Thoughts about my open condemnation letter

Yesterday, I issued an open and unequivocal condemnation of the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, and invited bloggers and writers to sign on.

I had no idea how many would agree when I wrote it.

Within 12 hours, over a hundred people, including some very prominent writers and bloggers, had added their names to the letter. It was shared hundreds of times on Facebook. Many people wrote to say how appreciative they were that I put into words what they were thinking.

Zionist bloggers weren't alone in their condemnation. Major US Jewish and Zionist organizations roundly condemned the murder and expressed horror at the fact that the suspects are Israeli Jews.

As I've noted in the past, the anti-Israel crowd suffers from psychological projection. They assume, reflexively, that the hate they have for Israel  is mirrored by Israelis and Zionists towards Arabs.

In the ten years I've been blogging, over hundreds of terror attacks, virtually every murder of innocent Jews was wholeheartedly and publicly embraced by the Palestinian public in their media and by their actions.   Practically every time, dead Jews were roundly cheered, and it was literally impossible to find any Arabic-language voice opposing murdering Jewish civilians. At "best," they would define every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel as "settlers" and "soldiers" in order to justify the murders. (The lone exception was the murders of the Fogel family in Itamar in 2011, which seemed to make Arabs uncomfortable.)

The contrast with how ashamed nearly all Jews and Zionists are at even the possibility that other Jews murdered Mohammed cannot be starker.

The people that signed my letter run the gamut from progressive Jews to the most politically right-wing Jews you can find . The very people who the haters assume would be haters themselves have proven that they will not hesitate to flatly condemn the murder of an Arab even if it was done by a Jew. Moreover, the condemnation was not the Abbas-style "condemnation" that we have seen so many times, where the only reason given for the statement was that the terror act was bad for the Palestinian cause, and not because murdering civilians is immoral in and of itself. . And even Western darling Abbas does not hesitate to happily pose with murderers.

The signatures show as clearly as possible how different most Zionists are from their enemies.

But I am more than willing to be proven wrong. I would be thrilled to eat my words by seeing a similar letter written by pro-Arab bloggers or writers, using plain language, to flatly condemn the murders of Eyal, Naftali and Gil-ad - or the murder of Shelly Dadon: without qualification, without "contextualizing," without equivocation. Nothing would make me happier than to see major Arab organizations declare that murdering Jewish civilians in Israel is exactly as immoral as murdering anyone else.

I don't expect to see such an initiative any time soon.

When Arabs feel the same shame at their fellows' support for terror that Zionists do, then there may be hope for peace. But as long as the cheers for dead Israeli civilians echo in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah, all we can do is wait.