Omar Yousef Shehabi, The Electronic Intifada, 26 May 2009
"......Let us remember that Netanyahu orchestrated a similar provocation early in his first premiership to advance his geopolitical agenda. On 24 September 1996, towards the end of protracted negotiations over the Hebron Agreement, Netanyahu ordered that a gate to the Western Wall tunnel be opened along the Via Dolorosa, blasted through the grounds of the Umariya elementary school (incidentally, my father's primary school). As a result, tourists who once had to retrace their steps to exit the tunnel now exit onto the Via Dolorosa and are escorted by armed Israeli soldiers through the Old City's Muslim quarter (think of it as a quotidian version of the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations that flaunt Israeli "liberation and reunification" of the city by parading through Arab Jerusalem and dancing atop the ruins of the Moroccan quarter in the Western Wall plaza).
Coming on the heels a Palestinian Authority (PA) crackdown on Hamas and reinforcing the view that the PA was doing its occupier's bidding for nothing in return, the "tunnel riots" that ignited throughout Palestinian cities the day after Netanyahu's decision left 90 Palestinians and 19 Israeli soldiers dead. The PA's guns, which were to be trained exclusively on other Palestinians, were for the first time turned on the occupier. It prompted the White House to call an "emergency peace summit" for 1 October 1996, from which a supine Yasser Arafat came away promising to quash the Palestinian uprising without any Israeli concessions on the tunnel, Jerusalem or Hebron......"
"......Let us remember that Netanyahu orchestrated a similar provocation early in his first premiership to advance his geopolitical agenda. On 24 September 1996, towards the end of protracted negotiations over the Hebron Agreement, Netanyahu ordered that a gate to the Western Wall tunnel be opened along the Via Dolorosa, blasted through the grounds of the Umariya elementary school (incidentally, my father's primary school). As a result, tourists who once had to retrace their steps to exit the tunnel now exit onto the Via Dolorosa and are escorted by armed Israeli soldiers through the Old City's Muslim quarter (think of it as a quotidian version of the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations that flaunt Israeli "liberation and reunification" of the city by parading through Arab Jerusalem and dancing atop the ruins of the Moroccan quarter in the Western Wall plaza).
Coming on the heels a Palestinian Authority (PA) crackdown on Hamas and reinforcing the view that the PA was doing its occupier's bidding for nothing in return, the "tunnel riots" that ignited throughout Palestinian cities the day after Netanyahu's decision left 90 Palestinians and 19 Israeli soldiers dead. The PA's guns, which were to be trained exclusively on other Palestinians, were for the first time turned on the occupier. It prompted the White House to call an "emergency peace summit" for 1 October 1996, from which a supine Yasser Arafat came away promising to quash the Palestinian uprising without any Israeli concessions on the tunnel, Jerusalem or Hebron......"
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