Dozens of shops in al-Jalazun refugee camp closed in mourning after a 22-year-old from the camp, Muhammad Mubarak, was shot dead by Israeli forces.Mubarak was killed while engaged in a shooting attack against Jews, a small detail that Ma'an refuses to mention.
When one man refused to close his restaurant, enraged Palestinian youths threatened to burn it down.
PA security forces intervened and clashed with the youths.
These shops weren't closed "in mourning" - like many other times, it was a strike. Using a mentality that has been around since at least the 1930s, some self-appointed Arab leaders think that by closing shops they somehow make a statement that would hurt the Jews. And the people who don't go along with their plans become their enemies, too.
This incident is reminiscent of the "boycott bombs" before the rebirth of Israel. In 1946, the Arab League declared a boycott of Jewish (not "Zionist") products. Normal Arabs of Palestine were not happy since this move was hurting them far more than it hurt the Jews, and many of them ignored the boycott.
So these wonderful Palestinian Arab "leaders" decided to start bombing any Arab shop that sold Jewish items!
October 1947 |
Today, it is not only Arab leaders who have no problem throwing Palestinian Arabs under the bus to further their anti-Israel agendas - it is another group of self-appointed leaders, the BDSers.
This editorial from the Palestine Post in 1946 about the boycott against Jews could have been written today:
Notice that the current BDSers are following the playbook of the 1946 Arab boycott perfectly - they claim victories that don't exist, they don't care about who they hurt for their cause, the cause itself turns into a sort of religion for these fanatics where nuance and logic are thoroughly ignored,, they will attack innocents who don't agree with them - and the boycotts are utterly ineffective.
The World Bank spends a lot of time and effort trying to quantify how Israeli policies hurt the PA economy. Do you think they ever spent a minute on how BDSers, Arab boycotters, strikers and thugs are hurting that same economy?
Nah - no one is interested in that.