Only allegiance: to the homeland

Having international forces at the Aqsa Mosque compound might be the only recourse to stop the violence in Palestinian cities, including Jerusalem.

The proposal was rejected this week by the Israeli representative at the United Nations, exposing the hidden agenda of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is keen on Judaising the entire city of Jerusalem.

To achieve this goal, he does not care for Palestinian or Israeli victims when a third Intifada erupts. The 2000 second Intifada made thousands of victims; it claimed the lives of more than 4,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis, according to official Red Cross figures.

The first Intifada, of 1987, which lasted for five years, claimed the lives of 1,312 Palestinians, but such a sacrifice did not constitute a deterrence to the occupied people who rose again in a second uprising that left many more thousands dead some years later.

But now, we see the accumulation of Palestinian frustration starting to burst. Anger has reached a boiling point in whatever pertains to their religious identity as represented by the Aqsa Mosque.

The new breed of young, angry Palestinians, still in their twenties, born years after the Oslo agreements of 1993, is different from the older generations.

These young people had to express the agony of their alienation, rejection of deprivation, and their fury for the daily humiliation inflicted on them by the occupation authorities.

Just as the older generation looked up to Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon as a role model to be emulated, the 2015 protesters look up to Jihadi John and Daesh jihadists as role models. That explains their option of using knives as a weapon.

They do not owe their allegiance to Fateh, to Islamic Jihad or to Hamas. They carry out their lone wolf operations out of one single allegiance, which is to their occupied homeland.

They exact revenge for the humiliation their fathers had to put up with for the last 48 years.

A new phenomenon of this third Intifada is the participation of the Arabs from Nazareth, Ramleh and Sakhnin in protests and demonstrations.

The demonstrations reflect the cohesive nature of the Palestinian people, especially those 1.6 million Israeli Arabs who defeated all attempts to liquidate their Palestinian identity or to erase their Arab affiliation.

One of the governors of the upper Galilee, and a psychological warfare expert, Israel Koenig, had to admit that his programme to change those Palestinians failed.

The ripple effects of this uprising are bound to reach Israel proper, Tel Aviv, which will shatter Netanyahu’s false doctrine of security.