Jerusalem Powder Keg

There's a fine line between the daily tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem and the actions that set the tinderbox alight. Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 rather obviously began the second intifada, though that is easier to perceive in retrospect than it may have been at the time. Things are growing more and more tense in Jerusalem in the past couple of days, following the events of last Friday, and there are warnings of a possible third intifada.

Yesterday, Israel arrested Sheikh Ra'id Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel's Northern Branch. A court soon released him, but banned him from Jerusalem for 30 days.

A little background is in order. The Islamic Movement of Israel is an Islamist movement among Israeli Arabs, and its northern branch is by far the most important because most of Israel's Arab citizen population live in Galilee, particularly in Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm. Ra'id Salah is a former mayor of Umm al-Fahm.

He's not exactly a poster child for coexistence: Israel has accused him of links to Hamas, and he's said some outrageous things about the Western Wall having no links to Judaism, etc. But the point is, he's an Israeli citizen, a former elected official within Israel within the Green Line, and thus he's not usually treated like a resident of the occupied territories. That makes him a lightning rod for not just Palestinians in the territories and East Jerusalem, but for Israeli Arabs as well.

Now, he was rather clearly rabble-rousing in the current tensions over the Haram al-Sharif/Har ha-Bayit. But as a lightning rod, the arrest (though subsequently downgraded to a ban on visiting Jerusalem for 30 days), escalates an already tense situation.

I'm not sure whether the Netanyahu government is actually seeking to ignite a flashpoint here, or simply blundering into one, but this could indeed be the flashpoint for a third intifada, and also a deepening of tensions within pre-1967 Israel itself, even if Salah is way more radical than most Israeli Arabs. More to the point, it escalates tensions within Green Line Israel, between the Jewish and Arab Israeli citizenry, and it must always be remembered that Israeli Arabs constitute about a fifth of the population within then pre-1967 borders, and vote.