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Jerusalem, this move provoked
large Palestinian protests in Jerusalem. Israeli soldiers killed
six unarmed protesters. These killings inaugurated over a month
of demonstrations and clashes across the West Bank and the
GazaStrip. For a brief period, these demonstrations spread
into Palestinian towns inside Israel.
In relative terms, the second intifada is already
bloodier than the first. As in the previous intifada, Palestinians
threw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, who
responded with rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition.
But both sides have employed greater force than in 1987-1991.
The militant wing of Fatah, which has coordinated many street
actions, now has a substantial cache of small arms and has
fired often on Israeli troops. The Israeli military response
escalated dramatically after two soldiers, allegedly "lost" in
the PA-controlled West Bank town of Ramallah, were killed October
12 by a Palestinian mob returning from the funeral of an unarmed
young man whom soldiers had shot dead the day before. The IDF
attacked PA installations in Ramallah, Gaza and elsewhere with
helicopter gunships and missiles. Subsequently, the IDF has
not always waited for Israelis to die before answering Palestinian
small arms fire with tank shells and artillery, including the
shelling of civilian neighborhoods in the West Bank and Gaza.
For these actions and the use of live ammunition
to control demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians, several
international human rights organizations have condemned Israel
for use of excessive force. The UN Security Council passed
a similar condemnation, from which the US abstained, and on
October 20, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution condemning
Israel. Israel, the US and four Polynesian island nations voted
no, and a third of the assembly abstained. Despite a truce
agreement at Sharm al-Sheikh, a later agreement to quell violence
between Arafat and Shimon Peres and Bill Clinton's attempts
to restart negotiations in January 2001, the second intifada
did not look like it would end soon. In December 2000, Barak
called early elections for prime minister to forestall a likely
vote of no confidence in the Knesset. He will face Ariel Sharon
in the February 6 election. To date over 350 people, about
90 percent of them Palestinian, have been killed in the violence.
While the outcome of the uprising is very unclear, it is probably
impossible to resume the Oslo peace process without major modifications
to its basic framework. The Palestinian street has definitively
rejected Oslo, and top officials of the PA now say that UN
resolutions must form the basis of future final status talks. |
