Sunday, March 27, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Two Arabs started shooting police and civilians before they were killed.
As with last week's attack, the terrorists were Israeli Arabs who had ties with ISIS.
Another similarity is that Israeli Arabs denounced the attack, without reservation. In this case the city of Umm al Fahm and the heads of the major Arab political parties condemned the attack.
The reaction from terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad was identical in both cases as well - praise for the attack, and justification for it as a "natural response" to Israeli actions.
And from the Palestinian Authority and their mouthpieces, in both cases - silence. The official Wafa news agency didn't report either attack, or if they did it was buried far from their front page.
So we have three sets of people referred to as Palestinians whose responses to terror attacks are quite different.
The average Palestinian Arab in the territories is supportive of terror attacks. Opinion polls have shown this to be the case time after time. Over the years, only about half support the concept of "armed resistance" in theory, but actual attacks are overwhelmingly supported.
The Palestinian Authority has never condemned a terror attack in a way that gave the impression that they were truly horrified by it. It was always a pro forma denunciation, with a wink to the terrorists.
The terror groups, and Fatah's "military wing," are more open about their support of terror, and quite proud of the attacks. Even though the attacks are associated with ISIS, which mainstream Arabs generally hate. They are effectively allies of the Islamic State.
Israeli Arabs, on the other hand, appear to be genuinely upset. Part of it might be because of worries about any backlash against them, but their responses to these two attacks do not strike me as being insincere, unlike the reluctant condemnations that we have seen in the past from the PA which appeared to be given under pressure from the US and Europe.
So we have three disparate reactions to terrorism, but really only two: the Palestinian Authority incites terror attacks themselves and praises terrorists constantly in their media. When forced to make a statement, their condemnations ring hollow.
Deep down, they are happy.
There is another group that is important to track as well: the Western apologists for Palestinian "rights." They pretend to be against terror but they always end up justifying it. Their reactions are very similar to the Palestinian Authority. During the height of the second intifada, the Western champions of the Palestinian cause did everything they could to come up with reasons why terrorism against Jews was justified. And you can see them, today, in the pages of Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada and even UN Special Rapporteur reports.
Notably, the attendees at the Negev Summit from Egypt, the UAE, Morocco and Bahrain condemned the attack.
The Arab world has been divided. We can see these divisions in how they react to the idea of Jews having their own state. And the divisions are mirrored in the Western world - with some people who claim to want peace being the ones who justify terror.
The common denominator is old fashioned antisemitism. That is what drives both the the Western haters of Israel and apologists for terror and the Arab rejectionist front - who generally are also pro-Iran and pro-Russia.
It is a different world now, and the divisions between good and evil, moral and immoral, philosemitic and antisemitic are lined up with the divisions between those who oppose terror without any caveats and those who justify it.
