Palestinians have so far not staged an uprising . Israeli police leave the Temple Mount area in Jerusalem.

WASHINGTON - In the Arab democracy movement, there is a dog that has not yet barked. And whether or not it does is causing a lot of anxiety among American policy makers.

Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans and Syrians gathered to demand democratic rights, and the Western world cheered . But by and large, so far, the Palestinians in the West Bank, who see Israel as the source of their grievances, have not. Yet.

In part, this is because the Palestinians’ own leaders - elected, but weak - have another timetable in place, for a diplomatic campaign against Israel in the fall that turmoil could complicate. But some other prominent Palestinians are beginning to say that the Arab Spring offers a more urgent opportunity to join fellow Arabs . And that worries policy makers and experts here, as well as leaders in Hamas and Fatah, whose own authority could be undermined.

“If you’re looking for a gamechanger, that would be it,” says Robert Malley, the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “At a time when the entire world, including President Obama, is applauding nonviolent popular protests from Cairo to Tehran, it would put Israel in an acute dilemma about how to react if tens of thousands of Palestinians started organizing protests in the West Bank, or marching on Israeli settlements or on Jerusalem demanding an end to the Israeli military occupation.”

Even more significantly, Mr. Malley said, “it would put the United States in an equally acute dilemma about how to react to Israel’s reaction.”

The biggest worry for President Obama is that Israel would react with violence toward nonviolent Palestinian protesters in the West Bank. On June 5, Israeli forces fired at pro- Palestinian protesters on the Syrian frontier as they tried to breach the border for the second time in three weeks. Palestinians have started to draw a direct line between the Arab Spring and their own push to end the Israeli occupation.

“You will see waves,” Mustafa Barghouti, a former Palestinian Authority presidential candidate and independent member of Parliament who has been critical in the past of the Fatah leadership, said in a telephone interview. “We, the Palestinians, have inspired Arabs many times in the past, and now we’re getting inspired by them.”

On June 5, a few hundred Palestinians in the West Bank tried to organize marches around the territory, but were stymied by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, neither of which are eager to see widespread Palestinian democracy protests. That is in part because leaders of both Hamas, the militant Islamist organization that controls Gaza, and Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority, fear that a popular Palestinian uprising could upend their own authority in the West Bank and Gaza.

“We have been talking to the youth movement in Tunisia,” said a Palestinian activist in Ramallah who asked to be identified only by his initials, F. A. He said his house, in Ramallah, had had no running water this month, but he could see Israeli settlers in a nearby settlement enjoying the summer in their swimming pool. Because of such daily indignities, he said: “We will do this. Our time will come.”

In Israel, discourse has centered on the increased fear that the Palestinians in the West Bank will join the Arab Spring movement. Aluf Benn, the influential Israeli editor at large for Haaretz wrote: “The nightmare scenario Israel has feared since its inception became real - that Palestinian refugees would simply start walking from their camps toward the border and would try to exercise their ‘right of return.’”

In Washington, Obama administration officials have been fretting about how the United States would respond. In many ways, Mr. Obama’s decision to come out in favor of Palestinian statehood based on Israel’s pre-1967 lines, with land swaps, stemmed from a desire at the White House to give both Palestinians and the world at large a place to park their grievances.

That, they felt, might help forestall both a United Nations resolution in September recognizing a state of Palestine within the 1967 boundaries, and an uprising among Palestinians in the West Bank.

That such an uprising hasn’t happened yet, Mr. Barghouti and other Palestinians say, goes beyond the simple Hamas-and-Fatah-won’tallow- it reasons. Palestinians in different West Bank cities are disconnected from each other, separated by Israeli checkpoints that don’t allow freedom of movement even within the territory. Israel’s security fence also inhibits movement among Palestinians.

Beyond that, Palestinians may be exhausted from the two intifadas
that ended with the Israeli construction of the security fence and the imposition of increasingly strict restrictions on movement throughout the West Bank.

But exhaustion from the violence may feed more nonviolent uprisings. “There is now a growing belief,” Mr. Barghouti said,
“that nonviolence is the only form of struggle we should use. Or, at least, that it is the most effective form of struggle we should use.”


HELENE COOPER ESSAY