Is this the beginning of a renewed Intifada?

MORE than three weeks of violent disturbances in the Israeli occupied territories have led regional analysts to conclude that the Palestinian Intifada, or rising, has resumed.

Several parallels can be drawn between the Intifada and what is happening today in the West Bank. The protesters have achieved enough momentum to sustain demonstrations from day to day, week to week, and to take hundreds of casualties and multiple fatalities.

The demonstrators have adopted the weapon of the Intifada, the stone plucked from rocky Palestinian hillsides, crumbling walls and broken roads. The mystical significance of the stone in the 1987-93 rising Palestinians call the "Revolution of the Stones" has been resurrected. For them the Intifada amounted to a dramatic "non violent" departure from "the armed struggle", the "Revolution of the Kalashnikov", which failed to liberate one inch of Palestinian land.

The belief that stone throwing could be considered non violent protest was reaffirmed this week by Dr Marwan Barghouti, a former intifadist and present Fatah leader in the West Bank. Palestinian teenagers dominate the present protests as they did earlier on. This week in Hebron, the stonethrowers broke through lines of interposing Palestinian policemen to confront Israeli soldiers at close quarters. No longer were the confrontations carefully organised theatre with the two sides menacing from a distance.

Like the Intifada, the current protests have been led and mounted by the people of the West Bank and Gaza, not by Palestinians from the diaspora. (Today, the "outsiders", who control the Palestine Authority and man the police, seek to calm the "insiders" rather than lead them.)

Finally, Palestinians have once again taken up the weapons of general strike and boycott of Israeli goods - weapons of solidarity which involved the whole community and enabled everyone to participate in the first Intifada.

In spite of these parallels, Dr Ghassan Khatib, a leading Palestinian analyst, told The Irish Times these similarities did not mean the present protests signified a return to the Intifada. The objective of the Intifada was to end the Israeli occupation of the territories, he said. "Today, most Palestinians live under the [Palestine] Authority; they can't react as before. This is a new situation."

But the new situation seems to have delivered a new Intifada, similar yet quite different from the old Intifada. The new Intifada has focused on settlers and settlements. Indeed, the settlers council claimed there had been 178 attacks against settlers during the past two weeks.

And, after the fatal shooting of a Palestinian by a Jewish seminarian in Hebron on Tuesday, Palestinian citizens demanded the removal of all 400 odd settlers and seminarians from the city centre. This fixation frightens the settlers but not the majority of Israelis, who dislike the settlers because they stake a disproportionate claim to Israel's limited financial resources, attract adverse publicity and disrupt a peace process which 78 per cent of Israelis want to succeed.

The new Intifada, coupled with the boycott of negotiations by the Palestine Authority demanding an end to settlement activity, could make settlements a political liability for the governing Likud.