Paul Abowd

Thirty-year-old Palestinian Hossam Dwayat turned his Caterpillar bulldozer into a lethal weapon last week in West Jerusalem, killing three Israelis and injuring many more. It's not easy (in America) to contextualize this terrifying act without being accused of excusing it. I certainly don’t support the forms of resistance that kill innocents. It is impossible, though, to separate Dwayat’s attack from his daily experience under colonial rule.

Dwayat left his family in East Jerusalem, where 250,000 Palestinians have lived with military occupation since 1967. Juan Cole points out that most of the international coverage of the July 2 attacks omitted a key detail: Dwayat was working construction on the major thoroughfare of Jaffa Road, building a causeway for Israel’s light rail system.

If completed, the light rail line would join the western part of the city with Pisgat Ze'ev, the largest settlement in “Greater Jerusalem,” a euphemism for the city plus its illegal settlements (often softened to Israeli “neighborhoods”) on the West Bank. These colonies are connected by exclusive roads for Jewish Israelis, and tap into Palestinian aquifers. They are also the breeding ground for a violently anti-Arab culture. The line is one more attempt to normalize the settlements and integrate them into an expansive Israeli capitol while the "peace process" drags on.
It is not difficult to imagine Dwayat going mad with the realization that he had become an agent of his own colonization, literally laying the tracks for the Israeli colonial project.