According to the blogosphere and media, a third intifada has been just around the corner for a few months now. However, as clashes raged through the West Bank between Palestinians and the Israeli army over the last two days that followed the death of Arafat Jaradat — a 30-year-old Palestinian man held in an Israeli jail — this rhetoric hit new heights. Protests and confrontations continued in the West Bank today, most notably in Jaradat’s hometown of Sa’ir, elsewhere in Hebron, Nablus, and outside of Ofer, the Israeli military prison on the outskirts of Ramallah, where demonstrations had already been taken place almost everyday for the past week in support of four Palestinian hunger strikers, including Samer Issawi.

Israeli news outlets — including Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post and Arutz Sheva — all wondered aloud whether these heightened tensions marked the beginnings of a third intifada, raising many questions: Were these reflections of fears brewing inside Israel, or did they constitute wishful thinking? In other words, would another intifada be beneficial to Israel at a time when it seems to have been losing many PR battles of late? Would an outbreak of hostilities provide Israel with a much-needed justification to the international community to warrant its ongoing military occupation?

Or is a third intifada exactly the last thing Israel wants at the moment? One can argue for this line of thinking when looking at repeated calls by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to stop the demonstrations flooding the streets of the West Bank. In fact, Netanyahu’s envoy Itzhak Molho spoke to Palestinian officials and demanded them to “calm down” the protests. Israel also said it would release some of the tax monies it has been withholding since Palestinians upgraded their status at the UN. Netanyahu’s reasoning for the transfer—which some can interpret as bribery — is “so that [the PA] won’t have an excuse not to enforce calm on the ground.”

Coincidentally, just two days ago, Abbas told Al Arabiya TV, in a message that seems to have been aimed more at Israelis than the Palestinians, that he supported protests against the occupation, but stressed that these should be non-violent in nature. “Armed resistance is banned,” he said. “This is a law and it is forbidden. It is also forbidden in the Gaza Strip.” The reference to Gaza suggests that Abbas has a say over what goes on in the coastal enclave run by Hamas. And though there have been repeated attempts to reconcile Hamas with Abbas’ ruling party, Fatah, nothing fruitful has yet come of them - certainly not anything that would prompt Abbas to suggest that he can control what happens in the Gaza Strip. A telling indication of this is that following Jaradat’s death, Palestinian factions in Gaza held an urgent meeting to discuss a response to the man’s demise.