So Long as Palestinians Celebrate Bloodshed, Peace Will Remain Out of Sight
When, in 1998, a Palestinian was fatally stabbed in Jerusalem—apparently by an Israeli terrorist—the country’s president visited the victim’s widow and the Defense Ministry gave his family a six-figure compensatory payment, akin to the support given to Israeli victims of Palestinian terror. Last Friday, the victim’s grandson murdered seven people leaving a Jerusalem synagogue. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to his spokesman Ned Price, hoped during his trip to Israel and Egypt this week that he could “put an end to the cycle of violence.” Stephen Daisley observes:Gil Troy: After Jerusalem terror attacks, some in the West lack empathy for Israel - opinion
On Friday night, in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, and east Jerusalem, Palestinians gathered to celebrate the synagogue murders. Crowds set off fireworks, started bonfires, fired their weapons into the air, honked car horns, and chanted. In Hebron they handed out sweets to children while in Gaza cries of “Allahu akbar” boomed from mosque loudspeakers. . . . Hand out enough candies and pastries every time an Israeli is murdered and you will teach your children that killing is sweet. The lesson will not go unlearned.
Hello “cycle of violence,” my old friend; I’ve come to talk with you again. Except, it’s not true. It’s not a cycle of violence. It’s a choice of violence, a choice Palestinians keep making.
When Jerusalem assures foreign audiences there is “no partner for peace,” it is a well-worn talking point but it is not easily rebutted. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, will not visit any grieving widows after Friday night’s attack. The Palestinians will pay no compensation to bereaved Israelis—they couldn’t afford to. The Palestinian Authority operates a Martyrs’ Fund that pays stipends to the families of Palestinians captured or killed while carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis. In 2020, the fund disbursed 597 million shekels (£139 million) in such payments. Sweets for the children, shekels for their widowed mothers.
Where does this get the Palestinians? Nowhere near a state, nowhere even close to the conditions necessary to achieving one.
SO FAR, these Jewish Blame-Israel-Firsters remain a minority. Most American Jews I know, meet and read about in surveys remain proud and protective of Israel. Therefore, although I resent the disproportionate attention the hypercritics command within the community and beyond, I resent even more their supersized self-righteousness and the feeble pushback they increasingly receive.
I share Prof. Ruth Wisse’s consternation – and fury – that, as she wrote in Sapir in 2021, “No other minority in America is ‘in sympathy’ with the war against its members – not African-Americans, Latinos, or Asians, not Native Americans or gays. Only the Jewish Left and their liberal fellow travelers capitulate in the old ways.”
his betrayal by these un-Jews – intellectuals and leaders, often on the Jewish dole, undoing the core Jewish consensus around Israel and Zionism – is even more outrageous because the forces gunning for Israel are not just anti-Jewish, not just anti-Zionist, but illiberal, anti-American, undemocratic and totalitarian.
Let me be clear. I seek vigorous debate regarding Israel, Israeli democracy, Israeli policies, Israel’s leaders and Israel’s attitudes and actions toward the Palestinians and others. Healthy identity Zionism requires a big tent like Abraham’s, open on all four sides – or we suffocate. But just as no tent can stand without its poles, no community can survive without some boundaries.
I attack those delegitimizers who repudiate what Israel is, not what Israel does. I condemn those demonizers who inject irrelevant race-based analogies and critiques of Western actions into Zionism’s unique story. And I challenge communal leaders, living off sacred Jewish dollars, to stop building relationships with Israel only through breast-beating without cheerleading, especially because there’s a bigger, more honest and far more inspiring story to tell.
It’s a story of how our youngest, newest martyr, Asher Natan, lived – not just how he died – loving Torah, loving life, perpetually smiling. It’s a story of our latest heroes, from the anonymous officer who shot the Ir David terrorist while absorbing life-threatening wounds, to this paramedic Fadi Dekidek who explains: “Jews save Arabs; Arabs save Jews,” while calling Magen David Adom “an example for the whole world.”
I hope this violence moves our government to slow down its bulldozing ways and keep us united. I hope it challenges the sky-is-falling gloom-and-doomers to protest without shouting loudly, hysterically, democratically, that Israeli democracy is over.
But I also hope this bloodstained moment, outside a synagogue, on Shabbat, 78 years after Auschwitz’s liberation, reminds those American Jews flirting with anti-Zionism to sift right from wrong. Israel is more humane and democratic than ever. We are all stronger, safer, better, with a robust, safe Israel. And we still all are one – Am Yisrael Chai.
UNRWA is Part of the Problem – Not the Solution
The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has once again requested international financial aid. This is the same organization whose workers have been promoting violence and antisemitism on social media.What Muhammad Aliwat learned in school
UNRWA has since done absolutely nothing to help the "refugees" move on with their lives and seek a better future for themselves or their families.
"Almost all of [the incorrectly labeled Palestinians in Gaza] have been born in Gaza, their parents have been born in Gaza, their grandparents have been born in Gaza... they were never displaced an inch. Yet, every day they hear, they learn, and they get an official stamp from the UN agency that says: 'That's not your home. You might have lived here all your life, but your home is there, just across the fence. That's your real home [Israel], and it was taken from you." — Einat Wilf, former Israeli Member of Knesset, December 1, 2015.
The Geneva-based independent human rights group UN Watch has uncovered evidence of UNRWA staff incitement which clearly violate the agency's own rules as well as its proclaimed values of intolerance for racism, discrimination or antisemitism.
Meanwhile, in 2021, the US government confirmed its "failure to ensure that taxpayer aid dollars sent to the Palestinian government did not ultimately make their way to terrorists."
Terrorist groups in Gaza, such as Hamas, have continued to build terror tunnels under UNRWA schools, to use the children as human shields if Israel retaliates after it is attacked -- as Hamas member Abu Khaled, openly admitted in December 2021.
"UNRWA's procurement contracts suggest that funds are already flowing to PFLP affiliates," wrote foreign policy expert Julia Shulman.
"[T]he Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act (PATA).... prohibits assistance to the PA unless the administration certifies that 'no ministry, agency, or instrumentality of the Palestinian Authority is effectively controlled by Hamas'" — Matthew Zweig, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, June 2021.
Commenting on the Biden administration decision to restore the financial aid, UN Watch said that now is the time for the US to demand that "neutrality, accountability and transparency" Secretary Antony Blinken paraded.
It does not seem, however, that UNRWA has taken far-reaching and drastic measures to end the incitement to violence and antisemitism. In fact, it has not taken any at all.
It is clear that UNRWA, like many other UN agencies, has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Instead of seeking ways to solve the problem of the so-called refugees, UNRWA has perpetuated and inflated it.... Instead of promoting peace and non-violence, UNRWA employees have been doing the reverse.... UNRWA donors might consider these evasions before they sign the next check to one of the UN's most incompetent and corrupt organizations.
Muhammad Aliwat, the 13-year-old Palestinian attacker who ambushed and seriously wounded a father and his son at the entrance to the City of David Friday night, used his school notebook to leave a message for his mother that reads: “God, or victory, or martyrdom. Forgive me, mother, you’re going to be proud of me.”Was a 13-year-old Palestinian incited to terrorism by UN schoolbooks?
The 8th-grader, reportedly a student at the Al-Furqan Islamic School for Boys in the Shuafat refugee camp, which uses the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum, has had quite an education in martyrdom, jihad, and antisemitism this school year and last. For example, he studied comprehension through a story promoting suicide bombings, in which Palestinians “cut the necks of enemy soldiers.” In Islamic education, a textbook devotes an entire chapter to teaching that martyrdom is “obligatory,” that it brings honor, glory, and promises entrance to paradise. Those who do not sacrifice themselves are weak.
Jews are depicted as conspiratorial, powerful, evil, and impure, posing a threat to the sanctity of Islam. A teacher guide for the 7th grade teaches that Jews crushed children’s heads, set them on fire, and threw them into wells. Even the science classes Aliwat attended take advantage of the opportunity to teach hate. He learned Newton’s Second Law through the action of a slingshot aimed at soldiers, and biology through a violent clash with the IDF that asks about its effects on one’s bodily organs.
This is a small sample of some of the violent and inciteful material Aliwat was presumably exposed to in the Palestinian Authority (PA) curriculum this year and last; material taught by teachers whose salaries are supported by the European Union, Germany, and other nations. It is the curriculum taught by UNRWA, whose biggest financial supporter is the United States.
UNRWA has been caught twice in the last two years by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Education (IMPACT-se) teaching its self-produced hate material. Its response was a half-apology followed by outright denial.
Education is the imparting of a society’s common knowledge and traditions to the next generation – it is the most important task adults have, it is a core task of government, and it is strategic.
After a young Palestinians shot two Israelis in Jerusalem, proclaiming he wanted to die 'a martyr', our Calev Ben-David reflects on the issue of incitement to terror that is often found in Palestinian school curriculums — including at UN-run schools.