Ben-Dror Yemin: The ‘Al-Aqsa libel’ lives on
As the years went by, the format of “an external enemy with self-killing” exacerbated, and not just among the Palestinians. The Muslims are regularly furious with the West. In the past few decades, the “forces of progress” have been adding fuel to the fire. Thousands of academics, journalists and human rights activists are pointing an accusing finger at the West, at the United States, as the Great Satan, and at Israel, as the Little Satan. Everything the Islamists say the ultra-enlightened people say a bit better.Israel must disabuse Abbas of the delusion he can bully Israel
But the rage against the West, which is mostly based on lies and self-deception, is entering an improved format of “an external enemy and self-killing,” because in recent decades the Muslims have mainly been massacring themselves. The massacre exists wherever there are Islamists, and they always find excuses to invigorate the “industry of death”—the title of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s article.
From 2002 to late 2016, 202,697 people were murdered in acts of terror. I’m not talking about the casualties of war in the Muslim world, where the death toll in that period almost reached one million. I’m talking about the victims of terror, the absolute majority of whom are Muslim, in Muslim countries or in Muslim population centers. Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria top the list. Israel is almost at the bottom. So with all due respect to the sensitivity towards the Temple Mount, which does exist, it’s the Muslim world’s last problem.
Terror doesn’t appear because it wants to improve something. It doesn’t seek peace. And in our case, it doesn’t seek two states for two people, it doesn’t want an end to the occupation. Terror appears because of incitement and hatred and blood libels. It seeks destruction and ruin, and it will find any excuse to reappear.
When the Palestinians suffer because of the occupation—they have an excellent reason, and one can be confident that the representatives of the forces of progress will turn into terrorism’s propaganda and justification arm. When things are good, despite the occupation—and in the past two years there have been signs of prosperity—it makes the jihadists’ blood boil even more and they rise up against the normalization. And, in the background, there are always the instigators and the agitators and the funders. The young man who went out to murder on Friday night believed that the Jews are desecrating one of Islam’s holiest symbols. He believed the campaign of lies, beginning with al-Jazeera and Hamas to Sheikh Raed Salah and the Palestinian media.
That doesn’t mean that our decision makers did the right thing. But before pulling out knives, and before starting an argument between the Shin Bet and the police, and before pointing an accusing finger at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we must remember that we are talking about a much deeper problem. A problem which the Arab world must solve with itself, because the Muslims are an absolute majority of the victims of Islamic terror. The Temple Mount, with all due respect, is not a jot of this problem. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Then Israel should stop facilitating the business interests of Abbas’s cronies, whose cartels control the Palestinian economy. The international donor community, too, might usefully rethink the huge sums of cash it pours into Abbas’s coffers every year.Arab humiliation and the Temple Mount
Then Israel can and should revoke the VIP permits that allow Abbas and his ministers to fly in and out of Ben-Gurion Airport on their luxury private jets. Let them beg King Abdullah in Amman for travel privileges.
Simultaneously, Israel should clamp down on the activities in eastern Jerusalem of rabble- rousers like Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the lead agent in the city for Erdogan’s Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood; Sheikh Issam Amira, the lead agent in the city for the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir); and Abbas’s hand-picked henchmen, the intemperate Temple Mount Mufti Muhammad Hussein and the fanatic former chief justice of the PA’s religious court, Sheikh Tayseer al-Tamimi.
Their sermons, “charitable” enterprises and educational programs glorify terrorists and explicitly call for violent resistance to Israel. Their networks (along with Fatah social media) also are the source for the libel that al-Aksa is in danger from Israel. It would also not be too hard to arrest their key street-activists, who are leading the riots in the city.
Israel should unsheathe its sovereign power and put the extremists down. This is the decisive action that one day might allow for Palestinian moderates to emerge.
With Donald Trump’s electoral victory, Palestinian hopes of luring the international community into a dictated agreement suffered an enormous setback. Meanwhile the Gulf states have come to view Israel as an ally against Iran, while Egyptian security cooperation with Israel is stronger than ever in history. The Palestinians are the odd man out. And President Trump himself went to the Western Wall of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, the first US president ever to do so – as a private citizen, to be sure, and without any Israeli official presence – in a powerful gesture of sympathy for Jewish national aspirations.
The last wedge that the Palestinians can drive between Washington and its Arab allies is the Temple Mount itself. This is not a matter of Muslim theology, nor a question of sentimental attachment: rather, it is the embodiment of the last hope that the hated Zionist presence will be temporary, and the prayers of a billion and a half Muslims for “success” eventually will be granted. Whether last week’s murder of Israeli policemen with guns hidden on the Temple Mount was a fortuitous pretext for the protests, or a provocation intended to produce a wave of outrage in the Arab world, is unclear.
That explains why Arab governments were “conspicuously silent” on the matter, as the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported July 24. One can only imagine the content of the telephone traffic between Washington and Arab capitals over the weekend. Israel at length removed the metal detectors to the official praise of the White House.
Washington and Jerusalem only have unpleasant choices in the short term. The so-called Arab Street has been quiet for several years. But life in the Arab world remains difficult to bear, and the danger of an eruption of popular rage is ever present. The Israelis (and above all the Israeli security services) do not want another Intifada and hope the issue will go away. Feeding the Arab’s refusal to admit defeat, though, will only encourage behavior that has come to resemble the Black Knight’s one-sided battle with King Arthur in Monty Python’s Holy Grail film. Peace isn’t made when one side is defeated, but when one side admits that it is defeated. Delaying this admission keeps the war going. (h/t Elder of Lobby)