Israel’s Search for Motives and Make-up of Youth behind The Palestinian Flare-up
Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman
The Palestinian flare-up that has been sowing panic in Israel has created a reality never expected in the midst of a state of chaos in some Arab countries facing internal conflicts as a result of the so-called Arab Spring. Palestinian groups and organizations have also been witnessing terrible divisions unrelated to the struggle to end the Israeli occupation. But the flare-up came as a surprise to many Arabs and the world as well, according to politicians, writers and journalists in the region.
Palestinian youth, rising from the ashes of despair and lack of hope, created a phenomenal movement of solidarity and perhaps a kind of ‘national unity’ to resist and end the brutal colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine, on their own without any known organized assistance from any side or source, domestic or foreign.
Palestinians, young males and females, lifted the discarded Palestinian banner of liberation and forged ahead to confront the Zionist killing machine, in spite of its deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Their self-sustained struggle to end the colonial/apartheid Zionist occupation without seeking any outside help has driven thousands of the occupiers to stay put in their homes with terrifying fear to step outside. It drove many trained Zionist soldiers to flee with their weapons from scenes where a Palestinian youth may have brandished a small kitchen knife or drove a vehicle to overrun them. Such young and selfless individuals rising up to face certain death without any trace of fear have put the only remaining apartheid colonial power (i.e. Israel) in our world into a quandary without a clue how to confront this uprising that some believe could turn into an existential threat to the very survival of the Zionist colonial entity.
The Palestinian youth’s uprising came at the right time when the whole Palestinian cause was about to disappear from the world’s political scene with many countries being busy trying to defend themselves from the threats or the burning hell of ’Takfiri’ wars falsely being waged in the name of Islam. Redrawing the maps of the Middle East by Western powers using Islam as an instrument to bring down regimes as had happened in the past in Afghanistan to end the Soviet empire, has put Western national security in extreme peril, as well.
In the midst of utter confusion, Israeli news media has chosen to lead the incitement “to crush Palestinian terrorism” by all means available. But it failed to show how one can stop an individual who lost hope of ever building a decent future under an apartheid foreign occupation from choosing death willingly to get out of a life without national dignity? All keen observers predict that the Palestinian youth’s uprising will continue, regardless of cost in lost Palestinian lives and demolished family homes by the bulldozers of the military Zionist occupation.
Israeli military intelligence searched for conditions and motives of the young Palestinians who have taken to the streets to fight Israel’s occupation. Nadav Shragai, an Israeli military analyst, wrote that “more than 60% of Palestinian attackers in the West Bank came from Al Khalil (Hebron) region. And 75% of the ones who carried attacks in Israel came from East Jerusalem.” He found that most of the Palestinian attackers have, more or less, the same profile: There are single, not married, unemployed, and loners in their actions with no criminal record or any association with any Palestinian organization.” Israel’s ‘Intelligence and Terrorism Information’ Center released a report saying “all the youth involved are made up of students who finished middle schools and they are either unemployed or working in jobs that are not suitable to their learned skills.” “Their (Islamic) religious motivation is not high nor is a factor that drove them to attack”, it said, and “their pages on the social media on FaceBook show that the vast majority of them were open to modern life with a personal attitude that was centered on secularism.”
The Israeli web portal Walla published a report by Avi Sakharov, a specialist on ’Palestinian Affairs’ in which he gathered statistics about all the “attackers” from which he drew the following conclusions about the Palestinian youth who were killed in a public execution style by Israeli forces: “They are individuals who do not even participate in social networks on the internet because of their very modest financial means and do not own cell phones, either.” Therefore, he ruled out “the incitement” on the social networks as a cause for their actions, concluding that “in view of the findings, it is very difficult to draw a common profile of Palestinian youth engaged in the resistance, except that they are usually young bachelors and unemployed.” The Israeli Army released a study in which they concluded that “the motive behind Palestinian violence is revenge in a style that leads to martyrdom.”
The Palestinian youth engaged in this phenomenal uprising were never affected by any attempts whether by brute force or persuasion to weaken their determination or to lead them into a passive attitude in their response to the colonial occupation. Young Palestinians left with no state of their own, no decent future with national dignity to look for, have no choice, whatsoever, but to choose martyrdom, not humiliation under an apartheid colonial occupation and their uprising is their way of life.
