ATROCITY ROCKS ISRAEL
P. David Hornik
FrontPage Blog, March 14, 2011
On Friday night at least one terrorist broke into a family’s home in Itamar, a settlement in Samaria (part of the West Bank). The result was that a mother and father, Ruth and Udi Fogel (35 and 36), and three of their six children—two boys, Yoav (11) and Elad (3), and a girl, Hadas (three months)—were stabbed to death. The terrorist(s) escaped and are still being sought by the Israeli security forces.
An army officer said that “the children were literally slaughtered. This is one of the most brutal attacks we’ve ever seen.” Even for Israelis, subjected to a tsunami of terror over the past decade, the stabbing to death of a three-month-old infant was something new.…
The event drew relatively little attention in the world media. Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked in a speech Saturday night that “several countries…always hasten to the UN Security Council to condemn Israel, the state of the Jews, because it planned a house somewhere, or laid a tile somewhere.…” Although eventually President Barack Obama and other world leaders condemned the terror attack, Netanyahu undoubtedly had a point. Their condemnations were barely a ripple compared, for instance, to the firestorm that erupted a year ago when Israel announced building plans—in Jerusalem, its capital city—while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting.
But mainly Israeli leaders stressed the Palestinian culture of incitement that creates fertile grounds of hatred for acts like Friday night’s. Netanyahu said further in his speech that “a society that allows such wild incitement ends up prompting the murder of children.” Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, speaking at the funeral of the five terror victims on Sunday in Jerusalem, which was attended by tens of thousands, said: “When we think of these murderers, we know that they operate against a background of education that teaches them Jews are fair game.… As long as this murderous education goes on, as long as the incitement continues, any agreement we sign is not worth the paper it will be written upon, because it will be immediately violated by those who are the products of this education.…”
Given the blasé media reaction and de rigueur, none too hasty condemnations by world leaders, it is hard to imagine that Friday night’s atrocity will have much effect on the ongoing, relentless pressure on Israel to cede land to the Palestinians. The question is—with the attack already perceived as a milestone and new revelation of the depths of Palestinian barbarity—what effect it will have [on] Israeli [policy] itself.…
For the Israeli population, the attack has had an unmistakable impact and takes its place beside other dire epiphanies—the 2000 lynch of two soldiers in Ramallah, the 2002 Park Hotel massacre, the post-disengagement relentless rocket fire from Gaza, and others—that have led the population away from the dovish illusions of the 1990s and toward greater strength and realism.
In that regard, if Netanyahu takes a flintier tack—even if its means defying [U.S. president] Obama—he will have Israel behind him.
WHY INCITEMENT IS IGNORED
Dore Gold
JerusalemCenterfor Public Affairs, March 14, 2011
The brutal Palestinian terror attack on Itamar has brought back the core issue of Palestinian incitement to center stage. After all, what prepares a Palestinian terrorist to slit the throats of Israeli children and kill their parents in cold blood? The fact is that serious experts in bringing to a halt the most intractable conflicts in recent history have all pointed to incitement as a key cause for the outbreak of mass violence.
Take for example the writings of the late Richard Holbrooke. He was probably the most accomplished and experienced U.S. diplomat that served in recent years in the Department of State. Indeed, Holbrooke was responsible for the greatest achievement of the Clinton administration in foreign policy—the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War.…
In his book, To End a War, on the Dayton Agreement, Holbrooke considered why the war in Bosnia erupted. He raised the theory that was widely cited in intellectual circles in the 1990s that the war in the Balkans was due to “ancient hatreds” between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. But he soon dismissed this idea completely and argued instead that the hatred that fed the conflict had been deliberately inflamed. He wrote that there was a deliberate policy of incitement by the Serbian leadership through Belgrade television, which spread ethnic hatred “like an epidemic.” In short, incitement was not a symptom of the Balkan Wars but rather, according to Holbrooke, it was a root cause.
Unfortunately, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, incitement has not been taken as seriously. Formally, there are many clauses on incitement throughout the Oslo Agreements, especially the 1995 Interim Agreement. The parties are legally bound to abstain from incitement and hostile propaganda. They were supposed to foster “mutual understanding and tolerance.” The first phase of the 2003 Roadmap calls on “all Palestinian institutions to end incitement against Israel.” But in practice many of these clauses were dormant. Israeli governments paid the greatest attention to the most politically explosive issues like borders and security.… There were those who undoubtedly felt that if Israel complained about incitement, it would be perceived that it was looking for an excuse to get out of the peace process and not make any concessions.
Dennis Ross [who served as Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and special Middle East coordinator under U.S. President Bill Clinton] wrote an 800-page book, The Missing Peace, in which he tried to analyze why the Oslo Agreements failed. He criticized the United States for ignoring the issue of Palestinian incitement: “The Palestinians’ systematic incitement in their media, an educational system that bred hatred, and the glorification of violence made Israelis feel that their real purpose was not peace.” He insists that any peace process in the future must be based on a code of conduct that prohibits behavior that contradicts peacemaking.
Ross is extremely open in explaining the reasons why the U.S. did not deal with the incitement issue. Washington was always afraid of halting the peace process. It did not want to confront Arafat and mistakenly accepted his arguments that he was too weak. But Ross warns that there cannot be successful negotiations if there is one environment at the peace table and another environment in the streets.…
More than ever, Israel has a strong foundation today for demanding zero tolerance at the negotiating table for continuing incitement by any agency of the Palestinian Authority. This is not a side issue that can be ignored but goes to the root of any meaningful peacemaking in the future.
(Dore Gold is a former Israeli ambassador to the UN.)
THE REAL OBSTACLE TO PEACE
Editorial
JerusalemPost, March 13, 2011
Our minds beg to avoid contemplating the Fogel family massacre. Every bit of human fiber in our being rebels against the cold-blooded viciousness. What miasma spawned a terrorist capable of crouching over the sleeping Fogels—mother Ruth, father Udi, and their three young children, including three-month-old baby Hadas—and methodically knifing them to death?
Offering up the “occupation” as an excuse is a vacuous insult to common sense. The restrictions on Palestinians’ freedoms and their political limbo—resulting in large part from their own unwillingness to agree on realistic compromises—cannot “explain” or “legitimize” this horror. Nor can the mere existence of Jewish families on land of biblical resonance that was previously controlled by Jordan and is now widely deemed to belong to Palestinians.
But Palestinian leaders would have you believe otherwise, and the Palestinian Authority’s reactions to the atrocity resonate hollow and false. “We reject this violence and condemn it as we have repeatedly rejected it against our people,” the PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told reporters just hours after the Fogels were slaughtered.
The implication was clear: The Itamar atrocity could and should be compared to attempts by the IDF to defend citizens from Kassam and Grad missiles launched by Hamas from Gaza—a territory made completely Judenrein by Israel in the summer of 2005—or to IDF attempts to protect Israelis from suicide bombings or drive-by shootings emanating from Nablus, Jenin and Hebron.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s reaction was not much different, provoking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to criticize the PA’s “weak and mumbling” statements.
To restate the obvious, which was conveniently and not so innocently left unsaid by Fayyad and Abbas: The IDF never intentionally targets innocent civilians, not to mention infants. When non-combatants, including women and children, are inadvertently killed in IDF operations, this is widely perceived by the vast majority of Israelis as a tragic but unavoidable outcome of warfare that can often be explained by Palestinians’ purposeful and cynical use of civilians as human shields. Fayyad’s and Abbas’s unsavory attempt to equate the unspeakable crime committed in Itamar to the IDF’s military actions is a mild symptom of a much more profound ailment afflicting the Palestinian people.
One of the most wretchedly disappointing spectacles of the past two decades has been the inability of popular Palestinian nationalisms of all kinds to rise above what journalist Christopher Hitchens has called “a thanatocratic hell.”
On Sunday, literally at the same time as thousands gathered in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul Cemetery to peacefully and tearfully accompany the Fogels to their final rest, Fatah’s youth movement, in a sick fest of death, celebrated the naming of a square in Al-Bireh, a town adjacent to Ramallah, after the “martyred” female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. On March 11, 1978, Mughrabi, along with eight or nine Fatah terrorists armed with Kalashnikovs and grenades, led the Coastal Road massacre, an indiscriminate killing spree that left 38 innocent Israelis, including 13 children, dead. Mughrabi, a hero of thousands of Palestinians, had hoped to derail Israel’s peace talks with Egypt.
As Yossi Kuperwasser, director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, told the cabinet Sunday, the Mughrabi death cult is just one of many examples of Palestinian incitement against Israel. The Fogel massacre, said Kuperwasser, is “in a way, an expression of the way the PA presents an attitude of hatred and demonization towards Israelis in general and especially towards settlers.”
Der Sturmer-like caricatures of Jews feature in PA media…; an Egyptian singer calling for jihad against Israel has been aired repeatedly in recent months on official PA radio and TV; and just hours after the Itamar massacre, Abbas met with a young Palestinians taking part in a song competition that glorifies suicide bombers.
This incomplete list, which can be substantially supplemented by Palestinian Media Watch’s regular reports, brings us closer to understanding how Palestinian terrorists could bring themselves to perpetrate such a despicable act against the Fogel family. Reflecting, as it does, the Palestinians’ insistent refusal to internalize the Jews’ fundamental right to sovereignty anywhere in this disputed land, it also represents the single biggest obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
LET’S STOP PRETENDING
Itamar Marcus & Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2011
The Palestinian Authority and its leaders share the blame for the murders of those five Israelis from Itamar on Friday—including two children and an infant—along with the terrorists who committed them. It is the PA and its leaders who have prepared the ground for these murders with the incessant incitement to hatred and the glorification of violence and terror.
In spite of its conciliatory statements in English, the PA continues to use all the structures it controls to demonize Israelis and to promote violence. Terrorists are presented as heroes and role models for Palestinians, teaching that killing Israelis is a way to earn eternal fame.
Just two months ago, PA President Mahmoud Abbas sent a clear message of support for terror when he awarded $2000 to the family of a terrorist who attacked IDF soldiers. Last week, the PA’s official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida announced a football tournament named after Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and three weeks ago PA TV, which is under the direct control of Abbas’s office, broadcast videos glorifying the terrorist Habash Hanani, who in May 2002 entered Itamar and murdered three Israeli students. Twice the PA named summer camps after the terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 led the most deadly attack in Israel’s history in which 37 civilians were killed in a bus hijacking, both in 2008 and again this past summer.
But the long arm of the PA’s promotion of violence and terror goes even farther, penetrating the realm of culture and music, which has been used so often in recent years in other places in the world to promote peace and tolerance. Last year, PA TV broadcast a number of performances of a band called Alashekeen, including a song anticipating the conquering of Israel through holy war. The song presents all of Israel as “Palestine,” mentioning the Carmel region near Haifa, and the cities of Lod, Ramle, and Jerusalem as regions to be liberated: “In Ramle we are grenades.… We replaced bracelets with weapons. We attacked the despicable [Zionists].… This is the day of consolation of jihad. Pull the trigger. We shall redeem Jerusalem, Nablus and the country.”
More significant than the repeated exposure on PA TV and at cultural events was the fact that Abbas chose to honor the musical group. He issued a presidential decree turning it into an official Palestinian national band.
Compounding the PA’s nationalistic hate promotion are its Islamic-based messages. The PA seems to have adopted what was once thought to be only Hamas ideology, that the conflict with Israel is a Ribat—a religious war for Allah to defend Islamic land in which conflict with Israel is uncompromising. Abbas’s appointed minister of religion, Mahmoud Habbash, has taught repeatedly that the conflict with Israel is not territorial but is in accordance with Islamic law: “Allah has preordained for us the Ribat on this blessed land.… It is a commandment.” In short, the PA, like the Hamas, is telling its people that Islam does not allow for reconciliation with Israel.
With continuous messages like this coming from the so-called moderate leadership of the PA, is it any wonder that people can go on terror rampages like the one in Itamar this weekend? Palestinians may assume that their leaders and society will honor them if they murder Israelis, that their families will receive payment if they are killed, and that their religion encourages Israel’s disappearance. Was the terrorist who committed those brutal killings dreaming about a future Palestinian summer camp in his name? Was he imagining Allah granting him everlasting rewards in paradise for fulfilling his command? Did he feel that he was fulfilling his national duty and would receive a financial reward?
And what about the international community which has accepted and naively believed PA leaders’ assurances that incitement had stopped? It was the international community, represented by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which stipulated preconditions for the PA to enter into a renewed peace process: “We will only work with a Palestinian Authority government that unambiguously and explicitly accepts the Quartet’s principles: A commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map” (House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, April 23, 2009). The Road Map states that “all official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.”
The international community has completely failed because it never followed up to see if these preconditions had actually been met, but gladly satisfied itself with Abbas’s promises, and continues to fund the PA. Everyone involved in the peace process is making a tragic mistake by assuming the incitement is just another issue that has to be dealt with, like the issues of water, borders, and refugees. All of those are issues that must be negotiated as part of a peace process. But as long as the Palestinian Authority continues to teach these messages, clearly there is no peace process.
It is incumbent on the international community to inform the Palestinian Authority that a condition for “working” with it, as Clinton stated, is that it erases the messages of hate and replaces them with peace promotion. And until that time the international community must ostracize and isolate the Palestinian Authority, just as they do Hamas, and stop pretending there is a peace process.
(Itamar Marcus is director of Palestinian Media Watch (www.palwatch.org).
Nan Jacques Zilberdik is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch.)
