A Third Intifada?
These days, the Hamas movement has been trying to reignite the Palestinian arena by using social networking sites and the active support of the al-Jazeera channel. It has already been decided that Friday, the 27th of September, will be called “Al-Aqsa Friday”. The end of September will mark thirteen years since the second intifada broke out, which was called the “Al-Aqsa” Intifada. The current use of this motif is intended to give the intifada a religious dimension and the weight of an Islamic obligation to go to jihad to free al-Aqsa from the Zionists’ grip.
Three factors are currently fanning the flames of the call for intifada: one is the competition between the PLO and the government in Ramallah on one hand, and Hamas and the government of Gaza on the other. The more one side progresses in making peaceful contacts with Israel, the more the other one attempts to set the area afire in order to pull the rug out from under the negotiators, and to negate any possibility of arriving at an agreement that would leave Israel even one square centimeter of “Palestine”. So paradoxically, it is the peace negotiations themselves that are actually fueling terrorism and causing deaths and injuries, for example the deaths of the two soldiers in recent days.
Here, we must note that one of them – Tomer Hazan – was killed by an imprisoned terrorist’s brother in order to serve as a bargaining chip to free the imprisoned brother. Hazan was a victim of the twisted practice of freeing murderers, which is something that only Israel engages in, of all the countries in the world. If Israel behaved like the United States, Britain, France or the rest of the democratic countries and did not negotiate with terrorists about the freeing of murderers, Israeli soldiers would not be kidnapped to be used as bargaining chips, and Tomer Hazan would still be among the living.
The dead end that the Hamas government in Gaza finds itself in, also adds to the desire to shake up the stable system that has consolidated around the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders hate the name that the jihadists have given them, “Mishamer haGaful” (“Border Patrol”), as if they are the guarding Israel’s borders against the jihadists’ operations. Hamas’ motivation, at least in the third intifada also comes from their desire to shake off this name.
The second factor leading toward a third intifada is the situation in the Arab world, especially in Syria. Potential jihadists see that by waging a stubborn and determined battle, they can turn a functional state into a torn and splintered country, and can threaten even a strong regime and send a tyrant to the edge of the abyss, where he must defend himself by the use of chemical weapons. The involvement of jihadists, who came from all parts of the world to take part in jihad against Asad the infidel, emphasizes the specifically Islamic aspect of the battle for Syria. The situation in Syria encourages organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to try to copy the model of the battle in Syria to Israel as well, not only to get rid of the “Occupation of 1967” but also to bring to an end to the “Occupation of 1948”.
The rage over what has happened in Egypt also worries the “Palestinian” jihadists, and they are especially angry about the “act of mass murder” that was carried out – according to them – by the infidel Egyptian army against their Muslim brothers in the Sinai Peninsula. The operation in Sinai also has a negative influence on the state of Hamas in Gaza, and this is another reason for the increasing rage among the “Palestinian” Islamists. The fact that Israel supports the military regime in Egypt and helps it in its fight against the jihadists of Sinai, increases the motivation to direct their rage specifically toward Israel, and also because that’s what exists in the PA as well.
The Third factor that is encouraging people to begin a third intifada is the wave of violence driven by Islamist motivations in many places the world over: the takeover by “Shabab al-Mujahidin” militias – a branch of al-Qaeda in Somalia – on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, which attracted world-wide media attention; the slaughter that Boko Haram (“the West is Forbidden”) carried out in Nigeria in which about 150 Christians were murdered; the daily massacres in Iraq; the slaughter in the church in Peshawar, Pakistan; the American failure to depose Asad, the infidel, despite his use of chemical weapons; the increasing influence on events in the Middle East exerted by the Russians, which itself has murdered Chechen Muslims, and supports Asad the murderer of Muslims.