Last week, Adele Bitton, a four-year-old Israeli girl, died of medical complications from an injury she sustained two years earlier when a Palestinian threw a rock into the car in which she was riding. Jonathan Tobin comments on such attacks, and the twisted thinking that is used to excuse them:
As with the justifications heard for the rockets launched indiscriminately at Israeli cities, towns, and villages, apologists for the Palestinians say they should be allowed to throw rocks because they don’t have tanks or an air force. For Palestinians, the sight of a Jew in a car living in a place where Arabs would prefer no Jews to live is enough to justify a rock thrown at a moving vehicle. But whatever one thinks about West Bank settlements, the rocks are lethal weapons. When used in this manner they are a practice that any American who was subjected to similar treatment on a U.S. highway would consider attempted murder.
[Rock-throwing] by Palestinians is neither an act of peaceful disobedience nor a plea for Israel to withdraw to the June 1967 lines. To the contrary, like the rockets launched by Hamas, [rocks] are a visceral expression of the Palestinian belief that any Jew living anywhere in the country, whether in the West Bank or pre-1967 Israel, is fair game for murder.
More about: Israel & Zionism, Palestinian terror, Rock throwing, Settlements, West Bank