The horrible truth is
that all of the anti-Jewish slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors
have been motivated to greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred.
Terror attack scene in Jerusalem .
(photo credit:KOBI GIDEON/GPO)
What we are seeing in Jerusalem today is not
simply Palestinian terrorism. It is Islamic jihad. No one likes to
admit it. The television reporters insist that this is the worst
possible scenario because there is no way to placate it.
There is no way to reason with it.
So
what else is new? The horrible truth is that all of the anti-Jewish
slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors have been motivated to
greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred. The only difference
between the past hundred years and now is that today our
appeasement-oriented elite is finding it harder to pretend away the
obvious fact that we cannot placate our enemies.
No
“provocation” by Jews drove two Jerusalem Arabs to pick up meat
cleavers and a rifle and slaughter rabbis in worship like sheep and then
mutilate their bodies.
No “frustration” with a “lack of
progress” in the “peace process,” can motivate people to run over
Jewish babies or attempt to assassinate a Jewish civil rights activist.
The
reason that these terrorists have decided to kill Jews is that they
take offense at the fact that in Israel, Jews are free. They take
offense because all their lives they have been taught that Jews should
live at their mercy, or die by their sword.
They do so because
they believe, as former Jordanian MP Ya’qub Qarash said on Palestinian
television last week, that Christians and Muslims should work together
to forbid the presence of Jews in “Palestine” and guarantee that “not a
single Jew will remain in Jerusalem.”
Our neighbors are taught
that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah in
628 as a ploy to buy time during which he would change the balance of
power between his army and the Jews of Kuraish. And 10 years later,
once his army gained the upper hand, he annihilated the Jews.
Throughout
the 130-year history of modern Zionism, Islamic Jew-hatred has been
restrained by two forces: the desire of many Arabs to live at peace
with their Jewish neighbors; and the ability of Israeli authorities and
before them, British authorities, to deter the local Arab Muslims from
attacking.
The monopoly on Arab Muslim leadership has always
belonged to the intolerant bigots. Support for coexistence has always
been the choice of individuals.
Haj Amin el-Husseini’s first act
as the founder of the Palestinian Arab identity was to translate The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and serialize them in the local press.
During
the Arab jihad of 1936-1939, Husseini’s gangs of murderers killed more
Arabs than the British did. He targeted those who sought peaceful
coexistence with the Jews.
His successor Yasser Arafat followed his example.
During
the 1988-1991 Palestinian uprising, the PLO killed more Palestinians
than the IDF did. Like Husseini, Arafat targeted Palestinians who
worked with Israel.
Since Israel imprudently embraced Arafat and
the PLO in 1993 and permitted them to govern the Palestinians in Judea,
Samaria and Gaza, and exert direct influence and coercive power over
the Arabs of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s governing
institutions have used all the tools at their disposal to silence those
who support peaceful coexistence with Israel, and indoctrinate the
general public in Islamic and racial Jew-hatred.
Much has been
made of the recent spike in incitement of violence by Palestinian
leaders led by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. But the flames Abbas
and his comrades are throwing would not cause such conflagrations if
they hadn’t already indoctrinated their audience to desire the
destruction of the Jews.
You cannot solicit murder among those who haven’t been taught that committing murder is an act of heroism.
Today
Israel must take swift, effective action to stop the slaughter. The
damage that has been done to the psyches of the Arabs of Jerusalem and
their brethren in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, cannot be repaired in a
timeline relevant to the task of preventing the next massacre.
This means that for the time being, on the tactical level, Israel’s only play is strengthening its deterrence.
Israel faces two major constraints in meeting this challenge.
First,
the European Union and the Obama administration, as well as the US
foreign policy elite, are obsessively committed to a policy of
empowering the Palestinians against Israel.
The Spanish
parliament’s decision to go ahead with its planned vote to recognize
the “State of Palestine,” just hours after the massacre at the Bnei
Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood
shows that the EU’s dedication to strengthening the Palestinians
against Israel is entirely unrelated to events on the ground.
They
don’t care who the Palestinians are or what they do. For their own
reasons they have made supporting the Palestinians at Israel’s expense
their top foreign policy priority.
Similarly, US President
Barack Obama couldn’t contain his compulsion to pressure Israel even in
his statement condemning the massacre. Even there, Obama called on
Israelis and Palestinians equally to restrain themselves.
Obama’s
unabated hostility toward Israel was brought to bear on Tuesday
afternoon when the State Department restated its rejection of Jewish
property rights in Jerusalem and its desire to see the homes of
terrorist murderers left intact for the welfare of their
terror-supporting families.
On Tuesday, Israel’s social media
outlets were filled with angry rebukes of Western media outlets from
CNN to MSNBC to CBS, to the BBC. All these networks, and many others,
did everything in their power to explain away the synagogue slaughter
as just another instance of a cycle of violence. That is, they all
sought to frame the discussion in a way that would lead their viewers
to the conclusion that the slaughter of praying rabbis was justified.
While
appalling, the coverage was not the least surprising. The Western
elite media’s devotion to their false narrative of Israeli culpability
for all the problems in the region is absolute. Networks would rather
wreck their professional reputations than tell the truth.
Together
with the EU, the American policy elite and the Obama administration,
the media place Israel’s leaders in a bind. Every step they take to
defend the country and protect the rights of Jews meets with automatic
and libelous condemnation.
The other impediment Israel faces in
deterring anti-Jewish violence against its citizenry is its own
weakness. Since the inception of the phony peace process, Israel has
continuously rewarded the Palestinians for their murderous violence
against its citizenry.
From Israel’s transfer of control over
all the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria, to its
forcible expulsion of its own people from Gaza, to its repeated releases
of terrorists from prison, to its continued transfer of hundreds of
millions of shekels in tax revenues to the PA, Israel has showed the
Palestinians at every turn that far from being punished for murdering
Jews, they will be rewarded for doing so.
Given the US and
European support for the Palestinians, Israeli declarations that there
will be no future releases of terrorists have no credibility. If
terrorists aren’t killed on the spot, they can assume that they will
eventually be released; if not in exchange for an Israeli hostage,
Israel will release them in an attempt to placate the White House.
But even with these constraints on its actions, Israel can take steps to deter its hate-filled enemies from attacking.
Since
the current campaign of murder is being carried out by terrorists
largely acting on their own accord, the measures Israel adopts to stop
the attacks should be directed primarily against individual terrorists.
As for action against the PA, it needs to be credible, consistent and
directed to where it will hurt Palestinian leaders the most: their
wallets.
With regard to the individual terrorists, the government
has made much of its intention to destroy the homes of terrorists.
While it sounds good, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of
this punitive measure, which is a relic of the British Mandate.
Rather than destroy their homes, Israel should adopt the US anti-narcotics policy of asset seizure.
All
assets directly or indirectly tied to terrorists, including their
homes and any other structure where they planned their crimes, and all
remittances to them, should be seized and transferred to their victims,
to do with what they will.
If Israel hands over the homes of the
synagogue butchers to the 24 orphans of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi
Kalman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky and Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, not
only will justice be served. The children’s inheritance of the homes of
their fathers’ killers will send a clear and demoralizing message to
other would-be killers.
Not only will their atrocities fail to
remove the Jews from Israel. Every terrorist will contribute to the
Zionist project by donating his home to the Jewish settlement
enterprise.
Just as Israel has repeatedly buckled under US
pressure to release terrorists from jail, so it has bowed to US
pressure to continue to fund the PA by transferring the tax revenues it
collects on goods imported to the PA.
Assuming that the government is too weak to stand up to the Americans, at a minimum it can see that the money is properly used.
To
that end, the Knesset should pass a law permitting Israeli terror
victims to sue the PA for actual and punitive damages in Israel courts.
The sums awarded to the victims should be taken from the tax revenues
Israel collects for the PA. The law should apply retroactively to all
victims of Palestinian terror carried out since the establishment of
the PA in May 1994.
Not only should the law permit Israeli
terror victims to sue the PA. It should dictate actions the Justice
Ministry must take to assist them in bringing suit.
Israel should
also revoke citizenship and residency rights not only from terrorists
themselves, but from those who enjoy citizenship and residency rights
by dint of their relationship with the terrorists.
Wives who
received Israeli residency or citizenship rights though marriage to
terrorists should have their rights revoked, as should the children of
the terrorists.
Since Tuesday’s massacre, aside from Abbas’s
phony condemnation, the Palestinian leadership and public from Fatah to
Hamas have been unanimous in their praise for the atrocity.
Today
Israel is powerless to influence the hearts of our Arab neighbors. But
we can influence their minds. We can deter them from attacking us.
The
actions set forth above: asset seizure, revenue seizure and
citizenship/residency abrogation for terrorists and their dependents are
steps that Israel can take today, despite the hostile international
climate.
If the government and Knesset adopt these measures,
they will rectify some of the damage Israel has inflicted on itself by
showing the Palestinians over two decades that they will be rewarded
for their aggression.
If our leaders fail to take these or
similar actions, and suffice with complaining about incitement, their
condemnations of the murder of Jews will ring as hollow as those
sounded by the BBC, Obama and Abbas.
Caroline B. Glick is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.
www.CarolineGlick.com
