In Hebron on December 7, over 20 Israeli soldiers arrested 14-year-old Fawzi Al-Junaidi, blindfolded him and marched him off to detention. The image of the arrest, the violence of it, startled many people. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan mentioned the arrest and said sharply: “Israel is a terrorist state. We will not abandon Jerusalem to the mercy of a child-murder state.”
Erdogan was referring to the renewed controversy over Jerusalem. On December 6, President Donald Trump declared that the United States would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. To move the embassy suggests that Israel’s capital is no longer to be Tel Aviv but Jerusalem. This action is against long-standing international policy, which sees Jerusalem as an “international city”—one that would be governed by various parties to protect the city’s special status as home to major religious sites of Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Trump’s statement on Jerusalem rattled Palestine, where the people have long worried about the seizure of East Jerusalem, which the United Nations deems to be part of Occupied Palestinian Territory, and the rest of the old city. Protests broke out in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip. These were largely non-violent, a mirror of the frustration of the Palestinian people with the collapse of their national liberation project.
Dangerous escalation
On December 8, which was a Friday and therefore a day of prayer for Muslims, Israeli forces…