By Daled Amos
On November 23, Tiran Fero, an 18-year-old Druze living in northern Israel was severely injured in a car accident near Jenin. When he was brought to the hospital, Palestinian gunmen found out he was an Israeli citizen, disconnected him from life-support and took the body -- apparently planning on using the body of an Israeli citizen as a bargaining chip.
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| Tiran Fero |
The gunmen badly underestimated the Druze community.
Within 30 hours they returned the body to the family. This was due, in part, to negotiations involving both Qatar and the IDF.
However, as Douglas Altabef writes for the JNF:
one strongly suspects that what ultimately brought about the return of Fero’s body was the mobilization of the Druze community and their threat to invade Jenin. A story is also circulating that Druze had kidnapped four Arabs and were threatening reprisals against them.
The Druze have just given us a tutorial in Middle East negotiation: strength matters. The willingness to use strength and an adversary’s inability to discern how far you are willing to go are critical.
Fine sentiments, but is Israel actually able to use its strengths against Palestinian terrorists?
Put aside Israel's strength in its military superiority -- world condemnation of Israel's military response to Hamas rockets tends to hamstring the IDF, forcing it to be more creative, as we saw in the last outbreak between Israel's military and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
But Israel is not limited to military options. It recently distributed thousands of new work permits to Gazans, creating a situation where Hamas risked depriving those workers of their livelihoods and generating widespread unrest. Another economic factor is that exports from Gaza to Israel are expected to grow by over 93%.
Hamas is not about to fold, but neither is it not eager to arbitrarily jeopardize this economic progress.
When it comes to the Palestinian Authority, Israel also has economic options. Palestinian Media Watch recently analyzed reports from the PA Central Bureau of Statistics. It found that this past August, out of Palestinian imports -- totaling USD 729 million -- more than half came from Israel. On top of that, of the Palestinian exports, over 90% of them were sold to Israel.
So while the Palestinian Authority joins the BDS Movement and makes a big deal out of encouraging its own people not to buy Israel products, the fact remains that if the Palestinian Arabs followed through on this "threat" to boycott Israel, the result would be negligible --
But if the Israeli market were to respond in kind to the BDS call, and stop buying Palestinian produced products, the Palestinian economy would face substantial difficulties, losing the ability to market over 90% of its produce.
Maybe Israel should take a page out of the anti-Israel playbook and boycott the West Bank? The question is whether Israel would be able to weather the inevitable storm of outrage from the West, accusing the Jewish state of unfairly singling out Palestinian Arabs.
But there is another option that Israel is trying.
Two weeks ago, Muhammad Murad Sami Souf stabbed 2 Israelis to death and ran over a third. The Israeli government has decided upon a tactic that mirrors what they are doing to try to keep Hamas in check:
Israel will revoke work and entry permits for 500 Palestinians related to the Palestinian assailant who carried out an attack near the settlement of Ariel on Tuesday.
...The decision to revoke permits accords with a security cabinet ruling from March, that called to arrest wider circles of people related to terror suspects, in order to increase deterrence amongst the Palestinians.
By holding friends and family accountable, this is a variation on the home demolitions that Israel has sometimes resorted to in the past. Will the West criticize Israel, as it did then, claiming that innocent Palestinian Arabs are being singled out?
Critics are outraged about collateral damage. They are furious when Gazans are caught in the middle when the Hamas terrorists they elected fire rockets at Israeli civilians.
Yet the same self-proclaimed defenders of human rights have no problem when Israeli civilians -- not Israeli military targets -- are deliberately and directly attacked.
No sympathy.
No outcry
Not a word.
If anything, they bend over backward to defend Palestinian terrorist attacks, claiming there are no other options available to these underdogs -- underdogs living on Jewish indigenous land where Jews have been living on for over 3,000 years.
And yet Israel continues to twist itself into a pretzel trying to find ways to prevent harm to both Jewish -- and Arab -- lives.
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