Rumblings about a third intifada are emerging from the Middle East. It’s not a pretty prospect but the utter failure to stop Israeli expansionism almost makes it inevitable.
Eileen Read, writing at True/Slant, shares this concern:
This week’s violent clashes between the Israeli military and the citizenry of Palestine underscore the ever-present chance of another intifada – and the need for President Barack Obama’s Middle East peace plan and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s vision of “two states for two peoples” to separate these warring nations.
Today, Arab workers, businesses, and students in Israel are on strike. This week, a Palestinian shot and wounded a settler driving from a Israeli settlement, Shvut Rachel – another typical violent exchange between the native population and the settlers. An Israeli jeep struck and killed a 17-year-old Palestinian, in what the military said was an accident and the local residents claimed was deliberate. A Qassan rocket was fired from Gaza into Israel. Two Gazans were killed and several were missing after an Israeli air strike against the tunnels bordering Egypt, used to smuggle arms to Hamas.
In Jersusalem, a settler organization, Ateret Cohanim, is marketing properties it will build to insert more Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem, designed to sell for between $1 million and $3 million each. Dr. Meir Margalit, a member of the Jerusalem city council, gave a copy of a marketing brochure for the properties to the Jerusalem Post, saying he feared this kind of activity could potentially “speed up the next big explosion [of Arab-Jewish tensions] in Jerusalem.”
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Ateret Cohanim has settled 1,000 people into Arab parts of the walled Old City of Jerusalem. This organization’s website calls the Moslem Quarter of Jerusalem “the so-called ”˜Moslem’ quarter,” and aggressively seeks donations to help change it to the “Renewed Jewish Quarter.”