We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
Israel Teen Murders: No Moral Equivalent: Thane Rosenbaum, Daily Beast, July 1, 2014— Here’s the good news: Despite the cynical speculation of some, the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers was neither a hoax nor a Mossad plot.
The Right to Kill Jews With Impunity: Evelyn Gordon, Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2014— The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a stunning new Palestinian opinion poll last week.
Because They Were Jews: Daniel Gordis, New York Daily News, July 2, 2013— To observers across the world, Israelis’ reaction to the abduction and murder of three teenagers may seem a bit overwrought.
There is No ‘Cycle of Violence’: Gerald M. Steinberg, Times of Israel, July 1, 2014— Three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood on their way home from school only because they were Israeli Jews.
Abbas Demands Netanyahu Condemn Arab Boy’s Murder (After Bibi Already Condemned It)
: Hana Levi Julian, Jewish Press, July 2, 2014
Mahmoud Abbas’ Stark Choice Between Peace and Terror: Con Coughlin, National Post, July 3, 2014
Where are the Palestinian Mothers?: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2014
An Open Letter to Jeremy Ben-Ami: Daniel M. Cohen, Times of Israel, July 2, 2014
The Curse of Cain: Daniel Greenfield, Sultanknish, June 30, 2014
ISRAEL TEEN MURDERS: NO MORAL EQUIVALENT
Thane Rosenbaum
Daily Beast, July 1, 2014
Here’s the good news: Despite the cynical speculation of some, the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers was neither a hoax nor a Mossad plot. Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel were murdered shortly after being abducted and then buried under rocks in an open field. The killers remain at large, but they are not unknown.
The bad news is that if debunking a shameful myth is the very best news to arise out of this barbaric incident, then there really is no good news. It’s just the latest reminder of what passes for diplomacy in a region far richer in terrorism than oil, and offers yet further reasons for Israelis to be suspicious of peace. Worse still, it supplies more evidence that a people who throw candy in celebration of kidnapped children have something on their mind other than nation building.
The Israeli government has vowed retaliation against Hamas. The unity government that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas established with Hamas is now in shambles. Surely peace negotiations will not resume if an unrepentant Hamas remains a partner. Yet, West Bank Palestinians wonder why they must pay the price for the misdeeds of Hamas, who are based in Gaza. For them the 18-day search for the Israeli teens and the manhunt for their captors was tantamount to collective punishment. Thousands of homes were searched and 400 Palestinians—most with Hamas affiliations—were arrested. Meanwhile, in response to 18 rockets fired by Hamas into southern Israel, resulting in no casualties, Israel retaliated with 34 airstrikes inside Gaza, killing three militants.
Even before the dead Israeli teenagers were discovered, it was widely reported that Israeli soldiers killed five rock-throwing Palestinians (some of whom were teenagers) in the West Bank. They, too, should be factored into the ledgers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where the books are never closed and audits are always postponed without a final reckoning. After all, the shortening of the lives of these Palestinian teenagers constitutes the tit-for-tat endgame of unmeasured suffering on both sides. Under the ancient laws of retaliation, the lex talionis, the lives of five Palestinians should cancel the debt created by Hamas in murdering three Israeli teenagers.
The problem, however, is not just one of proportionate loss but the casualness with which many insist on drawing a moral equivalence between acts of terror and self-defense, between the purposeful kidnapping of teenagers hitching a ride and the inadvertent killing of teenagers who are hurling homemade grenades at armed soldiers going house-to-house in search of three boys who they don’t realize are already dead. There is no moral equivalence here, and there is a danger in continuing to make these false comparisons. Slippery calls to moral relativism make it impossible to render moral judgments vital to distinguishing right from wrong—indeed, deciding which party is the greater impediment to peace. President Obama’s own confusion as to the relative grievances on each side of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a perfect example of this distortion of moral clarity, which has left him paralyzed as a peacemaker.
This situation is not new to the region or to these parties. Disproportionate loss among Palestinians has been endemic to their struggle, and Israel’s experience with Palestinian terror has made them gun-shy about peace, all the while making their guns morally necessary. When Israel invaded Gaza in 2012, bringing to an end otherwise unabated rocket attacks, there was a disproportionate number of Palestinians deaths relative to Israeli losses. Can 10,000 rockets that miss their intended targets be measured the same as Israel hitting the bull’s-eye on buildings that warehouse stockpiles of weapons, along with innocent people, too?
Everyone has an opinion on what Israel can’t do to defend itself, but those very same people remarkably find themselves tongue-tied when asked what Israel can and should do. Palestinians must be held accountable for their love affair with terror…If history had gone differently in the United States and African Americans had relied on domestic acts of terrorism rather than peaceful nonviolent resistance as a way of gaining their civil rights, no one would have excused the murder of white teenagers as justified retribution for years of pernicious racism and inhuman slavery. Similarly, no one would tolerate Native Indian-Americans seeking to vindicate the Trail of Tears by bringing tears to the eyes of suddenly childless white American mothers.
It’s important to remember that Palestinians are not the only ones who can claim the status of human rights victims. Neither the Kurds, Tibetans, Congolese, nor Sudanese have responded with acts of terror against their far worse persecutors. Why are Palestinians granted a license of bloodlust as an excusable remedy for their suffering? Human life may be precious, but the way it gets taken away is not always the same. Children who are kidnapped and killed to serve the twisted ends of a liberation movement are not casualties of war. And Palestinian mothers who push their children toward jihad and martyrdom are not the same as the three grieving Israeli mothers whose boys never made it back home.
THE RIGHT TO KILL JEWS WITH IMPUNITY
Evelyn Gordon Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2014
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a stunning new Palestinian opinion poll last week. The headline finding was that 60% of all Palestinians, including majorities in both the West Bank and Gaza, now openly say their goal isn’t a two-state solution, but “reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea” – aka eradicating Israel. Yet that isn’t actually news for anyone who’s been paying attention: A 2011 poll, for instance, found that even among ostensible supporters of two states, 66% didn’t consider this a permanent solution, but only a step toward the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (a finding the new poll replicates). In short, Palestinians are now merely saying aloud what they believed all along.
Thus I was more struck by another finding: Contrary to the international dogma that Israeli construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem is the biggest obstacle to peace, Palestinians didn’t consider that top priority. Their main complaint, by a large margin, was Israel’s unwillingness to free Palestinian terrorists – so they could kill again. Asked what they considered “the one thing Israel could do to convince Palestinians that it really wants peace and a two-state solution,” fully 45% said Israel “should release more Palestinian prisoners.” That’s more than twice the proportion who chose either a settlement freeze beyond the security fence (19.7%) or willingness to share Jerusalem (17.3%); indeed, it’s significantly more than both combined. The last-place choice (13.8%) was increasing Palestinian freedom of movement and cracking down on settler attacks – two other issues the world deems high priority.
If the Palestinians’ goal were truly a state alongside Israel with its capital in East Jerusalem, one would expect the opposite order of priorities. After all, significantly expanding settlements due to be evacuated under any deal (as opposed to settlements expected to remain Israeli) would make a two-state solution harder to implement. In contrast, jailing terrorists in no way undermines a two-state solution, and might even facilitate it: By reducing Palestinian terror, it increases Israeli willingness to make territorial concessions. Yet this order of priorities makes perfect sense if the goal is “reclaiming all of historic Palestine.” Once you’re aspiring to remove millions of Jews from Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, a few hundred new houses in isolated settlements are irrelevant. But freeing Palestinian terrorists is crucial.
First, on a practical level, Palestinians credit “resistance” – aka terror – with driving Israel from both Lebanon and Gaza (Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki terms the Gaza pullout a “victory for violence”). That’s why 64% of respondents said “resistance should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated.” Yet as Israel’s defeat of the second intifada proved, arresting or killing enough terrorists can dry up the supply of recruits: Once the likelihood of ending up dead or behind bars becomes too high, terror starts looking unattractive to all but the most fanatic. Thus to mount a terrorist campaign massive and deadly enough to “reclaim historic Palestine,” it’s vital to make terrorism low-risk by getting Israel to release imprisoned terrorists.
No less important, however, is the psychological impact: By releasing terrorists, Israel is effectively saying Jews can be killed with impunity, and thereby returning Jews to the status of dhimmis – second-class citizens – that they occupied in the Mideast for centuries. To quote Matti Friedman’s incisive June essay in Mosaic, “Israel is an intolerable affront to so many of its neighbors … not because Jews are foreign here but in large part because they are not foreign—they are a familiar local minority that has inverted the order of things by winning wars and becoming sovereign.” Thus the first step toward reversing this affront is to make Jews revert to feeling like helpless victims, just as they were before Israel’s establishment.
That’s precisely why, as The Jerusalem Post reported last summer, the Palestinians rejected Israel’s offer to freeze construction outside the settlement blocs under the US-brokered deal that restarted Israeli-Palestinian talks. Instead, they demanded a different bribe: the release of 104 veteran prisoners, most of them vicious murderers.
This also explains another surprising finding of the poll: While a narrow majority of Palestinians supports boycotting Israel, a larger majority wants Israeli companies to provide more jobs in the territories and over 80% want more Palestinians to be allowed to work in Israel. The Washington Institute interprets this (not unreasonably) as “pragmatism.” But it also reflects the Palestinian view that the Jews’ proper role is to serve their Palestinian masters: It’s their duty to provide Palestinians with a living, but Palestinians have no obligation to provide anything in return; they should be free to boycott those who feed them – and to kill them with impunity.
Granted, you don’t need polls to know Palestinians are uninterested in peace; they’ve proven that by rejecting repeated Israeli offers because none met 100% of their demands, including the demand to eradicate the Jewish state demographically by relocating millions of Palestinians to it. Had their priority truly been a state of their own, they would have settled for less than 100% to obtain one, just as the Jews did.
Nevertheless, the “international community” remains obsessed with settlement construction as the major obstacle to peace. This would be absurd even if Palestinians actually wanted peace, since as Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot recently demonstrated, the overwhelming majority of settlement construction occurs in areas that every deal ever proposed has allotted to Israel, and consequently doesn’t undermine prospects for an agreement at all. But it’s even more absurd given that no obstacle to peace could possibly outweigh one party’s unaltered desire to annihilate the other.
And that’s why the poll’s findings about prisoners are so important. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas excels at making moderate statements, as he did recently by condemning the kidnapping of three Israeli teens. But as long as Abbas and his countrymen demand that the perpetrators of such crimes walk free, such statements are mere lip service. For nobody who demands the right to murder Jews with impunity can be a genuine peace partner for the Jewish state.
Daniel Gordis
New York Daily News, July 2, 2014
To observers across the world, Israelis’ reaction to the abduction and murder of three teenagers may seem a bit overwrought. Of course, the deaths of any three children, anywhere, is horrific. And yes, a tightly knit country like Israel will invariably respond with greater emotion than might citizens of other countries. But still, how does one explain the presence of thousands of weeping people at the funeral, most of whom did not know the families? Why did Israelis across this country light hundreds of candles on sidewalks, hold each other and cry softly? Why were Jews across the world, in France and in Australia, in the U.S. and in South America, so mesmerized for three weeks as thousands upon thousands of Israeli soldiers searched for them? Sad as it undoubtedly is, many people might understandably ask, “What am I missing here?”
It’s a fair question, with a tragically simple answer. What has Israelis so shaken is the simple fact that the three boys were hunted, kidnapped and murdered simply because they were Jews. They were not soldiers. They had not strayed into Arab villages. They were but the latest victims in a long, painful history of millions who preceded them — killed because they were Jews. Had they been Druze Israelis, they would not have been touched. Had they been Muslim Israelis, they would not have been kidnapped. Had they been Christian Israelis, they would not have been shot. A millennium after the Crusades, and almost three quarters of a century after the Holocaust, Jews are still dying simply because they are Jews. The quiet, dignified weeping throughout Israel is a response to our renewed awareness that this horror is simply never going to end.
We didn’t always believe that. This would not happen anymore, Jews once told themselves, once we had a state. A century ago, when political Zionism was relatively young, some actually believed that if only the Jews had a country of their own, Jews would be seen as “normal,” and anti-Semitism would end. And even if hatred of the Jew didn’t end, we believed, we would at least be able to protect ourselves. “Give us a state,” Jews said to one another, “and we will stop dying just because we are Jews.” But matters have not worked out that way. As Israeli author Amos Oz has noted, when his father grew up in Europe, the walls were covered with graffiti that said, “‘Yids, go back to Palestine.’ So we came back to Palestine, and now the world shouts at us, ‘Yids, get out of Palestine.’”
Why the outpouring of grief? Because once again, we are reminded — the hatred follows us wherever we go, and Jewish children will continue to die, even in their homeland, simply because they are Jews. And the agony is overflowing because of our impotence. We have a powerful army and a sophisticated security apparatus, but we simply cannot keep all our kids safe. Every now and then, the evil arrayed against us will succeed, and when it does, our children die. Pure, unmitigated evil really does exist. It is so persistent and so ineradicable that at times, all we can do is shed tears. Yes, we can assassinate Hamas’ leaders. We can bomb Gaza. We can infiltrate the terror cells on the West Bank. But it will make no substantive difference. We cannot put a stop to this. The evil will persist. So we weep, in agony and in frustration.
Yet let no one confuse grief with weakness, or emotion with fragility. Israelis have no intention of giving up. Unwittingly, the murderers unleashed not only great sadness, but a deep resilience as well. There was grief at the funerals, but also resolve. We did not come home and build this state from scratch simply to accept defeat. Yes, we know that we are vulnerable, even in this little homeland of ours; but we are not nearly as vulnerable as we would be without it. So we will not budge. There was a moment during the funerals when the tears that we had struggled to suppress finally flowed. It was when one of the mothers, eulogizing her murdered son, evoked our grief but also our hope, Israel’s anguish but also its determination, and expressed better than any of us could have, the reason we’ll always be here. “Rest in peace, my child,” she said, “we will learn to sing again without you.”
THERE IS NO ‘CYCLE OF VIOLENCE’
Gerald M. Steinberg
Times of Israel, July 1, 2014
Three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood on their way home from school only because they were Israeli Jews. Their Palestinian Arab murderers, as identified by Israel, did not know their victims and they did not care. The objective was to attack some hated Israelis, and perhaps exchange them or their bodies for jailed murderers. Any random Jews would do.
So it has been for some 100 years in this long war against Jewish national sovereignty and equality among the nations. Long before the 1967 war and the “occupation” provided an excuse for hate and murder, such acts of inhuman violence were common. In 1929, when the Jewish community of Hebron was massacred (ethnically cleansed in modern parlance), there was no cycle of violence — this was an entirely unilateral act. In November 1947, when all Arab leaders rejected the minimalist UN Partition Plan and launched a wave of mass terror against the Jewish community, there was no cycle. And the 1967 war, which led to the subsequent “occupation,” was triggered by Nasser’s renewed effort to destroy the Jewish state, and not part of an action-reaction cycle.
Similarly, today, there is no “cycle of revenge,” as many journalists, diplomats and self-proclaimed human rights activists often claim. A cycle means symmetry, automatic tit-for-tat, mindless action and reaction, in which all sides, and none, can be held morally responsible. But attack and defense, terror and counter-terror, incitement and fear are not symmetric or morally equivalent. When diplomats and academics repeat the “cycle” analogy, and meekly issues calls “to both parties to exercise restraint,” as the European Union, the UN and even the US did after the kidnapping, they are endorsing a dangerous fiction. When journalists invent an artificial balance and an immoral equivalence between attacker and victim, or an NGO with European and US taxpayer funds equates the mother of a Palestinian terrorist with the mothers of Gilad, Naftali, and Eyal, this is fundamentally immoral.
For years, Palestinians and their supporters have been able to peddle the fiction that murderous terrorists in Israeli jails are political prisoners, guilty only of participating in the “cycle of violence,” including opposing the “occupation,” albeit with violent means. European human rights funds have also channeled government money to lobbying groups (non-governmental organizations) to promote this fiction and the public campaigns on their behalf. A small but highly vocal group of Israelis have adopted the false “cycle of violence” slogan, reinforcing the beliefs of outsiders, and are sought after to validate these myths. In this imagined world, symmetry provides false hope; the deep conflict and war against Jewish self-determination, regardless of borders, is replaced by a simple mirror-image — “they” are not filled with hatred, incitement, and violence.
Instead, like us, Palestinians are portrayed as unwillingly locked into a vicious tit-for-tat loop. The incitement that fills Palestinian books and media is falsely portrayed as paralleled in Israel. And thus, all that is needed is to break this unrighteous cycle, and to recognize the narrative and fears of “the other.” This imagined symmetry is the basis for peace, or so they have convinced themselves. The sad reality, as we have tragically learned once again, is that the differences between the Palestinian and the Israeli societies, as well as the contrasting basic goals and aspirations, are fundamental. Attempts to erase these differences by repeating simplistic mantras based on invented “cycles of revenge” are tragically misleading, and worse. They are brutally immoral.
Abbas Demands Netanyahu Condemn Arab Boy’s Murder (After Bibi Already Condemned It): Hana Levi Julian, Jewish Press, July 2, 2014 —Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas took the first opportunity possible Wednesday to call on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “condemn the kidnapping and murder [of an Arab youth]… as we condemned those of the three Israelis.”
Mahmoud Abbas’ Stark Choice Between Peace and Terror: Con Coughlin, National Post, July 3, 2014 —Whatever action Israel takes against Hamas in retaliation for the cold-blooded murder of three Israeli teenagers, the militant Islamist movement will only have itself to blame if there is a full-scale resumption of hostilities.
Where are the Palestinian Mothers?: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2014—In March 2004 a Palestinian teenager named Hussam Abdo was spotted by Israeli soldiers behaving suspiciously as he approached the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank.
An Open Letter to Jeremy Ben-Ami: Daniel M. Cohen, Times of Israel, July 2, 2014—I am not a member of J Street, but I have many dear, pro-Israel friends who are.
The Curse of Cain: Daniel Greenfield, Sultanknish, June 30, 2014 —After Cain killed his brother, the Lord told him, "A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth."
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