02-Sep-14: Wonder how living with terror-minded neighbors works? We offer some tips

PA insider Jibril Rajoub, seeming statesmanlike in 2011. Where exactly
does he stand on terror? Read on. [Image Source]

It's Tuesday morning in Jerusalem, and the sun is shining brightly. Here's what happened here last night.

• A three-year-old toddler was lightly wounded on Monday night by Arab terrorists that hurled rocks through the window of the bus she was riding in, as it passed through Uzi Narkis Street in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat. Magen David Adom [ambulance] paramedics rushed to the scene to provide the baby girl with medical treatment, transferring her afterwards to the Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center. The toddler was injured while traveling on the Egged 143 bus line from Tel Tzion, located north of Jerusalem in the Binyamin area of Samaria, to the Israeli capital. Police forces were dispatched to scour the area for the attackers. [Israel National News]
• Around the same time, also last night, a Molotov cocktail [a fire bomb] was hurled at a bus traveling along Route 505 between Tapuach and Sha'ar Shomron. The bus driver suffered injuries from windscreen glass shards. Yarkon-area Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance teams treated him at the scene, while IDF troops combed the area for suspects. [Ynet]

It's been a less than pleasant time for some Israelis who come into contact with hostile Arab neighbors. Just in the past week:

Terror victims, the Sharchaton family,
in happier days

• This past Saturday night, another fire bomb [euphemism: Molotov Cocktail] was hurled at Beit Meyuhas, a Jewish residential building of historical significance (some little-publicized background here; the residence has been owned by Jews since the 1870s) in Jerusalem's Ir David ("City of David") area, immediately south of Jerusalem's Old City. A 45-year-old Jewish man was injured in that attack, suffering first and second-degree burns to the head. [Israel National News]
• Also this past Saturday night, an Israeli vehicle in which a young family was traveling in the area north of Hevron was struck by rocks (one of them "the size of a melon") which shattered the windshield, hitting the driver, Yedaya Sharchaton, 25. The car flipped over causing the driver to suffer critical injuries. His wife Hadassah and one-year-old baby daughter Nitzan emerged relatively unharmed [Israel National News].
• On Thursday, a two-year-old was injured when the vehicle in which she and her family were traveling was also hit by rocks near Yitzhar Junction in the West Bank. An IDF source said dozens of Palestinian Arabs had been throwing stones and other objects at Israeli vehicles traveling through the area. [Ynet]
• Last Wednesday, a baby of 11-months-old was injured in an Arab rock attack on private vehicle in which she was traveling. The attack at Yitzhar Junction in the Samaria District was serious but could easily have been far worse: ambulance crew members said the rock that struck and injured her was the size of a man's fist, and could have caused far more extensive injuries [Israel National News]. 
• Also last Wednesday, a woman suffered minor wounds after unknown assailants hurled rocks at a minibus traveling in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz. MDA ambulance paramedics provided initial treatment at the scene, and she was evacuated later to the city's Shaare Zedek Medical Center [Ynet]

It's difficult not to connect these attacks with the ongoing incitement by Arab leaders of their populations in the communities of the West Bank.

Here, for instance, is how the violent, dangerous and duplicitous game is played by top-of-the-pile PA insiders like Jibril Rajoub. He's a very public figure about whom we have written in the past. See for instance "3-Dec-12: Deadly dangerous games and those who play them" and "8-May-13: "I am your partner. I am going to kill you now" as two among many or click here.

Rajoub heads the PA's Sports Authority as well as holding the political position of Deputy Secretary of Fatah's Central Committee. The busy fellow is also head of the Palestinian Football Association.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) caught a recent speech of Rajoub's, delivered naturally enough in the Arabic language with the result that while his foot-soldiers absorbed the full sense of the lethal message, most journalists reporting from the field - including those who have written favorable articles about the man - would have missed it. This one was broadcast on the independent Palestinian TV channel Awdah just three weeks ago on August 13, 2014. The good people at PMW uploaded the video for the skeptics: it's here, with English subtitles.

Some highlights now of the vicious incitement the Palestinian Arab public - but not Western consumers of the news media - hear and see from the figures who run their society:

• “I’m telling everyone: Fatah has ‎decided that our relations with the Israelis are relations between enemies. There is no kind of ‎coordination between the Israelis and us... Everyone can be certain that any form of mutual ‎coordination ended a day after they declared war on the National Unity Government..."
• "OK, brother, ‎here is the occupation; am I stopping you from slaughtering a settlement? No one is stopping anyone. ‎Don’t lie and tell me: ‘The [PA] Security Forces and Mahmoud Abbas,’ and so on [stop you]. Drop it, ‎OK? No one is stopping anyone." 
• "Our political decision is resistance in the occupied territories in order ‎to bring an end to the occupation [using] all forms of resistance.”‎

Those are all direct quotes made by Jibril Rajoub: noted "peace partner", "strong defender of the peace process with Israel", "political and military leader who is seeking a more peaceful coexistence for Israelis and Palestinians", and very senior sportsman. 

Now a reminder of the content of another interview given by the great man to Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen television channel back on April 30, 2013. His message of partnership and of peace included this revelatory pearl of wisdom:

Resistance to Israel remains on our agenda... I mean resistance in all of its forms. At this stage, we believe that popular resistance - with all that it entails - is effective and costly to the [Israeli] side..." [Al-Mayadeen]

Jibril Rajoub expounding on peaceful and
neighborly relations, via PMW [Video clip here]

PMW translated and published that too [here]. 

So now let's try to be clear about how Rajoub's words, as a highly influential PA insider, are understood by the simple folk out there in the villages. 

In advocating “resistance in all of its forms”, Jibril Rajoub means violence directed against Israel and Israelis - armed or not; adult or child; peace-loving or peace-resisting or neutral. Israel is “the main enemy” of Arabs and Muslims. 

So why negotiate with them at all, which he has seemed to advocate? To this, the clever Rajoub has an answer that ought to be believed. It's because, says Rajoub, the Palestinians still lack military strength - and he doesn't mean military in the ordinary sense of the word, no sirree:

"We as yet don't have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we'd have used it this very morning."

In a previous post, we asked (rhetorically) what the salaried employees of the very well-funded Geneva Initiative (with torrents of Euros and Francs supplied by the governments of France, Belgium and Switzerland), who served up Rajoub (see him on video) as living proof that there actually is a partner for peace with beleagured Israel, saying now? 

Is "oops - sorry" even in their lexicon? Or is there a more subtle, peace-friendly way to interpret "If we had a nuke, we'd have used it this very morning"? 

The Israelis we mentioned at the top of this post probably have their opinions.