24-Feb-16: Incitement and its harvest: What the numbers do and don't tell

Cause and effect [From a Palestinian Authority
government-controlled television broadcast]

Data from the Israel Security Agency (aka Shin Bet) published yesterday shows that this beleaguered country of 8 million saw an almost three-fold increase in people injured in acts of terror during the year just ended, compared with a year earlier.

Statistics, as families of the victims of terror know much too well, are a cruel and dehumanizing way to think about the losses that a society suffers when terrorists do their savagery. The bloodless numbers inevitably mask the complexity, drama and detail of the horror that has impacted the lives being reported - and not only of the victims but of those who shared lives with them.

But numbers play an important role and the trends they reveal demand to be understood.

Start with the number of Israeli deaths by terror: 20 in 2014, 28 in 2015. Year-on-year comparisons hide a lot of detail, but an increase of 40% is significant on any view. So is the breakdown of where the victims were found: by far, most were civilians: 25, comprising 22 Israelis, 2 foreign nationals, one Palestinian Arab). Members of the security forces killed in terror attacks: 3. Understand now why the apologists for the Palestinian Arab side call it resistance?

Hamodia notes how those victims were killed: 16 in shootings (of which 5 involved both shooting and stabbing); 8 by stabbing; 3 by vehicle attacks (car-rammings); one by rock hurling.

Injuries from acts of terror grew astonishingly: 53 in 2014, 239 in 2015. Putting some context around that, previous Shin Bet annual terror surveys showed the number of terror attacks rising steadily, then flattening this past year:

2012: 578

2013: 1,271

2014: 1,793

2015: 1,719

The "yield" of deaths and injuries per attack, the obvious purpose of all this savagery, keeps growing. In the past year, it translated into an average of five terror attacks every single day of the year including holidays and weekends, with Israelis being injured at the rate of nearly five every week.

The Times of Israel analysis ["Number of Israelis injured by terrorism jumps 284% in 2015", February 23, 2016] mentions, though barely emphasizes, that the army and police arrested some 3,100 Palestinian Arabs in connection with terror, and along with them

143 rifles, 34 handguns, dozens of pipe bombs, tens of kilograms of explosive material, and shut down three bomb-making labs...

Then it adds that a third of them were affiliated with Hamas. Since Israeli security forces don't patrol inside Gaza where Hamas is at home and fully in charge, we're speaking of a considerable presence by the Islamists of Hamas in the territory controlled by their arch rivals, Fatah, and the notoriously-immoderate "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas.

Shlomi Eldar, an Israeli analyst writing on the Al-Monitor website two years ago, said

...Shin Bet surveys determine that Hamas is attempting to build up infrastructures in the West Bank, particularly in the Jerusalem region, and that these are being based on Palestinians who were released from prison in the Shalit deal.

If Eldar is right, and the numbers bear him out, that's another unbearable outcome of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Transaction that is, for the most part, buried in the media coverage in Israel and beyond it. He also mentions, and it's a factor worth keeping in mind, that

The involvement of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks was minimal this year [2013] as well.

There are two more data-points that keep going unreported or under-reported.

The president of all those Palestinian Arab girls and boys [Source video]

One is the number of posters eulogizing the terrorists who are killed in the course of doing these attacks - the so-called martyrs of the Palestinian Arabs. The anecdotal evidence from scanning Facebook, Twitter and other Arabic-speaking parts of the social media is that the rising tide of Palestinian Arab barbarism is happening against a sound track of constant incitement from the highest levels of the Mahmoud Abbas regime in Ramallah. The return on that "investment" is plain for anyone who wants to see. Not enough people do.

And two: the substantial portion of the Palestinian Arabs doing the terror who are minors and children. Click "Weaponizing Children" for more about that horrifying dimension.