The Daily - The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

In the past few days, the deadliest violence in years has erupted between Israel and the Palestinians. Hundreds of missiles are streaking back and forth between Gaza and cities across Israel, and there have been shocking scenes of mob violence on the streets.Why is this happening and how much worse could it get?Guest: Isabel Kershner, a correspondent for The New York Times based in Jerusalem. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Rioting and mob violence between Arabs and Jews has torn through towns and cities across Israel, while rockets from Gaza and Israeli airstrikes have continued to kill civilians.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Over the past few days, the deadliest violence in years has erupted between Israel and Palestinians. Intense rocket fire from Gaza, answered by Israeli airstrikes, showing no sign of easing. Punctuated by hundreds of missiles streaking back and forth between Gaza and cities across Israel. Increasingly large numbers of casualties, including children from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

And now on the streets of Israel by shocking scenes of mob violence against both Arabs and Jews. Today, I spoke with my colleague in Jerusalem, Isabel Kirchner, about why it's all happening and just how much worse it may get. And just how much worse it may get. It's Thursday, May 13th. Isabel, I know there may not be a simple answer to this question, but what was the trigger for this eruption of violence in Jerusalem over the past few weeks? Well, one of the triggers for sure is actually a case of six Palestinian families who are facing a looming eviction by Jewish landlords from their houses that they've been living

in since the 1950s in a very small, quiet, leafy neighborhood of East Jerusalem, not far from the old city. In the neighborhood of Shekejera, the tension's been growing for weeks. Several Palestinian families face eviction from their homes. We are in the right. We are still resisting. We are staying here, even if they don't want us. This is a case that's been bubbling on for years and years. We don't understand why Arabs are here.

I don't want any problems, but this land is Jewish and belongs to us. We don't believe anyone, not the courts or anyone else. The Israeli government has cast it as a small private real estate dispute, but it's far from that. So you're talking about families who were displaced and made refugees during 1948, the war surrounding the creation of Israel. And they lost their homes in what became Israel.

And they moved to that area of East Jerusalem when the Jordanians were in control. And the Jordanian government actually offered them an option in conjunction with the United Nations Refugee Agency at the time. an option in conjunction with the United Nations Refugee Agency at the time. They said, we'll build some houses in this neighborhood, a few dozen houses, and you can come live in them and we will register them for you. And in return, you should give up your refugee status. And the families actually agreed to that and moved into the houses. But at the end of the day, somehow the Jordanian government never actually finally registered them in their names. So then in 1967, the Middle East war breaks out

and Jordan loses control of the land of East Jerusalem and Israel takes control of it. Israel after the 67 war annexed that territory, but that move was never internationally recognized. And most of the world still considers it occupied territory. And although there was an agreement between the Jordanians and these Palestinian families over these homes, the land they sit on now gets to be controlled by Israel. And on top of that, although this is now a Palestinian populated area, predominantly, the land was bought by a Jewish trust in the 19th century. And then in the meantime, religious trusts have sold the rights to a real estate agency, people who want to move Jews back into that neighborhood. And there is nothing more

in the Palestinian mindset, nothing more upsetting than the refugee issue. So it just took on much bigger proportions. You know, it's not just about renting or an eviction order or a few houses. It suddenly becomes a national issue. So this is pretty complicated, but to summarize, these refugee Palestinian families were given these homes in the 1950s and told that it would be their home for good. But that didn't happen. It's still the case that legally these homes belong to Jewish landlords. And now those Jewish landlords are saying to these Palestinian families, we want you out. And in part, they want them out because they want Jewish people to control these properties in East Jerusalem. That's correct. And they're able to do that based on a 1970s law, which allows Jewish

property owners to reclaim property in the east side of the city. But, you know, then on the other side, the Palestinians do not have the same recourse to reclaim properties they left on the west side of the city or elsewhere in Israel. So this has created a huge imbalance, and the dispute has gone from the district court all the way up to the Supreme Court. And we were waiting for a final verdict in the case of whether the evictions would go ahead or not on Monday. So Isabel, how does this legal conflict over these evictions spiral into what we are seeing now? How does that happen? We have been in a month that has been extraordinary in many ways. So on the one hand, we've had the month of Ramadan in the Islamic lunar calendar.

And Ramadan, the lunar calendar, it moves. So this year, Ramadan fell from mid-April to now. So it also coincided with a month in the Hebrew calendar, when you also have quite a lot of emotive dates. You have the Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, you have the Independence Day, you get towards the end of the month, and you get Jerusalem Day, which is the day when some Israelis, not all, are celebrating what they call the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. I mean, this is a day where the Israelis are marking conquering the eastern part of the city, placing the Palestinians in the city, generally on the other side of the line,

in what became occupied East Jerusalem. Got it. And that can be a very provocative day as well, because a central feature of it is what they call the flag parade, which is usually thousands of young, right-wing, mostly Jewish youths who march traditionally on a very contentious route right through the Muslim quarter of the old city to get to the Wailing Wall. And of course, that was supposed to happen also on, yes, you guessed it, Monday.

Hmm. So Monday of this past week becomes, through the eviction case and through the calendar, a kind of swirling collision of Palestinian grief and Israeli celebration and just a kind of powder keg, it sounds like. And we also had a lot else going on in the city building up to this day. Ramadan is a time when the city is very much on edge. It's a time of, you know, religious and nationalist fervor for many people. And it started with several other potential points of ignition. So you had the police, for example, barring Palestinians from gathering at Damascus Gate. Damascus Gate is one of the most beautiful and historic entrances to the old city

from the east side. And it has these steps and going down to a plaza, a bit like a kind of amphitheater. And every night during Ramadan, traditionally, every year, Palestinians come, they gather there, they break their fast, there are cultural events,

and it's a general kind of party, a festival atmosphere. But for some reason this year, the police banned anyone from gathering and sitting on the steps. They put up barricades and said it was for public order to allow people to safely enter and exit the old city. And this created huge tension. to allow people to safely enter and exit the old city. And this created huge tension. So it actually turned into a battlefield. Every night you would have the police trying to disperse the crowds there. Young Palestinians would protest and it would end in clashes. We also had what became known as the TikTok attacks.

What are those? So there were a couple of Palestinian 17-year-old youths who filmed themselves for a TikTok video slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew while he was sitting on the light rail train. And it kind of went viral. And there were one or two other similar attacks. And people just took great affront. And it ended up with hundreds of young Israeli Jews marching to Damascus Gate, chanting things including death to Arabs. And in the end, you had the police acting as a buffer between them and the Palestinian protesters at Damascus Gate and, you know, pitched battles on both sides with the police. So that was one other strand of great tension building up towards this Monday.

So a very unstable situation is very much ignited by actions taken by multiple groups of people on the ground in Jerusalem, including the Israeli police. Right. So we come to Monday morning after all this buildup of all these different tensions in the city in this very tense month. And we get to the point where we've had Laylat al-Qadr, which is a very holy day for Muslims at the end of Ramadan, when thousands of worshippers spend the night traditionally in the compound of the Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam. And it's also probably one of the most hotly contested sites in the world because it's also the holiest place for Jews. They know it as Temple Mount,

and it's the location of two ancient temples. So on Monday morning, which is Jerusalem Day as well, there were Jewish groups who were planning, as they traditionally do, to go up to the Temple Mount on a visit. And the Muslim worshippers, many of whom, as I say, had been there overnight, were expecting them, ready for what they would see as a kind of invasion on their holy territory on a very holy time of year. The police stopped the Jewish groups from going up. But what we did see was the police in large numbers

raid the compound. There are many different takes on whether they went in just to disperse crowds or they went in to stop stone-throwing by protesters at the site that had already started, or whether the stones only started after the police arrived, but whatever the exact circumstances. You ended up with a large police raid on the Aksamos compound.

police raid on the Aksamos compound. And it ended in stone-throwing clashes with police responding with tear gas, rubber-tipped bullets, stun grenades. And by the end of the main part of this confrontation, you have on the one side 330 Palestinians who've been injured, 250 who were actually treated in the hospitals, and on the other side, 21 police officers injured. So Isabel, what happens after this police raid on the mosque? How do Palestinians respond? So by the afternoon, we get an ultimatum from Hamas, the Islamic group that holds sway in Gaza,

saying if the Israelis do not remove all their forces from the mosque compound and from the area of East Jerusalem, the Palestinian area where the evictions were about to take place, something would happen. And they don't specify what that something is, but it will be serious. Israel will be paying the price. We'll be right back. So, Isabel, what happens on Monday with this 6 p.m. deadline from Hamas for Israeli security forces to withdraw from East Jerusalem and from the mosque? for Israeli security forces to withdraw from East Jerusalem and from the mosque.

Well, clearly the Israelis were not going to comply. So we waited till six o'clock. And lo and behold, three minutes past six, we're sitting here in our office in Jerusalem. And suddenly we hear sirens wailing, incoming rocket warnings. And within maybe a minute, we suddenly hear a series of booms. You know, there's a feeling that Jerusalem is under attack. Hmm. So once this deadline passes, Hamas sends missiles over into Jerusalem. Yeah. They're aiming towards Jerusalem.

One was intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome, the anti-missile defense system. Others actually fell in communities and empty ground in the hills west of Jerusalem. And nobody was killed or hurt, but there was some property damage. And this was highly unusual and clearly was not going to go without an Israeli response. And what is that response? And now Gaza is a very small and crowded territory. So even if Israel says it's targeting military targets with very precise weapons and taking all the precautions it can to avoid civilian casualties, inevitably there are civilian casualties as well. So from the beginning, the airstrikes were deadly. There were two children killed very early on that night.

And each side just kept stepping it up. Israel taking down tower blocks in Gaza, multi-story buildings that housed Hamas offices or headquarters of various types of Hamas. And Hamas again issued another ultimatum and said to Israel, if you hit any more civilian buildings, we're going to hit Tel Aviv. And a huge, huge salvo of barrages of rockets began streaming out of Gaza and slamming into suburbs around Tel Aviv.

You know, things have just been escalating all the way. So by Wednesday afternoon, two days into the conflict, we have at least 53 Palestinians killed, according to the Gaza health officials, 14 of them children and more than 300 wounded. And on the Israeli side, you have at least six people who've been killed and, you know, scores injured. Isabel, it is often felt in moments like this that Hamas's missile attacks, as terrifying as they are to Israelis,

often fail to inflict significant damage on Israel based on the technology that Hamas is using, and that the Israeli counterattacks tend to be much better targeted and more destructive. And the death toll seems to suggest that that has been the case so far here, a kind of disproportionate impact. Look, disproportionate is a term that, you know, is often used. I think there's certainly the circumstances that Israel has total air superiority in terms of its air force. The Hamas rockets are rather inaccurate. The Hamas rockets are civilian areas within Gaza, making it very, very, very difficult to avoid collateral damage.

At this point, is it fair to describe what's happening here as a war, as warlike? What is this? It feels pretty warlike. If we end up with a ground campaign on the Israeli forces side, it will definitely be a war. And is there talk of a ground operation? Well, no confirmation of one, but some preparations seem to be being made. There are some call-ups of reserves. There are some troops and vehicles moving down towards the border. So it's not being ruled out, but it's hard to tell.

I think Israel won't rush into a ground invasion because they are usually very costly. But sometimes, you know, it's part of the tactical war to signal that you're ready for one, which could also be what's going on. that you're ready for one, which could also be what's going on. What are the leaders on all sides of this saying about this moment and how it might come to an end? I realize that's a tricky question because both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is very much in flux, but what are they saying about it? So we heard on Wednesday night a very strong statement from President Mahmoud Abbas. He leads

the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is a main rival of Hamas. And he was basically telling Israel, end your occupation. And we've been hearing more from Hamas. So Ismail Haniya, a senior Hamas political leader, sent a recorded address to a Hamas-affiliated television station. Since yesterday and until now, it's been going on with the people of Egypt, as well as our brothers in Qatar and with the United Nations. He spoke about being contacted by Egypt, Qatar, the United Nations, with some kind of talk of maybe working towards a ceasefire. But he said since, in his view, Israel had started this,

it was Israel's responsibility to be the ones to begin to end it. On the Israeli side, we're hearing that we're not done yet. The defense minister said on Wednesday there's no end date. And the night before, the prime minister also said, you know, this could take some time. So it sounds like from leadership, there's not an eagerness to quickly bring this to an end. Right. It does seem that on both sides, they're not rushing to end this and it might actually be helping them. How so? On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas operating really in a vacuum with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who's aging and weak. And Hamas really trying to

reinstate itself using its currency of leading the resistance and defending Jerusalem, which is, you know, always a rallying cry on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side, you have a very confused situation because Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently standing trial on corruption charges. He has been unable to form a government after four elections in two years. form a government after four elections in two years. And his rivals were working on trying to form an alternative coalition, which would have seen him removed from office for the first time in 12 years. And I think, you know, we're not sure how this is going to play out, but somehow he might well be able to capitalize on this time as being not the right time to have a changing government. Isabel, we started this conversation by talking about the eviction case in East Jerusalem that, in many people's eyes, lit the fuse that has now turned into this war-like conflict.

What has happened with that ruling? So the ruling was supposed to come on Monday. On Sunday, after the government had spent, you know, weeks saying this is just a private real estate dispute, the attorney general finally stepped in and asked for a delay in the case so that he could study the materials, get involved, state an opinion, and the judges gave him a month, suspending the verdict for at least 30 days. This is one case where the Israelis stepped in to try and defuse the situation, But of course, it was too little too late.

So this ruling has been delayed, but not for all that long. And eventually, when it comes out, it will no doubt influence the course of this conflict that has erupted over the past few weeks. But it strikes me as odd and maybe a bit ironic that the Israeli government has called this eviction case a real estate dispute, when you could argue that the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ultimately a dispute over real estate, over land, and over the idea of home. You certainly could see it that way. I mean, you know, with all the security and national and religious

aspects to this conflict that's been going on for a century, at the end of the day, it's about who rules territory where and who gets to call a place home. Yeah. Isabel, as always, thank you very much. Thank you. The Times reports that as the conflict expands, rival mobs of Jews and Arabs are carrying out violent attacks in several Israeli cities and towns. One occurred in a suburb of Tel Aviv, where dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking an Arab motorcycle driver, even as his body lay motionless on the ground. Another occurred in northern Israel, where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, leaving him in critical condition.

On Wednesday night, the United Nations warned that the conflict could soon intensify into, quote, all-out war. And the Biden administration dispatched a senior American diplomat to the Middle East to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and to urge both sides to de-escalate. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, during a closed-door vote, House Republicans ousted Representative Liz Cheney as their party's third highest ranking leader over her decision to speak out against former President Trump, his role in the January 6th

riot at the Capitol, and his lies about fraud in the 2020 election. I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office. After the vote, Cheney said she had no regrets and vowed that she would continue to speak out against Trump and seek to break his hold over the Republican Party. We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution. And the company that operates the major fuel pipeline shut down by a cyber attack said that the pipeline's operations had begun to resume. The shutdown

of the pipeline had raised fears of gas shortages and triggered panicked buying in several states, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Today's episode was produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown, and Daniel Guimet. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, with help from Phyllis Fletcher. It was engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music by Rochelle Bonja and Dan Powell. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.