Israel guest
In the past month, Palestinians have taken to the streets of Israel armed with kitchen knives, meat cleavers and screwdrivers to attack Jews. In October, a 13-year-old Jewish boy was brutally stabbed while riding his bike in a Jerusalem neighborhood by Arab teens, one his own age and another slightly older. In total, 11 Israelis have been killed from these kinds of attacks while going about their lives: driving to work, going to dinner with friends, walking to prayer services at the Western Wall. Many fear to leave their houses, eat at restaurants or send their children on the bus to school.
This newspaper recently printed a column authored by Students for Justice in Palestine and an article quoting its co-president, arguing that this horrific wave of terror, one that has stolen the lives of innocent Jews and Arabs alike, is a direct result of Israel’s policies of occupation. This assertion is a dangerous fallacy and represents a complete divorce from the reality of the situation.
Israel conquered the area known as the West Bank in 1967 in a defensive war against five Arab armies seeking its destruction. Before 1967, there was not a single Jew in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank. There were no settlements, and there was no occupation. And yet, there was a conflict for about 60 years before that. There were terror attacks for many years before that. In fact, the current individuals taking to the streets to kill Jews make no distinction between the West Bank and the rest of Israel. Terror has struck in Tel Aviv, Afula and Be’er Sheva, all cities that are not disputed under international law.
SJP also completely ignores the violent rhetoric of the Palestinian leadership and the horrific anti-Semitic graphics that circulate in Arab media. One would hope that while Jews are stabbed, shot and rammed by cars, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would immediately condemn his citizens’ abhorrent actions, as the Israeli government has quickly done in the face of Jewish terror. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true. Instead of condemning these attacks, Abbas has encouraged them. In a September address on Palestinian television, Abbas stated, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.” This is the kind of dangerous incitement that encourages a teenager to fashion a ruler into a sharp weapon to murder his Jewish neighbors.
Abbas has also rallied his people around the myth of an Israeli invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The 1,310-year-old mosque, a focal point of the Jerusalem skyline, sits on the ruins of two Jewish temples. It is a holy place for all three great monotheistic religions. Sadly, only one of those religions is permitted to pray at the holy site. Israeli authorities uphold the ban of prayer on the site for all non-Muslim visitors to keep peace and maintain the status quo.
Abbas has recently stood up and claimed that Israel is attempting to destroy Al-Aqsa. He has called for the removal of the Jews’ “filthy feet” from the holy grounds of the mosque, declaring Israel is stealing the site from Muslim worshipers. Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently banned all members of Israel’s parliament from visiting the site to allay Palestinian fears. Israel has continuously asserted its commitment to maintaining a status quo that, while discriminatory, ensures the safety of all of the city’s inhabitants.
To suggest that Israel has not and does not want peace with the Palestinians is categorically false. In just the past 15 years, Israel has offered the Palestinian Authority two legitimate opportunities to reach an agreement. Both were immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat in 2000 and Abbas in 2008. Netanyahu and other world leaders continue to invite Abbas to sit down and negotiate, but their requests have not been answered. It is not Israel that stands in the way of lasting peace, but rather, it is rampant Palestinian incitement and the fundamental inability of Palestinian leaders to accept a Jewish State of any form in the Middle East.
