27-Aug-21: Peace, terror and Jordan's under-reported attachment to anti-Jewish bigotry

Jordan's King Abdullah is received in President Joseph R. Biden's Oval Office, July 19, 2021

We anticipated the fawning reception King Abdullah II of Jordan would receive during his three week tour of the US in July. 

We were ready for the high-intensity five days of meetings he had with President Joseph R. Biden in the Oval Office, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and with a long list of Washington insiders both in the Congress and around it, very few of whom have shown the smallest interest in engaging with us. (Details to follow.)

Everything was more or less predictable,

Less expected and seriously unwelcome was how the Washington media remained, almost entirely without exception, docile to the point of self-parody, lacking all desire to seize on the obvious issues thrown up by the King Abdullah royal tour. 

This was noted in a critical comment over at MediaIte.com. See: "White House Press Corps Whiffs By Not Asking Biden About Jordan Harboring a Wanted Terrorist During King Abdubllah’s WH Visit" [Jackson Richman, July 19, 2021] 

The issues from which the intrepid reporters shy away as they have for years are dramatic, involving murdered American young women, a killer who boasts of the lives she destroyed, and brazen efforts to evade a long-standing treaty obligation. 

It's startling to us how wide a consensus there appears to be among reporters and their editors in America's news industry that Jordan's role in harboring the admitted bomber of a busy pizzeria filled with children (and targeted for that very reason) is untouchable. 

Turkish news report from 2016

We hoped right to the end that the Ahlam Tamimi case would get some degree of analytical attention in the public parts of July's unusually long and extensively reported Royal Hashemite state visit. But it got approximately none.

Those factors among others are behind an opinion piece Arnold Roth co-wrote with Dr Sharon S. Nazarian of the Anti-Defamation League that is published today on the Forward website ["Jordan has a public antisemitism problem. Why isn’t the U.S. holding them accountable?"].

It's hard for us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) to deny our perspective is subjective and affected by our personal experiences. We are the parents of one of the two American nationals murdered by Jordanian terrorist Ahlam Tamimi in the Sbarro massacre. Starting in 2012, we pressed for the fugitive to be charged under US law. And once that happened, we kept asking the US to explain to Jordan what it needed to do next; to extradite Tamimi to stand trial on those charges in Washington as the 1995 Jordan/US treaty requires.

This process has put us on a steep learning curve. 

Once Jordan - a country of 10 million inhabitants of whom almost none are Jewish - defied the US extradition request ["23-Mar-17: Looking for justice in Jordan, Jerusalem and Washington"], we began being treated to a long line of senior officials in three US administrations - Obama, Trump, Biden - practically falling over themselves to keep the whole mess under wraps. 

No less troubling, a strangely uncurious media failed - and continues to fail - to question what was going on. The failure is on show and damning right up until today. 

Being treated contemptibly by powerful officials, finding that all our questions go unanswered or get mechanical, thoroughly meaningless mantra-like responses has been for us a chilling experience.

Meanwhile we, a bereaved couple armed with few tanks and even fewer battleships, felt we were perceived, and still are, as some kind of hostile force. 

We recognize the principles of realpolitik that underlie the US-Jordan relationship. But what we understand a lot less well is why those charged with pretending they don't exist think that they alone can see the big picture that eludes grieving parents. We tried making that point in July as Jordan's king sailed through Washington's halls of power ["25-Jul-21: What we said in the media about King Abdullah's visit"]

But there's a flip side. The diplomatic seers seem blinded to a companion reality that is all too apparent to us and it's this: Jordan, despite the peace treaty with Israel, remains a hotbed of vicious Jew-hatred.

To be clear: Like most of our neighbors and friends, we want to see good and better relations with Jordan. It's a goal with which we totally identify. But justice is a powerful goal too. And it's clear to us Jordan has for decades been in the grip of a powerful hatred that will define the future unless its leadership takes determined steps to change direction. 

We have searched and we would welcome bring told how wrong we are. But there is simply no evidence that King Abdullah either intends those changes or has ever acknowledged the vast problem exists.

So we will be blunt. The ongoing Tamimi travesty illustrates Jordan's continued commitment to a culture of deep bigotry towards Jews. Its brazen breach of a strategic treaty with its most important ally and supporter is not a special case but an example of a much broader mind-set and systemic policy failure. 

Here are three more.

► Making serious trouble on the Temple Mount

Jordan secretly maintains its own “incitement force” on the Old City of Jerusalem's Temple Mount as part of a kingdom-driven policy of Israel-focused calculated violence and overt trouble-making. This emerges from a research paper published August 6, 2021 by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (known as the BESA Center), a think tank doing policy-relevant research on Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs and based at Israel's Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. 

In "Jordan’s “Incitement Force” on the Temple Mount", the author, Dr. Edy Cohen, an Israel intelligence service veteran, quotes Jordan's current Minister of Religions revealing that some 850 Jordanians are working at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on behalf of Jordan’s Ministry of Religion. 

Here's why this is startling. Jordan is an economic basket case that is the world's third-largest recipient of US foreign aid amounting to billions of dollars in US tax-payer-funded contributions each year. Yet it manages to find some NIS 56 million (roughly US $17.5 million) annually to keep this ugly strategy going, according to the BESA analysis. 

What underpins this madness is the little-publicized rivalry between Hashemite Jordan and Saudi Arabia which rules the desert kingdom from which the Hashemites were forced to flee a century ago. The Saudi/Jordanian rivalry centers on Jerusalem's sacred Islamic sites as a kind of counter-balance to the control the hold the Saudis have over Mecca and Medina as their 'guardians'. 

Jordan is known to fear moves that might end its term as guardian of the Jerusalem sites. The kingdom's minister of religion, Dr. Muhammad Khalaila, told a parliamentary committee that those 850 workers are registered as employees of Jordan's Ministry of Religion. Dr Cohen notes that this strikes an odd note for people tuned in to events in the Old City: 

"As anyone visiting the mosque can attest, no more than a few dozen Jordanian Waqf security guards are visible—not hundreds, and certainly nowhere near 850. So who are the others, where are they, and what are they doing? The most likely hypothesis is that those workers are used as mercenaries of a sort in times of crisis. Many significant gatherings have sprung up almost instantly on the Temple Mount in recent years whenever the site deteriorated into violence—during the recent Gaza war, during the magnetometer riots (July 2017), during the Mercy Gate crisis (March 2019), and in many other violent outbursts. The Jordanian workers might serve as a “rapid incitement force” that increases the volume of the event, stirs up the crowd, and stimulates it to conduct riots, or joins with the crowd to create a sense of “togetherness” against the “occupation.” If each of those Jordanians brings along one or two young men, in a short time thousands of rioters can be expected. This allows the organizers of the riots to put tremendous pressure on the Israeli authorities and render it difficult for them to calm the situation. The road from there to surrender is short."

Given the current fog of confusion and doubt that characterizes Israel's Jordan relations, the worrying questions these revelations throw up are unlikely to get any useful answers.

► Antisemitism in Jordanian Textbooks?

A carefully-argued report by the Anti Defamation League published four months ago (and almost totally ignored by the media) says that an ADL review of Jordanian middle school and high school textbooks finds the kingdom's textbooks fuel and foster antisemitism. Those books are official parts of today's educational curriculum.

The report's author, David Andrew Weinberg, ADL’s Washington Director for International Affairs, focuses his research and writing on antisemitic incitement in the Middle East. 

Among the messages injected into the minds of Jordanian school-children, he quotes these:

• "The Israelites who did not believe in Jesus, peace be upon him, wanted to be rid of him and eliminate his call, so they tried to kill him" but because of a divine intervention "they grabbed someone who resembled him from among the people, and they killed and crucified the lookalike..."
• A textbook that teaches “the historical roots of the Palestinian issue” presents an array of civilizations that inhabited the area but makes no mention of Jews or Israelites until the 19th century, at which point it notes the emergence of “Zionist greed in Palestine,” in league with imperialist powers.  
• The Zionist movement is defined as “a racist, settler political movement aimed at establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, founded on historical claims without basis in truth.” 
• Jewish links to Jerusalem are “founded on historical and religious claims without any actual grounds on which to base them”.
• Treachery is a characteristic Jewish trait,
• The deadly riots of 1929 were because of Jewish actions and religious claims. The riots “broke out because of the Zionists’ claim that the Buraq Wall [better known as the Kotel or Western Wall] led to "transgression on the Islamic holy sites, so they [the Arabs] attacked groups of participating Jews at the Buraq Wall”
• Totally inverting the 1969 attempted arson attack by a mentally-unwell Australia Christian visitor on an Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount, a Jordanian text says "Israelis had the audacity to burn the al-Aqsa Mosque". The unsuccessful arson attack is listed under "Israeli Occupation assaults on the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque". 
• It teaches that current Israeli archeological sites “seek to link everything discovered to fake Talmudic narratives... to claim that they have extended historical roots in Jerusalem and Palestine” and therefore to “forge historical facts.” 
• Israeli excavations in Jerusalem "intentionally aim" to harm the Arab economy and to “secure the Jewish settlers who come to Jerusalem to practice their Talmudic rituals.”  
• Treason and the breaking of pacts are among the characteristics of the Jews and the hypocrites.

There's a special irony in how the breaking of pacts is ascribed to Jews. Since March 2017, it has been Jordan itself ["26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions"] that spins a disingenuous tale about a narrow and highly technical flaw in the way its 1995 extradition treaty with the US. That alleged flaw is the sole basis on which Jordan fails to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who confesses to the the bombing massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria where our daughter's life ended. Jordan argues it isn't a breach at all because the treaty was never ratified, We now hold documentary proof that that this is untrue. 

The US has very quietly continued since 2017 to say the treaty is valid and in force. Throughout the years since then, it has incomprehensibly failed to make a single public call for Jordan to honor it.

The author of the ADL report in a summing up that to us sounds remarkably restrained says that

if Jordan keeps publishing official textbooks that demonize Israel, Jews, and Judaism in such a manner, the next generation may be less likely to support this relationship, nor the desirability of peace with Israel more generally. 

► Jordan is a hotbed of seriously antisemitic views. What if anything is its government doing to change that?

Some findings again from the ADL. No one comes close to its statistics-driven insights into the current state of antisemitic sentiment worldwide and the dynamics behind that make it possible. And while it's certainly an issue that deserves careful thought and wide attention, it's the Jordan aspect that we feel the need to highlight here and now.

On a published index they call the ADL GLOBAL 100: AN INDEX OF ANTI-SEMITISM®, the ADL's researchers ascribe a score to most of the world's countries. Their methodology is laid out in clear terms. It's a respected analysis.

Jordan, the last time the study was done there in 2014, weighs in with an index score of 81%. This isn't something to ignore. For comparison purposes, that puts Jordanians - relative to other Muslim and Arab countries - as more antisemitic than Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. 

If you don't find this startling, you might not realize how much support Jordan gets in Washington.

Jordanians as a society are also substantially more antisemitic than the Middle East and North African countries taken as a whole (average index score of 74%). 

And Jordanians are between two and three times more antisemitic than (ranking them in order from most antisemitic to least) Eastern Europe, then Sub-Saharan Africa, then Asia as a whole, then the Americas and finally Oceania.

This blog post isn't meant to encourage hatred or criticism of Jordan or Jordanians. 

Source

But when its ruler spends most of the month of July traveling around the United States, being received with uncommon courtesy and often with striking enthusiasm by political leaders at the very highest level - and certainly including America's Jewish leaders - we wish they would pause before they launch into gushing praise. Something is seriously wrong with the current reality.

They could and should ask the man who owns and runs the Hashemite Kingdom. In our words:

Your Majesty, is this the way to bring peace? When will you acknowledge publicly that the devotion to hatred and violent extremism (by which we of course mean terrorism) among your subjects and institutions at every level of the society over which you preside is an embarrassment and a serious impediment to everything your friends want to help you achieve?

Ahlam Tamimi needs to be extradited now as the treaty made by the father of today's king with his American allies in 1995 demands. 

Changing course, handing her over to US law enforcement without further unconscionable delay, will be one step, but an important one, in the direction of addressing issues that sadly and avoidably push peace further away rather than draw it closer.

18-Aug-20: An Arab-on-Israeli knifing in Jerusalem's Old City and a dead assailant

Screen cap from the Israel Police video report [here]

The general sense of fury being projected by a wounded and failed Palestinian Authority leadership in the wake of Israel's suddenly open 'normalized' relationship with the United Arab Emirates received its depressingly predictable expression last night.

Here in Jerusalem, near Lion's Gate (שער האריות) in the Old City at around 8:40 pm Monday night, shortly before Muslim evening prayers and close to the Bab Huta entrance (one of several) to the Temple Mount, an attacker wearing a protective face mask launched an explosive knifing attack. His victim was a 19 year old armed Israeli security officer who came out of it with moderate injuries but alive and recovering.

The attacker was almost immediately shot by security personnel and died of his injuries. Palestinian Arab news reports like this one predictably say the young Arrab was 'executed'.

The security camera video [here] makes plain the usual procedure: young Arab male, walking along one of the Old City paths, lunges without warning towards a security forces member standing guard to protect the peace, whips a knife out of his clothing. Thrusts a hand holding the weapon towards the upper body of the Israel, causing what undoubtedly would be the first of several lethal wounds if no one stops him. But he is stopped by the shots of another alert Israel Border Guard officer and falls to the ground.

Arabic-language news reports (like this one from the official Palestinian Press Agency, archived here) say (translated from the Arabic original) "the Israeli occupation forces executed a Palestinian youth", that "the martyr... is from the Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem" and "he is 30 years old".

The murderous assault comes against the background of what a Times of Israel report calls "a general lull in terror activity in the capital, which had not seen a stabbing attack in nearly three months".

The teenage border guard, presumably in the midst of his compulsory national service, was taken to hospital (Yediot Aharonot says Shaarei Zedek; Times of Israel reports Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center) for emergency treatment. Initial first aid was given at the site by Magen David Adom medics. The hospital reports that he sustained stab wounds to the chest and is "stable and fully conscious”.

Haaretz quotes Israel Police announcing that the Temple Mount gates were closed immediately after the knifing. Social media reports (like this) say that in the Shuafat neighborhood of north Jerusalem there were clashes in the hours that followed between Israel Police and locals.

06-Feb-20: A day of rising apprehension

The scene of the vehicle-ramming at First Station, Jerusalem,
Credit: United Hatzalah [Image Source]

Wednesday February 5, 2019

• The terrorists of Hamas issued a call to Palestinian Arabs "for escalating confrontations with the occupation and its settlers and fighting their assaults against the land and holy sites, especially the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque" [Times of Israel].
• Palestinian Media Watch publicized a brief video on TikTok – a social network popular among children - that encourages murdering Israelis by means of graphic animated recreations of actual terror attacks: four specific Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks that involved drive-by shootings, rammings and knifings. The appalling animation clip is here.

Thursday February 6, 2019

• In a pre-dawn, Thursday morning vehicle ramming attack on Jerusalem's David Remez Street, adjacent to the popular First Station restaurant and entertainment compound, a terrorist slammed his car into a group of IDF Golani soldiers brought to Jerusalem for their swearing-in ceremony. (They were walking around just prior to their early-morning ceremony at the Kotel, the Western Wall in the nearby Old City.) Twelve are injured, one of them now in serious condition. Times of Israel says he is in serious but stable condition, unconscious and connected to a respirator in the intensive care unit. A search is underway for the attacker. The vehicle used in the 2 o'clock attack had Israeli license plates and was later found abandoned in the Palestinian Arab village of Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem, a few minutes drive from the site of the ramming. "Clashes broke out in the village and the surrounding area as Israeli troops searched for the driver, who had fled the scene after hitting the soldiers. Palestinian media reported that Israeli troops seized security cameras around Bethlehem, apparently as part of the search effort" [Times of Israel].
• Thursday noon: An Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack at the Lions' Gate in Jerusalem's Old City resulted in an Israeli being wounded. According to Ynet, he is a 38-year-old Border Guard policeman. The shooter was shot dead by other police in the vicinity. 
• Thursday mid-afternoon, an Israeli man was wounded by gunfire in an evident drive-by shooting on a road near Dolev, an Israeli community in the Binyamin region. The shooter is still on the loose. Hamodia says the victim, an IDF soldier in his 20s, is lightly wounded and getting treatment at Sheba Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv. Hamodia says the shooting happened at the Post Intersection, named for the post office located nearby during the time of the British Mandate. It's today a busy intersection, near the Palestinian Arab villages of Ras Karkar and Kharbatha Bani Harith, and the Israeli communities of Neria and Na’aleh. Ras Karkar is now under IDF closure as forces search for the terrorists.
• Thursday 5:00 pm: The IDF is positioning an extra battalion in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) to respond to the upsurge in Arab-on-Israel violence. Times of Israel says IDF battalions normally include several hundred soldiers.

The post-attack scene this afternoon in the Old City [Image Source]

Few doubt the Trump conflict-resolution proposals announced on January 28 are what has brought the Fatah and Hamas leadership of the Palestinian Arabs to encourage fresh and escalating violence. Times of Israel says

"In the week and a half since the plan’s release, the military has noted a significant increase in violence in the West Bank, with regular riots, rock-throwing and violent opposition to Israeli arrest raids...

We've been down this route enough times already to know that the Arab side act as if the threat to them of peace is more dangerous than war and fighting. The Palestinian Authority (PA) regime rejected the US proposals before they were even announced. Speaking a day before the plan was released, and before he had any way to know what it contained, PA prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said: "We reject it and we demand the international community not be a partner to it".

Writing in Fathom Journal this month, Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry writes that

be sure, it is the Palestinians who have the most to gain from securing a deal. The Jewish people have their national home – a stable, successful, innovative, liberal-democratic state that despite facing incomparable threats and challenges, and despite having virtually no natural resources compared to its neighbours, has matured into an economic and military power in just 71 years. But the Palestinians remain stateless and stricken by all the consequences of such a condition... calling the plan a ‘hoax’ and a ‘fraud’ and summoning their people to a new ‘day of rage’...PA Prime Minister Shtayyeh delivered a strikingly candid explanation, perhaps unwittingly, for why the Palestinians, who claim to seek independence above all else, are rejecting a proposal to give them just that. ‘It is nothing but a plan to finish off the Palestinian cause,’ he said. Herein lies the answer to the vexing question of why a people that claims they want nothing more than a home of their own and an end to the conflict, have rejected five comprehensive offers of statehood and have now taken to rejecting new offers before they are even presented. The conflict is not a territorial dispute to be settled by delineating borders and agreeing land swaps. It is a clash between the Jewish national movement which desperately craved a scrap of land to call their own so that they and their contributions to humanity should not vanish from this Earth, and the ‘Palestinian cause,’ which seeks no precise outcome beyond thwarting its rival, and holding out, digging in, struggling on, resisting. 

Few of the Israelis we know think these irreconcilable outlooks are going to be somehow resolved in the foreseeable future.

UPDATE 6:30 pm Thursday February 6, 2019: The alleged vehicle rammer was arrested this afternoon at Gush Etzion Junction, south of Jerusalem. He's said [Times of Israel] to be a male, 28, a resident of East Jerusalem's A-Tur neighbourhood and with no previous terror convictions.

UPDATE 9:00 pm Thursday February 6, 2019: The First Station ramming suspect is now identified as Sanad al-Tourman, who according to Israel's Channel 13 TV news operates a flower shop in a Jerusalem shopping mall. No further details for now.

18-Aug-18: Friday afternoon Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack is thwarted by police - who are accused by attacker's family

Screen-cap from the security video

Security camera video has emerged of a stabbing attack on Israeli police keeping order in Jerusalem's Old City on Friday afternoon.

The would-be knifer, identified subsequently as Ahmed Muhammad Mahameed, 30, an Arab resident of the Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel, is seen walking briskly from the direction of the Temple Mount, turning sharply in the direction of a small group of on-duty police, then quickly pulling a knife out and attempting to stab someone. There follows a scuffle which is shown only briefly and then - according to a Times of Israel report - the assailant is shot by one of the police who came under lethal attack and he is killed.

The report goes on to focus on the complaints of the dead attacker's family. They say he was mentally ill and had twice tried to take his own life. They deny that he carried out the attack for nationalistic reasons but fail to offer an explanation - beyond mental illness - for what happened. They also deny that the response of the police was reasonable and say the officer who fired at him was “light with his finger on the trigger.”

“They didn’t have to kill him,” said the assailant’s father, pointing to other instances where police managed to neutralize attackers by shooting at their legs instead of their upper bodies. Mustafa Abu Megged, a friend of Mahameed’s, called his family a “normative” one that would never endorse such conduct. “They could have neutralized him in another way. When it comes to Arabs, they [the police] are easy to pull the trigger,” Megged charged. In addition, the Umm al-Fahm Municipality released a statement Saturday condemning police for what it called the “cold-blooded murder” of its resident.

Members of the family are quoted as well in a Ynet report:

"He suffers from a mental illness and he tried several times to commit suicide. We did not know he was in the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday, he never usually goes there,” said Ahmad’s brother Naseem, in an interview with Ynet... "My brother is a mentally ill person who never thought of harming people... We thought at first that he was misidentified. My brother is not a terrorist. Everyone needs to understand his mental state and not jump to conclusion that are so far from the truth," Naseem vented... ["Family of stabbing attack suspect: He has mental illness", Ynet, August 17, 2018]

There's a video embedded in the Times of Israel report that concludes with an officer reassuring the uniformed men on duty that they acted correctly in defending themselves and that doing so was in accordance with police values. It's hard to disagree with him.

Umm al-Fahm is home to more than 50,000 Arabs, overwhelmingly Muslim and almost all of them Israeli citizens.

For the past two decades, its public life has been increasingly viewed as directed by the outlawed (since 2015) Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement whose leading figure, former mayor of the city (between 1989 and 2001) Sheikh Raed Salah, is identified with Hamas. Salah is notorious for inciting under the slogan "Al-Aqsa is in danger":

In 1996, as events surrounding the authorization of a northern exit to the Western Wall tunnels were unfolding (and which led to violent riots), Salah became aware of how to capitalize politically on matters regarding the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
He started to hold an annual rally titled “Al Aqsa [Mosque] is in danger” in the northern city of Umm al-Fahm. Thousands usually attended. [Avi Issacharoff, "The Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch — long a thorn in Israel’s side", Times of Israel, November 17, 2015]

We may be about to see the flames of that particular kind of incitement being fanned again.

UPDATE August 21, 2018:

The stabber's funeral in Umm Al-Fahm drew hundreds of participants, turning it into yet another sickening mass rally in support of #PalArab terror. The family had committed to the police to limit its scale and may now have to forfeit the bond they posted: https://t.co/PvkHiME34n pic.twitter.com/O7mBY009Yk

— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) August 21, 2018

24-Jul-17: Stabbing for Al-Aqsa again

The kosher shawarma stand where today's stabbing "for
Al Aqsa" happened [Image Source]

There has been an Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack today (Monday) in Petach Tikvah.

According to Ynet, the Arab attacker stabbed his victim, an Israeli Arab of 32 who is a driver for Egged, the national bus co-operative, at a spot close to a shawarma (grilled lamb meat) stand near the busy Petach Tikva Central Bus Station, injuring him moderately-to-severely.

According to Times of Israel

The assailant then tried to escape on foot, but was wrestled to the ground by civilian bystanders and handed over to police. Some reports said a driver who was passing by helped stop the attacker by ramming him with his car as he tried to escape. Others said a local pizzeria worker helped subdue him by hitting him with a wooden pizza tray. The assailant, a 21-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank town of Qalqilya, was arrested and taken for questioning by police. Police spokesman Luba Samri said Monday’s attack was nationalist in nature. She said the attacker was a Palestinian working illegally in Israel.

Ynet says the victim was rushed to Beilinson Hospital in nearby Rabin Medical Center with injuries to upper body including stabbing injuries to the neck. This, it has to be noted, is where Palestinian Arab stabbers are taught to aim when carrying out Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

In Ynet's telling, the stabber told police he "did it for Al-Aqsa." He has a criminal/terror record, having been imprisoned in 2015 – 2016 for "a nationalistically motivated attack" on Israelis.

We're witnessing a great deal of evil being done "for Al-Aqsa" at the moment.

22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf

Elad Salomon Z"L, pictured with his wife Michal, was murdered at his parents'
Sabbath table on Friday night [Image Source]

The Friday night news from Neve Tzuf (often called Halamish which is the Hebrew word for flint) is devastating.
A man, Omar al-Abed, 19, from a Palestinian Arab settlement called Kobar - the home village of the notorious convicted Palestinian Arab terrorist Marwan Barghouti - jumped the fence in the dark and made his way to one of the nearby, brightly-lit houses. He burst into the home around 9:30 pm brandishing a kitchen knife he had purchased earlier in the day for what he admitted to be an intended knife attack on Jews.

Finding a family seated at their Shabbat dinner, he launched a frenzied attack and managed to stab four family members. We know now that they are Yosef Zvi Salomon, 70: his wife Tova, 68; their daughter Haya Esther Salomon, 46; and their son El'ad Menachem Salomon, 36 and the father of five young children.

Tova is seriously injured and underwent emergency surgery in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center last night. After surgery, she was told that her husband and two of their children had succumbed to their injuries. The older Salomons have three other children.

Times of Israel says the Salomons were celebrating the birth of a baby boy in the family. Also that El'ad's wife, Michal, managed to flee from the carnage and protect their five children behind a locked door in the house from where she called police.

That same report quotes the 19 year-old murderer saying he was driven to carry out the killings by the incitement of "the imams on the Temple Mount". This statement ought to be getting much media amplification but almost certainly will not.

And from another source, it appears he had been under recent suspicion of terrorist plans and was arrested three months ago by PA security forces, spending the next two weeks in PA detention where he was "violently interrogated about alleged plans to attack Israelis before he was released." His father described the son's motivation - that he:

was upset over the loss of Palestinian lives following violent clashes over escalating tensions at the Temple Mount and wanted to protect the “honor” of the Jerusalem holy site. “The honor of Muslims is only the Haram,” Mohammed al-Abed said. “If it’s gone, the Muslims’ honor is gone. This was the motive for my son.”

Honor. It's a value that underlies a colossal amount of bloodshed in their culture.

In a Facebook post prior to the attack, the knifer said

he expected to be killed in the attack. He wrote that he wanted his body to be covered by a banner of the Hamas terror group and a photo of Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat... [Times of Israel]

The Islamist terror movement in Gaza wasted no time aligning itself with the murderer:

Hamas issued a statement this evening welcoming the attack, which they called "heroic." According to Hamas, the attack followed "Israel's violation of the rights of our people in Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque." [Ynet]

It's been a big weekend for the stabber's family. Ismail Haniyeh, who became the head of the Hamas terrorists in May 2017, phoned the father and, quoted here, said "Your son brought pride to the nation."

Fatah, desperate not to fall too far behind in the terrorism stakes, issued its own statement [here] praising the Arab-on-Israeli killings. Mahmoud Abbas who heads Fatah in addition to being the PA's President-for-Life may yet condemn the stabbing-killings because... well, because he can. And doing that, in a cruel, superficial and hypocritical world, has its uses. But also because the mainstream news media routinely avoid pointing out the brazen, chronic contradictions in the man's stance on terror: advocates for it in his Arabic messaging, while claiming to be against it when talking to the non-Arabic media. This works.

It's a hard neighbourhood in which to live: all of Neve Tzuf's residents had to briefly abandon their community eight months ago ["27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration"] when wild fires destroyed a depressingly large number of the community's homes.

Neve Tzuf is located across the highway and an easy stroll from Nabi Saleh, the Tamimi clan's base of operations about which we wrote "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"; "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"; and "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

17-Jul-17: Two images: Do the things that offend people say something about them?

Two photos here.

The first represents a cause around which large swathes of Palestinian Arabs and citizens of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, including most of the members of its parliament, have rallied.

Are those Arab populations offended? They certainly are.

The photo shows new enhanced security devices that were installed on the approaches to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem following Friday's lethal shooting attack by three Arab gunmen from the northern Israeli city of Um Al-Fahm.

They attackers managed to kill two Israeli Border Guard security men, both of them from Israel's Druze minority, who were protecting the Moslem holy sites. Scanning and detecting devices just like these have been used to screen every visitor to the nearby Kotel for years. Those visitors are not all Jews, but it's a site holy to the Jews and Jews are a very large of the crowds that throng the Kotel plaza.

Muslims heading for the Temple Mount have had the privilege of being exempt from security measures like these till now. This change evidently offends them deeply even as it will almost certainly enhance their safety and ours.

The second shows the funeral of the two victims of that shooting attack.

Haiel Sitawe, 30, from Maghar, a mostly Druze and Arab city in northern Israel, who signed up with the Border Police as part of his mandatory national service in 2012 and served in the unit responsible for securing the Temple Mount ever since; and Kamil Shnaan, 22, from Hurfeish, an almost entirely-Druze village also in Israel's north. Sitawe is survived by a wife, Irin, and a three-week-old son, as well as parents and three brothers. Shnaan was to celebrate his engagement party to his girlfriend in a week. He leaves behind parents, a brother and three sisters.

The deaths by shooting of the two men whose self-endangering presence was meant to protect the Al-Aqsa precinct and its worshipers from terrorist attack has aroused no expressions of their honor offended - not from Jordan (see our post from yesterday: "16-Jul-17: The Friday killings: Jordan condemns but pay attention whom") and not in any meaningful way from the Palestinian Arabs.

It's almost as if they want attacks like this to happen.

16-Jul-17: The Friday killings: Jordan condemns but pay attention whom

Arabiyat

You can take seriously this report in today's Times of Israel if you like: "Jordan king condemns Temple Mount attack in call with Netanyahu". But note that it is barely re-reported outside Israel and the actual language of the Hashemite king's "condemnation" is hard to find.

On the other hand, Petra, the official voice of Jordan's government, still has its condemnation of Israel in the name of its Minister of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs Wael Arabiyat. 

 He manages to include

• "violations committed by the occupation authorities" 
• "and Jewish extremists against the Al-Aqsa Mosque"
• "Jordan rejects Israel's closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque" 
• [which prevents] "worshipers from praying under any circumstances"

In other words, for the Jordanians and their global audience Israel is the real culprit. As for condemning the shooters, if that's on the Petra site, we haven't found it.

It's a traditional game, played for decades by Jordan's kings and recently the subject of our comments here: "11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan." Read that and you will realize it's easier and safer for the Jordanians to condemn a jihadist attack inside a French kosher food store than on the grounds of one of their holy places which - did you notice? - is formally under their guardianship:

The Hashemite monarchy, descended from the house of the Prophet Mohammed, who in Muslim belief rose to heaven from the Dome of the Rock, is guardian of the city’s Islamic holy places [i.e. Islamic sites in Jerusalem], by tradition and by the 1994 treaty. Any challenge to the religious status quo in the holy city strikes at the heart of Hashemite legitimacy, in Jordan and throughout the Arab world... ["Jerusalem’s holy places are a minefield for Jordan", Financial Times, November 4, 2014]

Obviously it's orders of magnitude easier for Jordan to blame Israel than to bite the bullet of Palestinian Arab and Jordanian (essentially one and the same) adoration of terror, jihad and killing Jews. It's called speaking from both sides of your mouth at the same time - but it's far, far less dangerous to those doing the speaking.

UNESCO is bound to start calling the Hashemite Kingdom to order any minute now. Not.

UPDATE Sunday July 16, 2017 at 940 am: Turns out, thanks to the alert editors at JewishPress.com that Petra, the official voice of the Jordanian regime, did condemn the shooting attack in the middle of last night - and then, for reasons about which we can and absolutely ought to speculate, removed it.

It's all here.

Here's the Jewish Press report on the part that briefly condemns the terrorist Palestinian Arab gunmen who desecrated an important Islamic sacred site - and then uncondemns them:

The condemnation did not address the details of the attack, and it did not send condolences to the dead and wounded police officers. Instead, the press release said that King Abdullah of Jordan spoke with Netanyahu about the need for “de-escalation” on the Temple Mount. Abdullah then reiterated his generic “condemnation of the attack in Jerusalem on Friday and the rejection of violence in all its forms, especially in holy sites and places of worship.” And of course, Abdullah then demanded that PM Netanyahu reopen the Temple Mount to Muslim worshipers, and warned Netanyahu 

and so on. A screen shot of the full text is at the JewishPress.com link.

15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?

As Abbas starts the thirteenth year of his four-year
term as president, nearly two-thirds of all Palestinian Arabs say
it's time for him to go home [Image Source]

We're keenly interested in knowing what the Palestinian Arabs think.

If you rely on newspapers or pay attention to electronic media coverage of their attitudes and expectations, you are likely to be getting someone's wishful projections rather than data-based analysis. The difference between the two is vast and unbridgeable.

So what is reality when we're discussing people's attitudes?

In the case of the Palestinian Arabs, we think it's what they tell serious polling organizations that are themselves Palestinian Arab. That's why we have published several posts here in the past couple of years that are based on the published findings of the pre-eminent Palestinian Arab opinion polling organization, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research or PSR [website] headed by a respected figure, Prof. Khalil Shikaki.

Not for the first time, we say that understanding the feelings, expectations and aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs is fundamental to having a sense of what's ahead. If you agree, you might want to review one or two (or all) of these earlier posts of ours:

• 18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?
• 15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?

Let's now look at the latest PSR poll which was announced via a press release [here] two days ago.

The parts that get the greatest prominence concern the political leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the outcome of the Fatah movement's recent Seventh Convention. Both of those matters provide an opportunity for the people polled to express broad and growing unhappiness with the performance of Mahmoud Abbas. In the previous poll three months ago, 61% said they wanted him to resign as president. That urgent Palestinian Arab dissatisfaction has now risen to 64%. This has vast implications for how and with whom and along what lines a living relationship can be negotiated by Israelis with the side he ostensibly leads.

The last time Palestinian Arabs were given the chance to vote for a president was in January 2005 when Abbas won; he has held tenaciously on to power ever since. The only previous presidential election, dominated by Yasser Arafat, was in 1996.

Frankly, we're much less interested in those issues and far more in what's revealed about Palestinian Arab thinking on violence and terrorism. Here's what we see, adopting verbatim (for the most part) the language of the PSR press release:

• "A majority in favor of armed attacks and a return to armed intifada." 
• "The overwhelming majority of the public sees nothing but incitement against Arabs in Netanyahu’s claim that some of the recent fires in Israel were initiated by Palestinians." 
• "An increase in the percentage of those who favor the abandonment of the Oslo agreement." 
• "Almost a consensus among the public that the decision by the Israeli government to ban the use of loudspeakers in the mosques’ call for prayer is tantamount to declaring war against Islam."

A few more insights into the mindset of the neighbours with whom we are engaged in a generations-long conflict:

• Asked about "the most effective means of building a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel", 37% vote for "armed action". Three months ago, that had the support of slightly fewer Palestinian Arabs - just 34%. 
• "62% support non-violent popular resistance, 53% support a return to an armed intifada..." [How to reconcile those two points? We won't try.] Three months ago, support for a return to an armed intifada stood at 48%..." 
• What do they not want president-elect Donald Trump to do when he takes office in January? According to 53% of them, he should keep out of the "peace" process. 
• About the PA leadership decision to send fire fighting vehicles and men to combat the recent wildfires in Israel, 50% say it was the wrong thing to do; they should not have been sent. And if their own houses or lands would have been destroyed? That wasn't asked, but we did notice that twice as many Arabs from the West Bank were in favour of Palestinian Arabs joining in the fire-fighting Arab compared with Gazan Arabs. (The fires did not threaten Gaza.) 
• "An overwhelming majority (87%) believes that the Israeli government decision to legislate a law that would ban the use of loudspeakers when calling for prayer at mosques is an indication of a war against Islam waged by the government while only 9% believe that the Israeli government is simply trying to protect the Israeli public." The pollsters evidently failed to check whether the respondents knew anything about similar measures adopted in other places. For instance the use of loudspeakers by mosques is (according to Wikipedia) banned outright in Mumbai, India; Lagos, Nigeria; certain cities in Michigan; and in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Limitation on calls of prayers by muezzins exist in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway and Belgium. 
• Only 32% think the two-state solution to the Palestinian Arab versus Israel conflict is "viable". In our October 2016 blog post on the previous PSR poll, 49% of Palestinian Arabs supported it, while among Israelis - via an unrelated poll we quoted then - 59% supported a two-state solution. 
• 54% of Palestinian Arabs say they believe that "Israel’s long term aspiration is to annex the lands occupied in 1967 and expel their population". 
• Roughly the same number, 52%, believe Israel intends to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and replace them with a Jewish temple (that proportion is essentially unchanged from three months ago).

There's not much here that's uplifting or forward-looking. 

But that's how it is with public opinion polls. You can ignore them, you can be angered by them, you can adopt them for the purpose of crafting new strategies. What you can't do is deny their meaning just because you find the conclusions unpalatable.

18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?

A Palestinian Arab leader [Image Source]

There are people who try to understand the Palestinian Arabs by watching CNN or reading the New York Times. For us, it makes far more sense to reach for Palestinian Arab sources and work from there.

Once again, we're looking in this post at what the Palestinian Arabs think, based on what they tell the pre-eminent Palestinian Arab opinion polling organization, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research [website] headed by a respected figure, Prof. Khalil Shikaki.

In a report published three weeks ago, PSR reported these findings (the wording is ours - the PSR's published summary, a 21-page document, is here):

• Some trends that are mentioned in the last PSR report ninety days earlier (reported in our post: "15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?") have gotten stronger. For instance, Palestinian Arab opinion is slightly less inclined to back armed action; the so-called French Initiative is slightly more popular; and the feeling that Mahmoud Abbas - the "moderate" head of the Palestinian Authority - should stop being president one way or another has gotten stronger. 
• Ismail Haniyeh, the likely Hamas candidate for president, would defeat Abbas if an election had been held in September. 
• But Marwan Barghouti, a convicted multiple murderer who, before being arrested, tried (in open court) and imprisoned by the Israelis more than a decade ago, was the commander of the Tanzim armed wing of Fatah, would defeat Haniyeh. All those lives murdered by him and his men speak loudly in Palestinian Arab society: in blunt terms, they're a political asset. And don't overlook that Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1984, thinks Jew-killing Barghouti ought to have been given this year's Nobel Peace Prize ["25-Jul-16: More on Tutu, Barghouti, terror, peace and prizes"]. We're fairly sure Barghouti is much more popular than Tutu among the Palestinian Arabs, but in politics, every source of electoral support counts.
• Palestinian Arab support for what the poll calls "an armed intifada" is currently high, as it has been for a long time. Three months ago, it stood at 54%. In this latest poll, it's down all the way to 48% - which still means every second Palestinian Arab favours the continuation of a shooting/stabbing/ramming campaign against Israeli civilians. Think about that for a moment, and consider what it means for those of us who come into contact with them every day.
• While it gets their support (55%), the Palestinian Arab public is "highly pessimistic" that the French Initiative has any chance of succeeding.  
• A Palestinian Authority court recently ordered the postponement of local elections. But if they had been held in late September, the Pal Arab public was certain Hamas would win in the Gaza Strip. They expect Fatah - the party headed by Abbas - to take the West Bank. (Clarification: Presidential and parliamentary elections have not been held anywhere in the two Palestinian Arab statelets for more than a decade. They are not likely to happen soon. The elections in this note are for local representatives. Abbas' four year term as president which started on January 9, 2005, is likely to keep going for the rest of his life. The Fatah–Hamas Gaza Agreement of April 2014 provided for presidential and parliamentary elections by no later than October 2014. It's questionable whether many thought it was going to happen at that time and no such elections are currently in view.) 
• This past summer saw numerous news reports of water shortages in Palestinian Arab cities and towns. Parts of the activist news reporting media knew whom to blame [for instance "Israel: Water as a tool to dominate Palestinians", Aljazeera, June 23, 2016], because there's rarely any downside in their circles to pointing the finger at Israel. The Israeli view is, not surprisingly, a little different ["Israel blames Palestinians for West Bank water shortage", Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2016]. So what are the Arab consumers of scarce water thinking and whom are they blaming? PSR found that 45% of Palestinian Arabs pin the responsibility for a shortage of water on Israel but a larger percentage (49%) says the Palestinian Arab side is to blame. (When did you last read or hear that in the mainstream news?) 
• The Palestinian Arab public are concerned about what the PSR terms "internal security breakdowns" and connects those with three main factors, all of them Arab: The PA security services' "weak and inconsistent performance"; a "weak" justice system, including the courts; and "a surge in family and societal conflicts". It's an issue that is rarely discussed in the world's media.
• There is very little faith among Palestinian Arabs in their own government. Indication: how many of them believe the PA suffers from corruption? 79%.
• There is even less faith in the freedom of the news reporting media. On the Fatah/PA side, only 16% of respondents feel there is press freedom. In Gaza where Hamas rules the roost, faith in freedom of the local press is even lower: just 14%.
• A two-state solution to the Palestinian Arab versus Israel conflict has the support of just 49% of Palestinian Arabs. A different poll conducted in August 2016 found that 59% of Israelis supported a two-state solution - and an additional 26% would agree if a peace agreement were to be made not only with the Palestinian Arabs but with the other hostile Arab states.
• There's strong support (55%) among Palestinian Arabs for abandoning the Oslo Accords of 1993-1995. (That requires a separate post of its own.)
• Concerning the Temple Mount, on which UNESCO is going to be voting again today, more than half of all Palestinian Arabs believe (and this is a direct quote from the PSR report) that of "the long-term aspirations or plans of the Israeli government for al Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem", the one considered most likely by most respondents by far is "Destroy Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock Mosques and build a synagogue in their place". That's the view of 52% of all Palestinian Arabs. And while it's a view that only 33% of Gazans hold, in the Abbas-controlled West Bank, 62% believe it to be true.

If all of this were not sufficiently dis-spiriting (and let's be frank - it really is and it mostly has been for at least five generations now), consider what the people on the far side of the fence want to happen after a State of Palestine has been established and after all (repeat: all) the "issues in dispute" (that's a quote) are resolved. 

Will there then be mutual recognition of Israel as the state of "the Jewish people" and Palestine as the state of "the Palestinian people" (those are the terms the poll report uses)?

The answer of 59% of West Bank Palestinian Arabs is "no". And that's what the Arabs of the Gaza Strip also say: 63% of them. 

We're for peaceful relations. And like most of the Israelis that we know, we're open to talk about compromise and to bargain in good faith. But what are people who hold views like ours to do once we internalize the Arab opinion reflected in that last statistic? It's also impossible to ignore the daily incitement to yet more hatred, bigotry, violence and conflict emanating from elite circles in the two Palestinian Arab statelets (the schools, the mosques, the political corridors) that certainly makes the situation steadily worse.

Postscript:

We're convinced that understanding the feelings, expectations and aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs is fundamental to comprehending them and to having a sense of what's ahead. If you agree, you might want to review these earlier posts:

• 15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?

05-Apr-16: 96 years of Arab-on-Jew terror and lessons still not learned

Hebron 1929: A Jewish survivor of the Arab massacre
mourns. Even today, voices seek to deny the terror
and absurdly connect it to 'occupation' [Wikipedia]

Much of the hostile commentary ripping into Israel in its conflict with the Arabs comes from people with an exceedingly thin grasp of history.

This is a problem for those of us open to dialogue because an incredible proportion of the haters of Israel are often as dumb as a boot about how we got to where we are today.

Moshe Arens, a veteran of Israel's political scene now in his nineties who was raised in the United States, has an essay in yesterday's Haaretz under the title "The Changing Face of Palestinian Terror". Reflecting on his decades of exceptionally-well-informed, insider experience (minister of defence in three governments, a term as foreign minister, a professor of aeronautics, and Israel's ambassador to Washington in the eighties), he refers back to how things were in the very early days:

From the attack by Arab mobs wielding hatchets and knives on the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1920 to recent attempts by Arab youngsters to knife individual Jews, we have witnessed 96 years of terror acts waged by Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.
The riots of 1920 were followed a year later by attacks on Jews in Jaffa, and culminated in the attacks by Arab mobs on Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed in 1929. The reaction by British police forces was inadequate, and the Jewish community was as yet not organized to deal with these outbursts of violence. They caused considerable loss of life, but did not succeed in halting the Zionist enterprise.
The major Arab effort to reverse the course of events in the Land of Israel was the Arab revolt of 1936-39, in which gangs of armed Arabs attacked Jewish and British targets. It was suppressed by the use of drastic measures taken by the British forces. Thousands of Arabs were killed, and over 100 were hanged.
The Jewish community was consumed by a debate on how to respond to this wave of violence. The official line taken by the Jewish Agency and its military wing, the Haganah, was to practice restraint and not retaliate in kind, despite the loss of life.
The contrary line was taken by the Revisionist Movement’s armed wing, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (led by David Raziel), which believed that Arab terror against Jews should be answered by terror attacks against Arabs. Actually, members of the Haganah participated in the Special Night Squads led by Orde Wingate, which practiced collective punishment against Arab villages. The Arab Revolt was suppressed but, nevertheless, succeeded in bringing about a change in British policy in Palestine. This resulted in the White Paper of May 1939, limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine and preventing the escape of many Jews from Europe to Palestine.

It's worth observing that all the Arab-on-Jew terror he mentions up to this point happened when the sum total of "illegal", "occupied" "settlements" was precisely zero. That specious rationalization for Jihad - which is certainly what the Arab viciousness was about - came much later,

Prof. Arens continues:

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, we have seen “spectacular” acts of Palestinian terror, like the hijacking of commercial aircraft and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Measures taken by the Israeli security services have been effective in preventing additional acts. The first intifada lasted for over three years. A large number of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip participated in demonstrations, strikes and rock-throwing at passing vehicles. It was a situation I inherited when I took over the Defense Ministry from Yitzhak Rabin in 1990. A concentrated effort by the Israel Defense Forces and the security services, targeting those throwing rocks at cars, brought the intifada to an end within a year. During the second intifada, which spanned the years 2000-2005, suicide bombers were the terrorists’ weapon of choice. Over 1,000 Israelis lost their lives, leading to the entry of IDF troops into West Bank cities during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002... ["The Changing Face of Palestinian Terror", Haaretz, Moshe Arens, April 4, 2016]

The 1929 Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron, a community whose Jewish population had been living there for centuries, is mostly forgotten and often ignored. Sixty-nine Jews including 46 yeshiva students and teachers were murdered in a single day of Arab rioting and savagery, August 24, 1929 right under the noses of the British mandate police. Dozens more were seriously injured and maimed; Jewish homes were pillaged; numerous synagogues were ransacked and destroyed.

The rioters and murderers were incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. (Sound familiar?) That was more than eighty years ago but progress on the Arab side is demonstrably slow in coming. Old patterns of malevolence and racist hatred are not easily shifted.

Salah explaining the role of vomit, Jews and filth to Islamist worshipers,
March 25, 2016 [Source]

Illustrating how this works, one of the current crop of Israel-based Arab leaders, Raed Salah, speaking ten days ago from an Islamist pulpit in Jatt, a town in northern Israel with an Arab majority and zero Jews, promised his congregation

that “the Israeli occupation” will vanish just like the Roman and Persian empires and British and French colonialism... [T]he land will “vomit” the Israeli occupation “just like the sea vomits its filth.” [Video and transcript]

We could easily fill this blog with ongoing ugliness of that sort from Islamist preachers and their secular counterparts. But what would that achieve?

Absorbing the experiences collected by Israel's Jews for 96 years so far, Prof. Arens observes that there are significant differences between the terror attacks we are seeing today against the Jewish presence in Israel and those that went before:

The present wave of Palestinian terror differs from all the others. Terror acts are being committed by individuals or pairs, using knives, guns or ramming pedestrians in the street. It makes for one-on-one encounters where the victim, civilian or soldier – if he is alert and, better yet, armed – can frequently stop the threat. Seemingly on the wane at the moment, the terror wave has only harmed the Palestinian cause – as was the case with both intifadas... [Arens]

He goes on to address some of the ethical issues that arise when terror is brought into the car parks and supermarkets of a busy, thriving society. These are of course not simple - at least not for our side. For the side with the knives and the axes and the weaponized children, they could hardly be simpler. Driven by a spectrum of passions, respect for ethical principles is certainly not one of them.

Notice, if you visit the Haaretz page, that several of the comments, presumably from some of those dumb-as-a-boot "activists" we mentioned above, dismiss Arens' observations on the usual nonsense argument that

Your history of the area from the 1920s to the present day and not one mention of the occupation. - Liz

Sadly, that's an actual quote. The idea of Jewish "occupation" of Arab holdings is what holds it all together for them, giving their lethal bigotry a useful fig-leaf.

Here's what we say: that no fig-leaf, not even one as widely-spouted as "never forget the occupation", can adequately conceal the moral nakedness of critics for whom the thought of a national dimension to Jewish peoplehood is literally unbearable.

Or the vile, racist bigotry of religious leaders like Salah for whom the Jewish neighbours around them are "filth" that needs to be "vomited".

---
[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("96 lat terroru arabskiego wobec Żydów") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]