Rockets over Jerusalem: Israeli-Palestinian violence

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Last week, one of America's largest fuel pipelines was shut down after a cyberattack in which the company's data was held hostage for money. We look at the growing scourge of ransomware attacks and why they're so hard to stop. And in China, the dead are struggling to rest in peace. As old taboos fade, grave robbing has been on the rise. For thousands of enterprising tomb raiders, it's become big business. But first— Yesterday, in the worst outbreak of violence in years, the Palestinian militant group Hamas fired more than 200 rockets towards Jerusalem before Israel responded with airstrikes on Gaza. 24 people, including 9 children, were killed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel Israel does not seek escalation, but whoever chooses to escalate will feel the weight of our arm. The conflict followed the annual Jerusalem Day march by Jewish nationalists, which commemorates Israel's capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. Palestinians see it as a provocation. But the atmosphere this year was worse than normal. After a weekend of protests in which nearly 300 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israeli police officers were injured, tens of thousands of worshippers gathered at Al-Aqsa Mosque on Saturday, the holiest night of Ramadan. But police blocked busloads of Muslims on their way to the mosque, citing unrest in the neighbouring Sheikh Jarrah district over a court ruling on the possible eviction of Palestinian families from their homes. Now tensions have boiled over. The UN Security Council chaired an urgent meeting but failed to issue a statement, while international leaders such as America's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, appealed for calm.

We're very focused on the situation in Israel, West Bank, Gaza, very deeply concerned about the rocket attacks that we are seeing now that need to stop and need to stop immediately.

Jerusalem Day should have been expected to have been worse than previous years because it comes at the end of a very tense month of Ramadan.

Anshel Pfeffer is The Economist's Israel correspondent and is based in Jerusalem.

We should see many clashes between Israeli police and young Palestinian demonstrators in the streets of Jerusalem and a rather heavy-handed response by Israeli police, which included on two occasions also the police bursting into Al-Aqsa Mosque and firing stun grenades and rubber bullets there.

Angel, you were there in Jerusalem for the Flag Day march. Can you describe what happened?

So just a couple of hours before the march set off, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the security forces to reroute the march and not allow the thousands of marchers to go through Damascus Gate, which has been one of the main flashpoints of recent tension. They were supposed to go through Jaffa Gate, which is a much more calmer part of East Jerusalem. And literally when the marchers had reached the police roadblock, which was preventing them from continuing towards Damascus Gate, sort of pushing them rightwards towards a less tense area, a minute past 6 PM, suddenly there were air raid sirens or missile warning sirens. And after about 30 seconds, we also heard a series of very loud explosions, which were probably the interception of at least one of the Hamas rockets by Israel's Iron Dome system. The rockets didn't hit Jerusalem. They fell to the west of the city. But it was a very surreal event in which thousands of young Jewish nationalists, most of them schoolchildren waving flags, were suddenly being told by the police to disperse and take shelter. It was an open area. There was nowhere to take shelter. And for the next hour or so, they just stood there until the police told them that the march has been canceled. And afterwards, they resumed the march. But it was really one of those moments where reality intrudes on a nationalistic, hubristic kind of myth of Jerusalem being reunified.

Let's just step back for a minute and try to unpick some of the reasons behind these tensions. Why was there such anger from the Palestinians this year?

This month of Ramadan, I think that there are a number of unique factors. First of all, it's come immediately after a long year of COVID lockdown, what everyone in the world is experiencing. But here in Israel, and because the Palestinians of East Jerusalem have access to Israeli healthcare, most of them have been vaccinated. There was a feeling that this Ramadan would be a calmer period in which they could enjoy the month of festivities, the Iftar feasts at the end of every fast day. And for some reason, which to be honest, I'm not still quite sure why, The new chief of police in Jerusalem appointed just 3 months ago decided for some reason to put fences around Damascus Gate, which is really the main gathering place about 10 minutes' walk from the Al-Aqsa Mosque where Palestinians hang out on Ramadan nights. It's really the main venue for people to gather. That in itself just caused so much anger, the fact that they felt that Israel was imposing itself on them.

Were there any other reasons behind the Palestinian anger, Anshel? You mentioned the threatened eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. How did that play into yesterday's events?

There is an ongoing case in the Israeli Supreme Court over the eviction of 13 Palestinian households in the nearby neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. That's causing a lot of anger. And we've seen on the streets of Jerusalem in the last few weeks an increasing presence of Jewish far-right activists who have been emboldened by the last election in Israel, where one of their leaders has won a Knesset seat and now has parliamentary immunity. And that's created this feeling, I think, among Palestinians that the representative of Jewish Israel, who is the most strident anti-Arab politician, has now been bolstered by the state of Israel.

And what role is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, playing in all of this?

Well, that's a very good question because Netanyahu is someone who is credited by both his supporters and his critics alike as having these almost magical abilities of influencing events to work for him. And there's no question that right now this kind of a conflict can help him perhaps avoid some of his political troubles. Very advanced talks of a non-Netanyahu coalition replacing him there. So people have been saying, oh, Netanyahu is setting the city alight. I have to say, I don't give much credit to those conspiracy theories because Netanyahu, towards the beginning of this week, he began to issue orders to calm things down. And I think that it was more of Netanyahu having his eye off the ball and perhaps being too preoccupied with his political problems and with his legal issues. His corruption case is still ongoing in the Jerusalem District Court. And I think that that is probably the main reason why the lower echelons, the police commanders, were allowed to get away with making so many really blundering mistakes. I don't think this was something Netanyahu planned in advance.

What are the chances of a solution to all of this then?

The solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, I think, is not something that anybody's even imagining right now. It used to be a priority, a foreign policy priority for the United States and for many other Western countries, all of which have more or less given up on trying to solve the conflict and are focusing on other burning issues that they have. The real question is, what are the prospects of de-escalation? And it's really down to Hamas and the Israeli government. If both sides want to end this in 24, 48 hours, they can. But they also need to find a way of doing so while saving face. Now, Hamas have achieved their goal of being the protectors of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa. They've got very compelling footage from yesterday. The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was very quickly evacuated during the missile attack. Those are really strong images for Hamas to use, showing how they beat the Zionists. The problem is, what does Netanyahu do? Does he quietly try to end this while losing even more credibility with Israeli public? That's probably the main question right now.

Anshel, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Shashank.

Just one petroleum pipeline that runs from Houston to New York supplies nearly half of the East Coast's fuel needs, and since the weekend, that pipeline has been shut down. A ransomware attack against its operator, Colonial Pipeline, forced the closure.

The Department of Energy is working directly with Colonial to get the pipelines back online and operating at full capacity as quickly and safely as possible.

Fuel prices have jumped, and the American government has issued an emergency relaxation of oil shipping rules.

The FBI also is engaged to assess the, uh, and address this attack.

The cybercriminal organisation responsible for the attack, DarkSide, said that it didn't mean to create problems, that its aims were mercenary rather than geopolitical. But the type of attack that shut down Colonial Pipeline is far from unique. In fact, it's on the rise.

American infrastructure— not just American infrastructure, actually infrastructure all over the world— looks increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Daniel Knowles is an international correspondent for The Economist.

You've had a huge surge of attacks. You had a water treatment plant in Florida in February. There's also things like local governments, hospitals, school systems. Any organization which has a large kind of digital element can be targeted.

Do we know who's behind all these attacks then?

Well, so this latest attack on the Colonial Pipeline seems to be done by a group called DarkSide, who are probably based somewhere in the sort of former Soviet Union, probably in Russia. They've been described as a gang. I don't know if that's quite right. It's more like a loose organization. They sell software and help organize ransoms effectively. All of these kind of cyberattacks, they tend to involve quite decentralized groups of people with different skills taking part, sort of organizing themselves on the dark web.

But we don't think this was the work of Russian spies or Chinese spies or America's traditional state adversaries?

Not really, no. In contrast to, say, the big SolarWinds attack last year, which seemed quite likely to have been done by Russian spies to steal secrets, these type of attacks, these kind of ransomware attacks, They often seem to come from Russia, but they're basically criminal enterprises. The aim is to extract money from victims rather than secrets.

And what exactly is a ransomware attack? Is this something new?

So ransomware has been around for a while, but it's really taken off in the last few years. And what it is essentially is you have a virus or a bit of computer software sort of injected into your computer or your organization's computer network, and it locks up all of the files on it with a sort of cryptographic key that you can't unlock unless you pay a ransom to the attackers, and then they'll give you the key to sort of get your computer systems back online.

And are these becoming more common recently?

Over the past year, they have really soared. The amount that's paid in ransoms seems to have increased a lot. There have been an awful lot of very prominent attacks. In Britain, Hackney Council got all of its systems taken down. In France, there's been about 27 hospitals were attacked last year. You've had attacks on police forces. Washington, D.C.'s police force was attacked recently. In this case with the Colonial Pipeline, the attack didn't shut down their systems, but what it did do was kind of lock up all their files and they had to sort of take their systems offline while they worked out what to do to sort of contain spreading. That's often the case with these ransomware attacks. They are incredibly damaging more for the disruption they sort of cause rather than the direct immediate cost, as it were.

In the case of ransomware, the point is, as the name suggests, a ransom. So are the criminals getting those?

They do seem to be. You know, an awful lot of firms when they're hit will have insurance that has paid ransoms. Government agencies, it's unclear whether they're less likely to pay ransoms, but often they get criticized for not paying them when the damage caused is so high. You know, a lot of people ask Baltimore City when they were hacked why they didn't pay, given that it caused $20 million of damage. So ransoms are getting paid, and that only sort of motivates the attackers to go for more of them.

And ransomware is one type of cybercrime. Are there others, and are they growing as well?

Yeah, so the pandemic seems to have caused this enormous spike in basically every type of digital crime. You know, you've also had a big acceleration in fraud, particularly the types of frauds that you'll get, you know, a text message or a phone call sort of telling you that you owe back taxes or that you have a delivery due or whatever it is, the sort of scams that are intended to try and trick you into paying money to somebody who's not who they say they are. And it seems with people being at home on their computers an awful lot and on their phones an awful lot, it's created a lot of opportunities for these sorts of cybercriminals.

Is the American government doing anything about this?

The Biden administration has been trying to do more. They've launched a task force specifically about ransomware, they're trying to to increase security standards for government. But I think they're really, you know, they're reacting as much as they're sort of proactive. They're seeing more and more attacks and having to try and find a way to clamp down on them.

I mean, Daniel, as defense editor, I've been covering cyberattacks for years. Why haven't all of the previous efforts, all of the previous measures kept up with the increase in online attacks?

It's not been seen as a priority. State-aided spying is one thing, but I think nobody's been that concerned about kind of lower-level infrastructure or parts of government that you wouldn't want to break into if you were just stealing secrets, but actually are quite important and vulnerable. I think companies generally, and even government organizations, are quite reluctant to admit that they have been vulnerable and that they've been caught out. Nobody wants to admit to how bad a data breach is. So there's not a lot of reporting of this type of crime. Quite often, firms will just go and pay the ransom instead, which might work for them, but obviously encourages the criminals to just keep going. Makes it quite difficult. It's, you know, even with individual fraud, people are often very reluctant to admit it, and a lot of the time their kind of losses are compensated for by banks and insurers anyway. And if people don't go to the police and people aren't kicking up a fuss about it, then prosecution is not a priority, then prevention won't happen.

Daniel, thanks very much.

Thanks for having me, Shashank.

In March, China's state broadcaster livestreamed a dig that unearthed 3,000-year-old relics from Sanxingdui, an ancient site in Sichuan province. Millions tuned in. It's part of a growing interest in archaeology among the old and the young.

So a few weeks after these discoveries were announced, I went to Sanxingdui where there is a museum that exhibits earlier finds at the site.

Stephanie Studer is a China correspondent for The Economist.

And I met 25-year-old Yang Ying, who described herself as a history buff. And she was milling around the museum. She was among many thousands who flocked to the museum after hearing about these discoveries, and she told me that she had become interested in relics and archaeology not just because of the livestreamed dig that she had watched, but also because she had really loved Grave Robbers Chronicles, which was a hit novel that was then serialised into a TV show. These books and shows have glamorised the world of grave robbing, which incidentally has also become big business in China.

How do you mean big business?

When these novels describing the glamorised world of the grave robber first appeared in China, it precipitated quite a change in popular attitudes. Up until then, although grave robbing had existed, it was really frowned upon, as was the work of archaeologists, because both were effectively digging up the dead in order to, to get at treasures, whether legally or illegally. And this fiction romanticized it, and some grave robbers who had been caught by police even claimed that they had been inspired by these novels. So this became a big concern for authorities in China.

And so now that some of the taboo of grave robbing has been stripped away, what is it that the authorities are seeing?

Now what we're seeing is that more of them are professional. They run grave robbing rings, and they fan out across China. They get investors to stump up the money for tools, which can be, you know, anything from metal detectors all the way to an excavator. and investors also cover their travel expenses. I spoke to an independent scholar, Ni Fang Liu, who has looked at grave robbing through the ages for many years now, and he told me that on a recent visit to northeastern China, he was approached by a thief who was trying to raise such funds. In fact, he turned out to be the brother of a senior policeman, which also shows the ways in which these robbers are increasingly well-connected too. And that makes it very hard for the authorities to crack down on it.

So what are the authorities doing to turn this tide?

Well, at the moment, China is in the midst of a year-long crackdown on grave robbing. It recently published figures that showed that it arrested 2,400 tomb raiders last year and was able to retrieve over 31,000 stolen items. And that was 3 times as many as in 2019. And on top of that, it's making punishments more severe. A couple of years ago, the leader of a ring of 200 grave robbers was put to death, and they're extending prison times. One was sentenced last year to 15 years in jail. So now with these publicly televised digs, authorities are hoping to show the value of archaeology and ensure that those items are properly cared for. And exhibited to the public.

Stephanie, do you think all of that's enough to ultimately stop the illegal trade, the allure of grave robbing?

I feel that public attitudes are at least changing, especially among the young. People like Yang Ying, who we heard from earlier, said to me that she was very clear that robbers should be locked up. And I think that, you know, as people flock to museums like Sanxingdui and others, they realize that that would only be possible if these items are not looted and then sold in the underground antiques market and, uh, and never seen from again except in private collections.

Stephanie, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks.

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