Bracing for the Third Intifada: Why violence in Jerusalem signals an ugly future

A wave of violence and reprisals flaring in East Jerusalem and occupied Palestine has both Israelis and Palestinians preparing for the potential of a third Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli military occupation. The statement came during an interview broadcast simultaneously on Israel's Channel 2 and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, and saw Kerry uttering the following hypothetical: “I mean, does Israel want a third Intifada?” In language that would be fairly radical for any White House official, Kerry delivered directly into Israeli living rooms a warning about the “increasing isolation of Israel” and a continuation of the “delegitimization of Israel that’s been taking place on an international basis” due to its intransigent land-grabbing in the West Bank. “If we do not resolve the question of settlements and the question of who lives where and how and what rights they have,” Kerry continued, “if we don’t end the presence of Israeli soldiers perpetually within the West Bank, then there will be an increasing feeling that if we cannot get peace with a leadership that is committed to nonviolence, you may wind up with leadership that is committed to violence.” American largesse notwithstanding, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the voters who returned him to office earlier this year weren’t much fazed by Kerry’s warning, and settlement-building has continued mostly unabated. According to Israel’s second-largest party, the Zionist Union, the appointment is “another nail in the coffin that Bibi is putting in Israel’s foreign relations.” David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel, wrote, “Undeniably, now, by the prime minister’s own decree, Danny Danon is the true face of Netanyahu’s Israel.” Danon, whom Horovitz calls the “arch-critic of a two-state solution,” proposed in a 2011 New York Times op-ed that Israel should annex the West Bank and establish an apartheid state. In Danon’s proposal, the nearly 3 million Palestinians caught in between the settlements “would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population.” “I think we should no longer think of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but Palestinian settlements in Israel,” Danon said in 2013, while still deputy defense minister.