviv on April 7, have killed 14 people since the end of March in Israel. Israeli forces have since been given carte blanche to “overcome terror”, including operations in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory. Assessment on the Palestinian side: more than twenty dead, including assailants of the terrorist attacks.
This Israeli military intervention raises fears of a general conflagration in the Palestinian Territories. Every night, groups of Palestinians attack the army, which retaliates with live ammunition. “It’s an unfortunately classic scenario that comes up at regular intervals for reasons that are always the same”observes Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, professor of political science at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, and specialist in the Palestinian question. “The reality is that we must end the occupation” Israeli, he adds.
“We are in a situation of occupation, Jerusalem is included, with a massive development of colonization for at least twenty years.”
Jean-Paul Chagnollaudat franceinfo
Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967. Some 700,000 Jewish settlers currently live in these two areas, in settlements considered illegal by international law. At the end of March, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Michael Lynk, called“apartheid” the system put in place by Israel, with “separate roads, high walls and ubiquitous checkpoints”.
In this context of “frustration and despair” Palestinian side, “you will inevitably have murderous sequences of this kind that will come back on a loop”, continues Jean-Paul Chagnollaud. For Frédéric Encel, doctor in geopolitics, author of Paths to Power: Thinking Geopolitics in the 21st Century (Ed. Odile Jacob), “we are in the syndrome of the first intifada”triggered in December 1987 by “a banal road accident in Gaza”. “You can always find sparks, observes the specialist. In the background, there is a very great emptiness. It is the vacuum of politics.”
On the Israeli side, the Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, successor to Binyamin Netanyahu, is playing the tightrope walker to keep his motley coalition in power, made up of deputies from the right, left, center and, for the first time, a formation of the Arab minority. “This coalition only exists to the extent that it has made a commitment not to change the status quo on the Palestinian question”analyzes Frédéric Encel.
On the Palestinian side, the elections which were to be held in May 2021 – the first in fifteen years – have been canceled on the grounds that the holding of the ballot was not “guarantee” in East Jerusalem. They were to seal a project of “reconciliation” between the secular Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamists of Hamas. Between this “division” history and “an abyssal loss of legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority” with his population, Jean-Paul Chagnollaud depicts a “situation where all actors are weak. There is nothing worse in a situation as serious as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said “deeply concerned about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem” and “is in contact with all parties to reduce tensions, prevent inflammatory actions and rhetoric”. However, the international community is currently more mobilized by the war in Ukraine and the risk of internationalization of the conflict. “I do not see by what miracle a peace process could be relaunched. The United States, which remains the only power capable of driving it, is far from that”judge Frédéric Encel, referring to an American president “weakened” internally and “occupied by the crisis in Ukraine”.
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been relegated to the status of local litigation.”
Frederic Encelat franceinfo
The latest American attempt in the region, the Abraham Accords, is a “nail driven in Palestinian hope”, continues the essayist. This Donald Trump plan for the Middle East, presented in January 2020, provided in particular for the annexation by Israel of parts of the West Bank. This project was finally suspended by the Jewish state last summer, thanks to an agreement to normalize its relations with several Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates. This recognition of Israel by these countries aggravates “Isolation of the Palestinians”, according to Jean-Paul Chagnollaud. The editor of the journal Mediterranean confluences recalls that the last resolution passed unanimously by the UN Security Council to condemn Israeli colonization dates from 2016 and has still not been implemented. “Yet she gave all the keys to a possible solution.”