The Palestinian Authority’s Ongoing Embrace of Murder

Wittingly or unwittingly, writes Robert Fulford, those who support the Palestinian regime in Ramallah and want it to become an independent state are backing those who glorify mass murder. Just recently, for instance, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) named a summer camp after one Dalal Mughrabi:

On March 11, 1978, Mughrabi directed the Coastal Road Massacre, in which 38 Israelis, including thirteen children, were killed and 72 were wounded. Mughrabi and eight other Palestinian terrorists also died. . . . She led a team of eleven who landed on the coastal plain near Tel Aviv. They hoped to create demonstrations that would shut down peace talks between Israel and Egypt. . . .

On the beach they encountered Gail Rubin, an American photographer taking nature pictures. They asked directions and after she answered Mughrabi killed her. On the coastal road, they hijacked a taxi, killing its occupants. They seized two buses and put all 71 passengers in one of them. Israeli soldiers stopped the bus and the two sides fired. The bus exploded. The Israelis say it exploded because Mughrabi blew it up with a grenade. . . . The plan to upset the Israel-Egypt talks failed; a peace treaty was signed and remains in force today. Even so, Mughrabi became, among Palestinians, a heroine and martyr, memorialized in the names of a public square, a computer center, and a soccer tournament, as well as a summer camp. . . .

There’s something especially ugly about celebrating Mughrabi’s achievement. She killed out of principle, but she killed at random. She willingly killed Israelis of every kind, and perhaps a few tourists who got in her way. She had no reason to think of them as human beings. It was killing for killing’s sake, intended to terrify other Israelis and make their existence unbearable. By raising her to the level of national standard-bearer, Palestinian leaders applaud the killing of innocents, morally authorizing others to do the same.

This attitude has carried over to the Knife Intifada, which began in 2015. Social media have been blamed for encouraging young would-be terrorists to draw knives abruptly and stab Israelis. But the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has helped create an aura of acceptance around this practice. While speaking publicly against violence, he recently met with Palestinians who carried out knife attacks and met with the family of a terrorist, [in keeping with his general practice].

Read more at National Post

More about: Israel & Zionism, Knife intifada, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terror, PLO

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society