Israeli commentators, Yaron Friedman, of “Ynet News” and Haviv Rettig Gur, of the “Times
of Israel” are clueless about the driving force behind the Palestinian mobilization
and collective struggle. In two recent articles, and with unmistakable conceit,
they attempted to highlight what they perceive as the failure of the current
Palestinian uprising, or “Intifada.”
Gur argues that “the terrorism” of the Palestinians is not a surge
of opposition to Israel but a “howl against the pervasive sense that resistance
has failed.” He reduces the Intifada to the mere act of alleged stabbing
of Israelis, and points out to the painful truth that the Palestinian Authority
“elites” are paying lip service to the “martyrs,” while
“simultaneously acting with determination on the ground to disrupt and
stop attacks.”
In his long-winded article, “Losing Palestine“,
Gur essentially claims that the current struggle against Occupation stems mostly
from Internet fervor and is more a deceleration of defeat than a strategy for
victory, and that no Palestinian leader dares to be the first to accept this.
Friedman, on the other hand, describes
the “knife Intifada” as a “fire without coal”; that the “insane actions
of the stabbers” is designed to ignite religious fervor, ultimately aimed at
blaming the Jews.
Those who launched the Intifada “have no real internal or external
support (financial or with weapons) and it broke out at a time when the nightmare
of all the Arab world’s leaders is the social protests turning into anarchy,”
he wrote.
There is little sense in arguing against the unsympathetic approach
Zionist commentators use to describe Palestinians or their insistence on seeing
Palestinian collective action, violent or otherwise, as an act of “terror”;
on their refusal to see any context behind Palestinian anger or on how they
inject a religious narrative at every turn, and lob “anti-Semitic” accusations
unfairly, whenever they see fit.