French rioters and Palestinian gunmen send similar messages.
At first, comparing Palestinian gunmen in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to rioting youth in France may resemble likening apples to pears.
In many ways, it is.
Youth in France are full-fledged French citizens demanding an end to disenfranchisement, marginalisation, alienation, racism and law enforcement and security force brutality.
That is where Palestinians would like to be after 56 years of occupation with no prospect for independence or integration into Israel with the kind of rights accorded to all, irrespective of ethnicity or religion, by French law, even if reality in France offers a different picture.
Yet, armed Palestinian resistance and French rioting have a common message: violence results from governmental and societal failure to acknowledge and address social, economic, political, and/or national aspirations.
Palestinian fighters and French rioters signal that violence will recur and likely escalate as long as governments reduce structural defaults to a law enforcement, security, and terrorism issue.
The difference between France and Israel is that French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledges the underlying problems, while Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sees force, repression, and intimidation as the way to disappear problems, and bend Palestinians to his will.
Both Messrs. Macron and Netanyahu are driven as much by a political vision as politics and a perceived need to cater to the right, far-right, and ethnic and religious prejudices.
Mr. Macron has promised to investigate what led to the police shooting last month of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
The June 27 killing sparked six days of riots across France, with protesters looting shops, setting cars alight, destroying bus stops, and pelting police with fireworks that wounded some 200 law enforcement officers.
France needs “order, calm, unity. And then to work on the deep causes of what happened,” Mr. Macron said.
Mr. Macron is not the first French leader to promise to tackle the violent protest’s root causes.
“Manuel Valls, a former prime minister, said these complexes instilled a sense of ‘territorial, social and ethnic apartheid’. Growing up on one, we were forever defined as failures by our postcode. Authority figures from teachers to police officers perpetuated a generational cycle of mediocrity and humiliation,” said Nabila Ramadani, a French woman of Algerian descent. Ms. Ramadani was referring to banlieues or ghetto-like suburbs of French cities.
Like his predecessors, Mr. Macron will likely discover that failure to follow through on promises means problems will fester and deepen societal divides…
