Kitchen knives. Meat cleavers. Scissors. Stones. The current weapons of choice used by Palestinians in this latest wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank. At the time of writing, 22 Israelis, 150 Palestinians, an American and an Eritrean have been killed. In the past three months, there have been 105 stabbings - and many of the perpetrators have been women. With murmurings that this wave of violence constitutes a new uprising - a third intifada - I believe that if this is indeed a third intifada, it is very different than the two previous ones: it is less orchestrated - and more intimate. An Intimate Intifada.
As of now, sixteen of the assailants in this “intimate” intifada have been women. Seven of these women were seen stabbing Jewish men in public spaces, seven of them were apprehended before the attempted stabbing, one of them attempted a car ramming and one of them had an explosive device in her car that detonated early. The disturbing novelty of this intifada is not that women are capable of engaging in violence - women have willingly and passionately committed acts of terrorism for centuries, as has been thoroughly researched by terrorism scholars Mia Bloom and Yoram Schweitzer - but the novelty here is the intimacy of these attacks.
It is intimate because the weapon of choice, knives, requires a physical closeness between the attacker and the victim. Unlike in suicide terror or bomb attacks, there is no physical distance that shields the killer from the eyes of the doomed. It is intimate because its agents are not jihadi foot soldiers but instead self-motivated individuals, acting on their own agency.
