Tag Archives: Gaza

Sticks and Stones Break Bones

Hamas has decided to perpetrate a third Intifada after the Israeli Defense Force conducted an extensive house-to-house search in Hebron, to find three Israeli teens that they kidnapped and murdered.

Rockets are now raining down on Israeli cities and violence is pouring through the streets of Jerusalem as Palestinians riot and throw rocks at Israelis. In response to these rocket attacks, Israel has launched Operation Protective Edge and is preparing to launch ground operations in Gaza.

Raised to iconic levels, throwing baseball-sized rocks at Israelis is a national sport for Palestinians. Having been described as a birthright and duty, Palestinians see stone throwing as emblematic of their resistance of Israel and encourage the youth to throw stones at Israeli. The one thing people neglect is, rocks kill people.

Palestinian activists often describe rock throwing with a general disregard for its hazards. They often justify the rock throwing by saying Jews don’t belong in the land and that the West Bank should be Judenrein (Jew Free). Additional justifications tend to revolve around the argument that the land was stolen from the Palestinians, which completely and erroneously negates the history of Arab belligerence against Israel.

Despite Palestinian rock throwers being seen by the international community as ‘unarmed civilians,’ rocks are deadly weapons meant for one purpose: To injure, maim and kill. Over the years there have been countless incidents of Palestinian rock throwing against Jews resulting in the injury and deaths of many innocent Israeli adults and children.

Instead of rebuking such heinous acts from its citizens, Palestinian authorities have reward violence against Israel and Jews by naming schools, hospitals, and streets after the murderers. A recent Palestinian opinion poll, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy show that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians opposes any goal other than the elimination the State of Israel thus adding to the indoctrination of hate.

Additionally, Israel finds itself in a sticky wicket because they are typically seen as the aggressor when responding to these deadly rock attacks. Media officials and photographers do nothing as Palestinian kids and teens pelt Jews with rocks. International journalists actually stand with the Palestinians and videotape them as they pelt cars with Israeli license plates. Cars like the one carrying Adele Biton, a 3 year-old who suffered traumatic brain injury after a rock flew through the cars windshield and struck her on the head, causing the car to crash into the back of a truck.

When Israeli soldiers detain the Palestinian perpetrators of these crimes – some of whom are young children — journalists will photograph the detaining and scream at the Israelis, saying they are innocent children. This type of media manipulation is all too common with journalists who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and looking to influence public opinion. This journalist bias is so common it’s referred to as “Pallywood.”

As violence escalates, new images of supposed Israeli actions against “unarmed” Palestinian stone throwers are sure to pop up. Many images currently being shared on social media are not even of Palestinians. What would your response be if someone were throwing rocks at you because it’s their “hobby” to injure and maim Jews?

Hamas has spent years warning of and provoking a third Intifada, perpetrating acts of violence for decades, even during the height of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in the 1990’s. By creating a unity government that incorporates Hamas ministers, Palestinians chose to wage armed and violent “resistance” over negotiating peace.

Israel has a right to defend itself from threats, including from rocks. Operation Protective Edge is a just and appropriate mission to both stop terrorists and degrade their capability to launch future attacks.

It is time for the international community to end these Pallywood antics and stop disregarding the carnage rock throwing can cause. Not doing so only perpetuates a culture of violence.

Fighting enemies from within and without

Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir was doing his own thing last Tuesday when he was abducted by Jewish terrorists, who slaughtered him. They killed him because he was an Arab, and they are racist murderers.

The police made solving Abu Khdeir’s murder a top priority. In less than a week, they had six suspects in custody. Three confessed to the murder.

There are dark forces at work in Israeli society. They need to be dealt with.

And they will be dealt with harshly.

They will be dealt with harshly because there is no significant sector in Israeli society that supports terrorism.

There is no Jewish tradition that condones or calls for the murder of innocents. In Jewish tradition, the line between protecting society from its enemies and committing murder is long, wide, unmistakable and unmoving.

This is why, for instance, at the memorial service for 20-year-old Shelly Dadon, who was murdered by an Israeli Arab terrorist from the Galilee in early May, the placards held up by the 2,000 participants called for the police to protect the public.

“Our blood is not worthless,” “Today it’s Shelly, tomorrow it could be you,” and, “Death penalty for murderers,” they read.

Not surprisingly, when on Sunday the police revealed both that they had arrested Abu Khdeir’s Jewish killers and that they had arrested Dadon’s Muslim murderer, public interest in the former story far surpassed interest in the latter.

The story of an Israeli Muslim terrorist murdering an Israeli Jewish woman is a dog bites man story.

The story of Israeli Jewish terrorists murdering an Israeli Muslim teenager is a man bites dog story.

The same goes for violent rioting.

The anti-terror demonstration in Jerusalem scheduled for last Tuesday quickly became a violent anti-Arab riot with rioters assaulting helpless Arab passersby. The police arrested 47 Jewish rioters. And the public as a whole condemned them.

Without public support, such deviant behavior has little longevity. Mob violence, as a general rule, plays to the audience at home. With no public support, the riots were over after one night.

In contrast, Jerusalem Arabs began rioting on Wednesday night. The riots spread to the north and south of the country by the end of the week. And there seems to be no end in sight.

There are several factors prolonging them. The most troubling is the depraved state of Arab society – both Palestinian Arab and Israeli Arab.

Whereas aside from fascist soccer fan clubs there are no significant Israeli Jewish groups that condone terrorism or racial violence, hatred of Israel and support for terrorism and the destruction of the Jewish state are widespread among Israeli Arab leaders and the general Arab public.

As for the Palestinians, there are no significant forces in Palestinian society calling for peaceful coexistence with Israel. The only voices celebrated are those calling for murdering Jews and destroying the Jewish state.

There is also the issue of the unfortunate timing the current violence.

The month of Ramadan has only just begun. During Ramadan, Muslims generally sleep during the day, wake up in the evening to eat and stay up all night long. With the widespread societal support for committing violence against Jews, rioting after the holiday meal is an attractive option for young people.

Moreover, we are in the midst of summer vacation. Teenagers with nothing to do can easily keep rioting through the night until school starts on September 1.

Monday night was witness to some encouraging signs. Several Arab mayors took to the streets to discourage continued rioting. The mayor of Kalansuwa, whose residents firebombed Jewish cars over the weekend and beat their drivers, began cleaning up the road. But the rioting is far from a spent force.

Beyond the local cause for their continuation, there are the outside forces itching to take over the action.

Israeli Arabs do not operate in a vacuum.

If the rioting continues, the current situation, in which much of the violence is spontaneous and locally organized, is not likely to last.

In 1987, the Palestinian uprising began as a spontaneous riot in Gaza City following a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver. At the time, from its distant base in Tunis, the PLO was searching for a way to be relevant.

Yasser Arafat and his goons quickly seized on the riots in the territories and took control of them through a campaign of bribery, extortion and murder.

Today Fatah and Hamas are in the midst of a power struggle. Each is keen to take control of the riots to assert supremacy over the other.

In Fatah’s case the effort still appears limited to incitement. On Monday for instance, Fatah’s Facebook page addressed Israel saying, “Sons of Zion, this is an oath to the Lord of the Heavens: Prepare all the body bags you can for your body parts.”

As Palestinian Media Watch has reported, this post was of a piece with other posts Fatah has published in the past week, all making clear that Fatah supports the riots and wishes to subsume them into a larger Fatah-led terror campaign against Israel.

Hamas today faces severe challenges.

Egypt is starving Hamas by blocking the smuggling tunnels from Egypt to Gaza. Fatah is starving Hamas by refusing to pay its employees’ salaries.

Internally Hamas in Gaza is facing a growing challenge from Islamic Jihad on the one hand and al-Qaida and ISIS affiliated terror cells on the other.

As Hamas sees it, no doubt rightly, the best way to rally its people behind it, weaken Fatah and alleviate Egypt’s stranglehold of Gaza is to go to war against the Jews. Operationally, it believes that it has a momentary advantage because a significant number of Israeli forces are tied down in Judea and Samaria.

The Netanyahu government gave Hamas good reason to believe it should press its perceived advantage.

By openly calling last Thursday for a cease-fire with Hamas, the government demonstrated severe weakness at a critical moment. It is not at all surprising that by Monday Hamas had escalated its attacks and extended the range of the rockets it has deployed to the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Nor is it surprising that by Monday night, the government was compelled to launch Operation Protective Edge to destroy Hamas’s missile arsenal.

The Jewish terrorists who murdered Abu Khdeir have made a bad situation much worse for Israel. The largely anti-Semitic international community had difficulty denying Israel’s right to self-defense after Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah’s bodies were found last Monday.

Now, despite the obvious differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the man-bites-dog story these Jewish terrorists created has relegated Israel again to its normal position of defendant in the continuous Kafkaesque trial that is the Jewish state’s diplomatic fate.

Unfortunately, we cannot stand down because we are mortified by the sick margins of our society.

We must build on these first signs of remorse and quell the Israeli Arab riots as quickly as possible. Aside from their obvious human toll, every day the riots continue, the prospect of Palestinian terror groups taking over and directing the violence expands.

So too, Israel has no choice but to fight another round of war with Hamas. And it must win this one decisively.

It would have been far more advantageous if Israel could have sat back and watched as Hamas and its foes destroyed one another. But this is not an option. Hamas is determined to fight. Israel must defeat it.

Once the dust has settled, or even as it continues to storm, Israel will have to deal with our Jewish terrorist problem.

The weeds of our society must be uprooted. And we must take action to heal Israeli Arab society. We cannot repeat the mistake we made in 2000, by appointing a commission that strengthened the most dangerous forces in Israeli Arab society in an attempt to appease them.

We must build on the actions of the Arab mayors who have begun to stand up to the rioters and actively encourage Israeli Arabs to integrate into Israeli society while enforcing the laws without prejudice against those who incite, condone, facilitate, organize or otherwise abet mob violence and irredentism among Israeli Arab society.

Israel faces a difficult, violent period ahead. But there are certain imperatives of freedom that we cannot shirk.

Defeating enemies – from within and without – who act to destroy us is one of them.

Obama’s mysterious visit

Why is US President Barack Obama coming to Israel today? In 2008, then president George W. Bush came to celebrate Israel’s 60th Independence Day, and to reject Israeli requests for assistance in destroying Iran’s nuclear installations.

In 1996, then-president Bill Clinton came to Israel to help then-prime minister Shimon Peres’s electoral campaign against Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.

It is possible that Obama is coming here in order to build up pro-Israel bonafides. But why would he bother? Obama won his reelection bid with the support of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Their support vindicated his hostility toward Israel in his first term. He has nothing to prove.It is worth comparing Obama’s visit to Israel at the start of his second term of office, with his visit to Cairo at the outset of his first term in office.

Ahead of that trip, the new administration promised that the visit, and particularly Obama’s “Address to the Muslim World,” would serve as a starting point for a new US policy in the Middle East. And Obama lived up to expectations.

In speaking to the “Muslim World,” Obama signaled that the US now supported pan-Islamists at the expense of US allies and Arab nationalist leaders, first and foremost then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Moreover, in castigating Israel for its so-called “settlements”; channeling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by intimating that Israel exists because of the Holocaust; and failing to travel from Cairo to Jerusalem, preferring instead to visit a Nazi death camp in Germany, Obama signaled that he was downgrading US ties with the Jewish state.

In sharp contrast to the high expectations the Obama White House cultivated in pre-Cairo visit statements and leaks, Obama and his advisers have downplayed the importance of his visit to Israel, signaling there will be no significant changes in Obama’s policies toward Israel or the wider Middle East.

For instance, in his interview with Israel television’s Channel 2 last week, on issue after issue, Obama made clear that there will be no departure from his first term’s policies. He will continue to speak firmly and do nothing to prevent Iran from developing the means to produce nuclear weapons.

He will not release convicted Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard from federal prison despite the fact that Pollard’s life sentence, and the 28 years he has already served in prison are grossly disproportionate to all sentences passed on and served by offenders who committed similar crimes.

As for the Palestinians, Obama repeated his fierce opposition to Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and his insistence that Israel must get over its justified fears regarding Palestinian intentions and withdraw from Judea and Samaria, for its own good.

Given that all of these are positions he has held throughout his presidency, the mystery surrounding his decision to come to Israel only grows. He didn’t need to come to Israel to rehash policies we already know.

Much of the coverage of Obama’s trip has focused on symbolism. For instance, the administration decided to boycott Ariel University by not inviting its students to attend Obama’s speech to students from all other universities that is set to take place on Thursday in Jerusalem. In boycotting Ariel, Obama’s behavior is substantively the same as that of Britain’s Association of University Teachers. In 2005 that body voted to boycott University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. But while the AUT’s action was universally condemned, Obama’s decision to bar Israelis whose university is located in a city with 20,000 residents just because their school is located beyond the 1949 armistice lines has generated litte attention.

Then again, seeing as Obama’s snub of Ariel University is in keeping with the White House’s general war with anyone who disputes its view that Judea and Samaria are Arab lands, the lack of outrage at his outrageous behavior makes sense. It doesn’t represent a departure from his positions in his first term.

The only revealing aspect of Obama’s itinerary is his decision to on the one hand bypass Israel’s elected representatives by spurning the invitation to speak before the Knesset; and on the other hand to address a handpicked audience of university students – an audience grossly overpopulated by unelectable, radical leftists.

In the past, US presidents have spoken before audiences of Israeli leftists in order to elevate and empower the political Left against the Right. But this is the first time that a US president has spurned not only the elected Right, but elected leftist politicians as well, by failing to speak to the Knesset, while actively courting the unelectable radical Left through his talk to a university audience.

Clinton constantly embraced the Israeli Left while spurning the Right – famously refusing to meet with then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1997 while both leaders’ jets were parked on the same tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport.

Clinton’s assiduous courtship of Israel’s Left enabled him to portray himself as a true friend of Israel, even as he openly sought to undermine and overthrow the elected government of the country.

But Clinton always favored leftist politicians – Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak – over rightist politicians. He did not spurn leftist politicians in favor of even more radical unelectable leftists.

So what does Obama seek to achieve with this novel practice? Clearly he is not attempting to use the opportunity of addressing this audience to express contrition for his first term’s policies. In his interview with Channel 2, Obama spoke of the instability on Israel’s borders – but never mentioned the key role he played in overthrowing Mubarak and empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, thus emptying of meaning Israel’s peace treaty with the most populous Arab state.

He never mentioned that his feckless handling of Syria’s civil war ensured that the moderate opposition forces would be eclipsed by radical Islamists affiliated with al-Qaida, as has happened, or expressed concern that al-Qaida forces are now deployed along Syria’s border with Israel, and that there is a real and rising danger that Syria’s arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, as well as its ballistic missiles, will fall into their hands. Indeed, Tuesday it was reported that the al-Qaida infiltrated opposition attacked regime forces with chemical weapons.

Obama will not use his speech before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s most outspoken critics to express remorse over the hostility with which he treated Israel’s leader for the past four years. He will not admit that his decision to coerce Israel into suspending Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria in his first term gave the PLO justification for refusing to meet with or negotiate with the Israeli government.

So since he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, and he intends to continue the same policies in his second term, why did he decide to come to Israel? And why is he addressing, and so seeking to empower the radical, unelectable Left? Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was held at the Islamist Al-Azhar Univerity. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama weakened Mubarak in three different ways. First, Al-Azhar’s faculty members regularly issue religious rulings calling for the murder of non-Muslims, prohibiting the practice of Judaism, and facilitating the victimization of women. In stating these views, Al-Azhar’s leadership has demonstrated that their world view and values are far less amenable to American strategic interests and moral values than Mubarak’s world view was. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama signaled that he would reward the anti-American Islamists at the expense of the pro-American Arab nationalists.

Second, in contempt of Mubarak’s explicit wishes, Obama insisted on inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his speech. In acting as he did, Obama signaled that under his leadership, the US was abandoning its support for Mubarak and transferring its sympathies to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Finally, by addressing his remarks to the Muslim nation, Obama was perceived as openly rejecting Egyptian nationalism, and indeed the concept of unique national identities among the various Arab states. In so doing, Obama undercut the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime while legitimizing the pan- Islamic Muslim Brotherhood which rejects nationalism in favor of a call for the establishment of a global caliphate.

As subsequent events showed, the conditions for the Egyptian revolution that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power were prepared during Obama’s speech at al-Azhar.

It is possible that in addressing the unelected radical Left in Jerusalem, Obama seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli government. But if that is the plan, then it would bespeak an extraordinary contempt and underestimation of Israeli democracy. Such a plan would not play out the same way his Egyptian speech did.

There are two possible policies Obama would want to empower Israel’s radical, unelectable Left in order to advance. First, he could be strengthening these forces to help them pressure the government to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince the Palestinian Authority to renew negotiations and accept an Israeli peace offer.

While Obama indicated in his interview with Channel 2 that this is his goal, it is absurd to believe it. Obama knows there is no chance that the Palestinians will accept a deal from Israel. PA chief Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor Yasser Arafat both rejected Israeli peace offers made by far more radical Israeli governments than the new Netanyahu government. Moreover, the Palestinians refused to meet with Israeli negotiators while Mubarak was still in power. With the Muslim Brotherhood now in charge in Cairo, there is absolutely no way they will agree to negotiate – let alone accept a deal.

This leaves another glaring possibility. Through the radical Left, Obama may intend to foment a pressure campaign to force the government to withdraw unilaterally from all or parts of Judea and Samaria, as Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. If this is Obama’s actual policy goal, it would represent a complete Europeanization of US policy toward Israel. It was the EU that funded radical leftist groups that pushed for Israel’s unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005.

And in the past week, a number of commentators have spoken and written in favor of such a plan.

The is truth we don’t know why Obama is coming to Israel. The Obama administration has not indicated where its Israel policy is going. And Obama’s Republican opposition is in complete disarray on foreign policy and not in any position to push him to reveal his plans.

What we can say with certainty is that the administration that supports the “democratically elected” Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and did so much to clear all obstacles to its election, is snubbing the democratically elected Israeli government, and indeed, Israel’s elected officials in general. Obama’s transmission of this message in the lead-up to this visit, through symbols and action alike does not bode well for Israel’s relations with the US in the coming four years.