The blood libel of the 21st century
For the sixth Friday in a row, protestors from Gaza came to Israel’s border with intentions to penetrate it…writes Sarah N. Stern/JNS.
Sarah N. Stern
They come with scissors to cut through the fence, with burning tires, Molotov cocktails, slingshots with rocks, and kites with firebombs attached to them to destroy Israeli farmlands and villages.
This is not some peaceful demonstration akin to Selma in the 1960s, when blacks were simply trying to sit together with whites at a lunch counter. The usage of the word “demonstrators” is a misnomer; these are “rioters.”
The unfortunate Palestinian people have been cynically manipulated by their Hamas leaders and their hate-infested educational curriculum—brought to them by UNRWA—to despise Israel and the Jews, and to replace all of Israel, including Haifa and Tel Aviv, with Palestine.
Last Sunday, the lead story in The Washington Post displayed a photo of a 17-year-old Palestinian with one leg amputated and ran a compelling personal interest story of the boy with the headline “Shooting to Maim,” referring to Israel’s policies at the border with Gaza.
It’s time to ask what any other country would do when confronted with a similar situation? The Israeli government has three choices: 1.) Let them overrun the border in a massive terrorist killing spree; 2.) shoot to kill them; or 3.) shoot to maim them.
It is deeply tragic that this young man is the product of a cynical manipulation by his Iranian-backed Hamas leaders to be so imbued with such immense hatred against Israel that he was driven to put himself into this situation.
Hamas, which callously exploits its own children, is in a win-win situation. Hamas wins if they penetrate through the fence and go on a terrorism spree throughout Israel, and they win the public-relations battle if they cannot penetrate through the fence and are maimed.
By the way, why is it that we never see their leaders in the front lines?
It is a crime under international law to use child combatants in warfare, according to the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute and the Conventions of the Rights of a Child, which defines a child as being anyone under the age of 18.
Imagine, if you would, thousands of potential immigrants amassed onto the border with America from Central America or Canada. Right now, the U.S. government is being asked to take in a caravan of refugees from Central America, and we are divided on how to respond. Of course, these are peaceful people, not rioters.
However, in this case, instead of just wanting to find a better way of life for themselves and their families by entering Israel, these people come armed to destroy Israel.
Each Friday en masse, they are moving closer and closer to the border with Israel, and each week they are becoming increasingly more violent. And the ultimate objective is to storm Israel and go on a killing spree, which is due to take place on May 15: “Nakba” Day, the day of the “Catastrophe,” which intentionally follows Israeli Independence Day on May 14.
The Palestinians and their ever-growing body of international sympathizers have gone out of their way to white-wash their intentions. It is patently obvious—if any journalist or academician would just listen to what they are saying in Arabic—that the aim of these rioters is not two states living side by side in peace and democracy, but the destruction of the State of Israel and the replacement of that state with “Palestine.”
The chattering classes seem to willfully blind themselves to the memory of the Gaza withdrawal. This was the internally divisive and gut-wrenching decision by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to uproot any remnant of a Jewish presence there in 2005. Wealthy Jewish philanthropists bought the greenhouses in order to give this nascent Palestinian state some sort of economic infrastructure, but as soon as the Israeli flag was lowered and the last Israeli military officer closed the gate, those greenhouses, along with any remnant of a Jewish presence, were destroyed in a hate-infested atmosphere of chaos and anarchy.
And when it comes to the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria), many generous offers have been made over and over again going back to the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947, the Clinton plan offered at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the offer made by Ehud Olmert at Taba in 2009.
Each of these proposals was progressively more generous. As Jackson Diel wrote in The Washington Post on May 29, 2009:“Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank. … He confirmed that Olmert “accepted the principle” of the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees—something no previous Israeli prime minister had done—and offered to resettle thousands in Israel.”
And President Barack Obama went further still when he pushed forward a plan that would have divided Jerusalem and given Israel borders that would be impossible to defend.
Yet the Western world insists on attributing these riots to the “occupation.”
This week, we heard the “moderate” leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas go on a rant, using classic antisemitic tropes against Israel and the Jewish people, saying that we Jews brought the Holocaust upon ourselves because of our “usury and unethical practices.”
Which brings me to the core of the problem: The failure of any Palestinian leader to accept any number of generous offers made to them by their Israeli interlocutors is not because the offers have not been generous enough.
It is not a rational thing. It is based on an emotion—raw Jew-hatred in the form of classic antisemitism.
And those journalists and academics in the West who refuse to acknowledge any of these salient facts are guilty of the very same ancient hatred.
Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, an unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-American think tank in Washington, D.C.
