The writer is an award-winning journalist and scholar, a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
At first, comparing Palestinian gunmen in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank to rioting youth in France may resemble likening
apples to pears.
In many ways, it is.اضافة اعلان
Youth in France are full-fledged French citizens demanding
an end to disenfranchisement, marginalization, alienation, racism, and law
enforcement and security force brutality.
That is where Palestinians would like to be after 56 years
of occupation with no prospect for independence or integration into Israel with
the kind of rights accorded to all, irrespective of ethnicity or religion, by
French law, even if reality in France offers a different picture.
Yet, armed Palestinian resistance and French rioting have a
common message: violence results from governmental and societal failure to
acknowledge and address social, economic, political, and/or national
aspirations.
Palestinian fighters and French rioters signal that violence
will recur and likely escalate as long as governments reduce structural
defaults to a law enforcement, security, and terrorism issue.
Like the French riots, the worst since mass protests in 2005, the latest bout of Israeli-Palestinian violence demonstrates that 56 years of harsh occupation, punitive attempts to squash Palestinian resistance and aspirations, and settlement activity aimed at changing the West Bank's demographics have failed.
The difference between France and Israel is that French
President Emmanuel Macron acknowledges the underlying problems, while Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sees force, repression, and intimidation as
the way to disappear problems, and bend Palestinians to his will.
Both Macron and Netanyahu are driven as much by a political
vision as politics and a perceived need to cater to the right, far-right, and
ethnic and religious prejudices.
Macron has promised to investigate what led to the police
shooting last month of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop in the
Paris suburb of Nanterre.
The June 27 killing sparked six days of riots across France, with protesters looting
shops, setting cars alight, destroying bus stops, and pelting police with
fireworks that wounded some 200 law enforcement officers.
France needs “order, calm, unity. And then to work on the deep causes of what happened,” Macron said.
Macron is not the first French leader to promise to tackle
the violent protest’s root causes.
“Manuel Valls, a former prime minister, said these complexes
instilled a sense of ‘territorial, social and ethnic apartheid’. Growing up on
one, we were forever defined as failures by our postcode. Authority figures
from teachers to police officers perpetuated a generational cycle of mediocrity and humiliation,” said
Nabila Ramadani, a French woman of Algerian descent.
Ramadani was referring to banlieues or ghetto-like suburbs
of French cities.
Like his predecessors, Macron will likely discover that
failure to follow through on promises means problems will fester and deepen
societal divides.
Even so, so far, Macron’s words appear to be little more
than sweet talk.
He seems more concerned about stymieing far-right efforts to
capitalize on its anti-immigrant and strong law enforcement messaging, even if
he is likely to take heart from a poll carried out during last week’s riots
that showed his highest approval rating since March at 33 percent.
As a result, the first legislative response to the riots was
a law enforcement bill passed by parliament that activists charge threatens to curb democratic freedoms and oversight of the police.
The bill allows police to secretly access suspects’ cameras,
microphones, and location via their mobile phones and employ surveillance
drones.
It also criminalizes helping to identify on-duty police
officers with “obvious” harmful intent, punishable by up to five years in
prison and an $89,800 fine.
In addition, authorities are fast-tracking legal proceedings against some 3,600 detained
protesters with an average age of 17.
French courts are working overtime to process the arrests,
including opening their doors on weekends, with fast-track hearings around an
hour long and same-day sentencing.
“Like other authoritarians, France expands the reach,
capabilities and competences of its law enforcement instead of addressing the root causes of failed integration
policies,” tweeted scholar Andreas Krieg.
Yet, armed Palestinian resistance and French rioting have a common message: violence results from governmental and societal failure to acknowledge and address social, economic, political, and/or national aspirations.
In contrast to Macron, Netanyahu and his government, the
most ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative religious cabinet in Israeli
history, refuse to acknowledge that they face existential issues that extend
far beyond the prime minister’s assertion of terrorism.
Speaking to an Israeli parliament committee days before
Israel launched a massive military assault on a refugee camp in the West Bank
town of Jenin, a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, Netanyahu asserted that the
Jewish state “needs to crush (the Palestinian) ambition” for an independent state.
Netanyahu vowed, "The extensive operation in Jenin is not a one-off. We will not allow Jenin to go back
to being a city of refuge for terrorism.”
Israeli forces this week launched their largest-scale
military operation in Jenin in decades, killing at least 12 Palestinians,
wounding scores of others, and leaving widespread destruction across the
refugee camp.
Days later, two members of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) were killed in the West Bank town of Nabulus in a gunfight with Israeli troops.
Rather than focus on the existential issues confronting both
Israelis and Palestinians, liberal Israeli commentators highlighted the
domestic political aspects of the Israeli assault.
Respected columnist Zvi Bar’el titled one of his latest
Haaretz columns, “Netanyahu's Jenin Op Was a Sedative for the Settlers”.
Bar’el was referring to Israeli vigilante attacks against
Palestinians in response to Palestinian assaults on Israelis.
Like the French riots, the worst since mass protests in
2005, the latest bout of Israeli-Palestinian violence demonstrates that 56
years of harsh occupation, punitive attempts to squash Palestinian resistance
and aspirations, and settlement activity aimed at changing the West Bank's
demographics have failed.
Israel, like France, confronts a festering wound that will
not be healed or go away by applying band-aids, ignoring the problem's
existence, or using a sledgehammer.
If anything, the wound will continue to fester.
The problem may be very different in Israel and France, and
so is the solution.
However, in both cases, the solution is political rather
than coercive. There is no reason to believe that Israel or France has the
political will to tackle the violence’s root causes. Without that, there is
little not much, if any, at the end of the tunnel.
James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar,
an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and
podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
.jpg)
.jpg)
