The Real Story Behind the Intifada

Written by Martin Krossel on Monday March 8, 2010

New revelations from the son of a Hamas founder prove that the Intifada which broke out in 2000, was not a reaction to Israeli actions, but rather a campaign of violence orchestrated by the PLO and Hamas.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of the founder of Hamas who has now written a book acknowledging that he has been for a decade an agent for Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, made an interesting – if not surprising – revelation in an interview with the Wall Street Journal this weekend about the outbreak of the Second Palestinian armed revolt or Intifada that broke out in September 2000.

As the article reports: “A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasir Arafat had turned the Israeli offer had turned down the Israeli offer on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas’s support through Sheik Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat’s compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the Second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef’s account helps to set straight the historical right that the uprising was premeditated by Mr. Arafat.”

One would hope that this put an end to the accusations that Sharon’s walk touched off the rioting. Yousef’s revelation should also trigger a re-examination of another outbreak of rioting, resulting in the deaths of more than seventy people, at the same location during the autumn of 1996. Benjamin Netanyahu (then Israel’s prime minister for the first time) was widely blamed -- particularly by self-defined “peace” promoters on the left -- for that violence, for deciding to open a second entrance to a tunnel used by tourists. The Palestinians claimed that the new entrance to the tunnel threatened the foundation of the mosques on the Temple Mount, and, that it was opened in order to drive Muslims away from the site. The charge was absurd. The tunnel was not close to the foundation of the mosques. In fact, by allowing for an increase in tourist traffic, the tunnel entrance would increase business for the Arab merchants in the area.

Still, the critics focused on Netanyahu. One called him either stupid or evil – or both. That pundit, Leonard Fein, claimed that Netanyahu knew that the tunnel opening would result in Arab violence – as was proved by his decision to open secretly in the middle of the night – and still he went ahead. Yet, Yousef’s claim at least raises the possibility that Arafat used the opening of the tunnel just as he later used Sharon’s walk as a pretext for violence. After all, there is a long history, going back at least to 1921, of the leaders of the Palestinian Arab community inciting mobs on the Temple Mount to physically attack the Jewish communities in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine.

In any case, those who blame the violence in 1996 and in 2000 -- on the tunnel opening and Sharon’s walk respectively -- implicitly absolve the Palestinians of any responsibility for the rioting that they initiated. Morally this is outrageous. Even if the Palestinians may have had legitimate grievances against the pre-state Jewish community or the State of Israel, as they may have well had, they made no attempt to resolve these in a non-violent fashion. Moreover, in the words of the Just War Doctrine, one might wonder whether the Arab violence was a “proportional response” to any Israeli provocation. Were weeks of lethal violence an appropriate reaction to the opening of a tunnel? Or was this massive overkill? Did Sharon’s walk on the Temple Mount justify a four-young long Intifada that featured by a suicide bombing campaign that was responsible for the deaths of 1,000 Israelis, and was not stopped until Israel took military action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank and construct a wall to stop the bombers from infiltrating into Israel?

The “peace” crowd always traces the source of all outbreaks of such violence to an alleged Israeli provocation, rarely scrutinizing the Arab rioting that follows them, or examines the appropriateness of the Arab behavior.  Thereby the “peace” promoters have consistently shown that their true concern has been in maligning Israel, and not in finding ways to bring about peace.

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