Jerusalem Post

[Jay]

(News posts are being done as Palestine)​

 

[Jay]

RAMALLAH — Leaders from across the fractured Palestinian political landscape converged here Thursday for an emergency session that organizers described as the most significant gathering of rival factions since the death of Yasir Arafat, as public fury over the collapse of peace negotiations with Israel boiled over into the streets of the West Bank.

The meeting, convened in a guarded government compound in the heart of Ramallah, brought together representatives of Fatah, Hamas, and armed militant groups that have spent years at odds over strategy, territory, and the very question of whether negotiation with Israel remains a viable path. By evening, officials emerging from the talks announced a rare point of consensus with a broad, if uneasy, backing for Marwan Barghouti to assume the leadership vacated by Arafat's death in 2004.

The announcement came against a backdrop of mounting anger. Palestinian officials accused Israel's government, now returned to the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of once again abandoning commitments toward Palestinian statehood, a charge that has become a familiar refrain through successive rounds of failed diplomacy but one that carried unusual weight Thursday given the scale of public reaction.

"We have watched promise after promise dissolve," said Barghouti who left the talks saying he had an enormous responsibility on his shoulders. "There is a limit to how many times a people can be told to wait."

Militant factions, emboldened by the collapse of talks, used the Ramallah meeting to press for what several described as a "firm response" to what they characterized as ongoing violations by Israeli forces, singling out repeated tensions at the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, as a particular flashpoint. Israeli security officials have in recent weeks expanded checkpoints and patrols around Jerusalem's Old City, a move Palestinian leaders say has inflamed an already volatile atmosphere rather than calmed it.

Even so, the emergence of a unifying figure appeared, at least for the moment, to have a stabilizing effect. Streets in Ramallah and several other West Bank cities, which had seen days of agitated protest, were reported calmer by nightfall, with residents describing a cautious sense that Palestinian politics might finally speak with one voice after years of paralysis.

Analysts cautioned that the coalition remains fragile. The factions gathered in Ramallah have clashed for years over questions of governance, security cooperation, and the use of armed resistance, and Thursday's agreement did not resolve those underlying disputes so much as paper over them in the face of a shared grievance.

"This is unity born of frustration, not of agreement," said Hanan Ashrawia a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). "The test will come in the weeks ahead, when the hard questions about strategy and legitimacy return to the table."

The developments in Ramallah come at a moment of renewed uncertainty across the region. With Mr. Netanyahu back in office in Jerusalem and Israeli officials showing no indication of reviving statehood talks, Palestinian leaders across the political spectrum said Thursday that they saw little choice but to present a united front, whatever the strategy that unity ultimately produces.

For now, officials in Ramallah say the immediate priority is consolidating support behind new leadership and containing the anger in the streets before it hardens into something neither the factions nor their new figurehead can control.

 

[Jay]

For a week now, the image has played on a loop across Palestinian television and social media with the now-former prime minister Naftali Bennett, flanked by Border Police and trailed by television cameras, walking through the Old City toward the Temple Mount. What was billed by Israeli producers as a documentary sequence has instead become, in the eyes of many Palestinians, something closer to a declaration of war, and the streets of the occupied territories have responded accordingly.

In the days since footage of the visit spread, mass demonstrations have swept across East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem, drawing crowds larger than any seen in years. What began as scattered protests outside Old City checkpoints has, in the span of days, hardened into something broader. Palestinian President Barghouti has called for general strikes, mass marches, and clashes with Israeli forces at flashpoints across the occupied territory.

"We have seen this before," said Barghouti to the press outside the PLO’s office in Ramallah. "This is yet another effort to provoke a violent response by the Palestinian people. Every attempt to squeeze us by placing the imperialist boot of the Zionist occupation on our necks has gone uncondemned. Every Palestinian harassed and humiliated in the lands of their ancestors goes unpunished. The world cannot expect us to remain silent in the face of these ongoing crimes.

Israeli officials have described the patrol as a routine security matter and the documentary project as an effort at public transparency about the work of the Border Police. But that explanation has found little purchase among Palestinian officials, who argue the timing and staging of the visit were designed to provoke exactly the reaction that followed.

"You do not bring television cameras to the holiest site in the region by accident," said Mustafa Barghouti, a senior official aligned with the newly consolidated Palestinian leadership under Marwan Barghouti. "This was not transparency. This was a message, and the message was received."

Some Palestinian officials have gone further, suggesting the visit served a political purpose in Jerusalem as much as a security one, that a government built on a fragile coalition and a hardline posture on statehood stood to benefit from a crisis that would unite Israeli public opinion behind it and justify the expanded security architecture already taking shape across the West Bank and Old City in recent weeks.

The scale of the response has surprised even some of the officials who gathered in Ramallah last week to rally behind Barghouti. That meeting, convened amid anger over the collapse of the peace process, produced a fragile political consensus among competing factions. What has followed in the days since looks less like a negotiated political strategy and more like a mass movement that has outpaced the leadership meant to direct it.

Militant factions that had called for a "firm response" to Israeli actions at the Temple Mount now find themselves navigating a mobilization considerably larger than anything they organized. Strikes have shuttered businesses across the West Bank. University students have walked out of classes. In several cities, protests that began at checkpoints have spread into sustained standoffs with Israeli forces, with reports of injuries on both sides mounting daily.

Barghouti, in a statement issued through Palestinian media, said, "Our people are speaking. It falls to us to make sure they are heard. It falls on us to fight for their future."

Israeli security officials have responded by reinforcing checkpoints across the West Bank and increasing the Border Police presence in Jerusalem, a buildup that mirrors, and in some places exceeds, the deployment seen in the weeks before the Ramallah factional meeting. Whether that response calms the streets or accelerates the same cycle it is meant to contain is, at this early stage, the question hanging over the entire region.

For a Palestinian leadership still assembling itself around Barghouti, the mobilization presents both an opportunity and a risk as it provides a genuine mandate for Barghouti to negotiate for true Palestinian statehood, but one whose energy may prove difficult to contain within any negotiating strategy. For Netanyahu's government, isolated internationally and politically fragile, it might be a miscalculation that brings down his political gambit.