A 20-YEAR-OLD man was shot dead by Israeli police yesterday outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. According to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, he had a knife and had carried out “an attack” on unspecified persons, although there were no reported injuries.

He is the 31st Palestinian to have been killed by Israelis since the start of the month. In the same period, seven Israelis have been killed by Palestinian assailants.

Some say the clashes began in response to provocative zionist incursions into the al-Aqsa mosque. Tensions are continuing to rise throughout Israel and occupied Palestine, not just in the epicentre of the current unrest, Jerusalem — the eastern half of which has been illegally annexed by Israel.

When Israel shot dead six Palestinians at a border protest in Gaza last week, Hamas’s leader there Ismail Haniyeh referred to the upsurge in violence as an intifada.

Israeli cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz blames Palestinians for the clashes and denies it has anything to do with Israel’s policies: “It’s all about horrible, anti-Jewish, racist incitement.”

No doubt he approves of Israel’s casual use of collective punishment — barring Palestinians from entering Jerusalem’s Old City during a Jewish festival, an explicitly racist move directed at the city’s own Arab inhabitants; sealing off entire neighbourhoods; demolishing the homes of anyone held responsible for an attack and removing their family’s residency rights in a city internationally recognised as the future capital of an independent Palestine.

He would have form, since the same man once defended Israel’s decision to prevent Gazans from studying abroad. (“I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so.”)

There seems very little reason to regard the current clashes as a “third intifada,” whatever Hamas says.

This is not simply because Israel is killing far larger numbers of Palestinians than vice versa — that is always the case, whichever side one believes to have started any individual confrontation. Israel is a First World imperialist occupying power, armed to the teeth, while Palestinians live in a Third World colony and are either under occupation in the West Bank or under siege in Gaza.

While lethal Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians have certainly taken place, it does not follow that all the Palestinians Israel has killed as alleged attackers are anything of the sort.

Many incidents, like yesterday’s at the Damascus Gate, involve no named victims and no injuries. Given the Israeli authorities’ routine disregard for Palestinian life, their word is hardly sufficient evidence of anything — even this newspaper blundered on October 5, taking an Israeli police assertion that 19-year-old Fadi Alloun had stabbed an unnamed Israeli teenager as factual when later video footage cast serious doubt on this version of events.

Israeli crowds marching through Jerusalem chanting: “Death to Arabs,” Jerusalem’s mayor swaggering around Palestinian neighbourhoods brandishing a gun — what is this if not “racist incitement”?

Hamas’s “intifada” talk is unwarranted, but it is the Israeli state which bears responsibility for this escalating crisis. House demolitions, collective punishment, firing live rounds into crowds armed with nothing more than stones — these are unacceptable, brutal acts of oppression by a callous and savage occupier.

All attacks on civilians are unjustifiable and should be condemned.

They do not however negate Israel’s responsibility for killing greater numbers of civilians — let alone for the illegal occupation of Palestine, the racist residency rules, the creeping annexation of ever more Palestinian land by zionist settlers.

And they do not wipe out the right that Palestinians, like all oppressed peoples, have to resist the occupation and fight the occupiers.