This formula avoids collective Palestinian Arab punishment, while promoting the collective welfare of the Jews in their land. Opinion
Some compelling incentives and conditions facilitate a Palestinian Muslim terrorist’s decision to murder Jews: his sense of Islamic obligation, Palestinian patriotic responsibility, family support, and Palestinian Authority financial payment. These are some of the components igniting his enthusiasm and validating his choice to set out to murder Jews, Israelis.
HOW TO PREVENT TERRORISM
Israel implements an impressive array of security measures to ward off terrorist assaults – monitoring potential attackers, surveillance ambushes, preventive detentions, a security fence, checkpoints, and patrolling city streets. Yet it is unreasonable to expect total success.
The recent spate of Palestinian Arab terrorist assaults in Beersheba, Hadera, Bnei Brak, Tel-Aviv, and Ashkelon exploited the virtually unhindered movement of Arabs throughout the country, their illegal possession of weapons, and – most decisively – their fundamental hatred of Jews and rejection of the Zionist state of Israel.
Once we realize that there is no full-proof method to preempt and prevent every terrorist attack before it occurs, the question is then whether there is an effective way to avert the next one from occurring.
THE TERRORIST’S PARENTS
ARABS celebrate the murder of Israelis. The father of Ra’ad Hazem from Jenin, who murdered three Israeli civilians sitting in a Tel Aviv café on April 7, waxed joyous and proud, boasting “the [Palestinian] victory will come soon…you [Palestinians] will be free and Al Aqsa will be liberated from the [Israeli] occupation.” The cult of martyrdom that is central to the Palestinian Arab narrative does not sanction moral musings or shameful submission to realities.
THERE is however a way to draw the curtains on Palestinian mythmaking by Israel changing her mind-set and thinking out of the box.
Muslim parents, both fathers and mothers, praise their sons for self-sacrifice on behalf of ‘Palestine’, as the terrorist summarily cut down by security forces brings honor to his family. This patriarchal society surges with religious and national loyalty as a sacred principle. Life goes on for the family, while the son’s action serves as a model of emulation for future martyr murderers.
A radically different scenario would nonetheless unfold if the Israeli response to terrorism would be the immediate expulsion of the parents and entire family.
Distributing sweets, which is customary after killing Jews, would end. From offering glowing tribute to their courageous son, parents would become the victims of his outrageous decision to spray Israeli streets with bullets targeting innocent Israelis. Before dawn breaks – and Israel buries her dead – the Palestinian parents would be across the border never to return.
Such a policy decision would serve a number of purposes. The festival of terrorism would become a woeful day in ‘Palestine’. The heroic act of murdering Jews will produce humiliation, disruption, and expulsion. Siblings, friends, and neighbors, some of whom might want to mimic the shaheed, would reassess a reckless decision, seeing how a son causes the uprooting of his parents. Rather than enjoying eternal veneration in the pantheon of Palestinian Arab ‘freedom fighters’, the son turns into the ,nemesis of his parents and their sad fate.
No less, this formula avoids collective Palestinian Arab punishment, while promoting the collective welfare of the Jews in their land.
CHANGING PALESTINIAN DECISION-MAKING
A cacophony of voices from all quarters will rise indignantly to dismiss this deterrent policy as immoral, politically unacceptable, legally awkward, and counter-productive from a security viewpoint.
That said, various new or alternative policy options are available to contend, contain, and crush terrorism. Israel could apply emergency measures by cancelling citizenship and residence status, deny access to social benefits and services, impose curfews over rogue villages, institute severe prison sentences, and impose fines on derelict persons and entities.
Striking out directly against the parents of terrorists would inflict a searing sting and traumatic upheaval against the enemy. The measure proposed is rational considering the Arab cultural milieu and defendable before Israeli public opinion.
Israel should enact this policy measure today. It will challenge and change the decision-making calculus in Palestinian Arab circles – for the better.
If we are looking for a powerful addition to Israel’s arsenal of deterrent measures, we have found it in expelling the family of a terrorist. With its first use, every father will wax angry and warn his son – dir balak – not to become the cause of the next family’s loss of home and land.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan is a retired lecturer at Hebrew U. and writes and lectures on Israel and the Middle East. He is the author of Only Israel West of the River and The Crack-up of the Israeli Left, among others.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/suspect-in-haifa-terror-stabbing-said-to-be-daughter-of-ex-shin-bet-informant/
Everybody thinks loyal Arabs should be encouraged to stay. Granted that they are an invaluable source of intellligence. But what about their kids?
@Frank That’s easy. Gaza. And their homes should go to the JNF.
Perhaps easier to start with …pass a law that as allows the state to dispose of the dead terrorist by not returning the body to the family , so that there is no sense of closure.
There is the little question as to where and how the terrorists’ parents and siblings are to be deported to ? Gaza? Yemen? Algeria?
Apart from the practicalities above, this proposal is at least consistent with, and understanding of Arab society and that it does not care for any form nor particular nation-state but is strongly clan and family focussed first.
As for whether Israel has the stomach to do it we have suffered enough from anti-liberals and have prospered with Enlightenment liberality and the resulting prosperity of the industrial age. Accordingly we have tender consciences about mistreating anybody as well as conscience stemming from our own halacha and musar.
However these people have declared war and intention to eliminate us and are waging war even if shooting unarmed civilians is not actual fighting it is war – which by definition is a break and suspension of normal civilian peacetime rules. One could at least run the experiment of deporting the families of this run of incidents and watch for whether the recruits dry up or not. It seems that Op Defensive Shield in 2002 caused the PA to be a lot more cautious and end the Second Intifada.
I have been saying this for years: Hang the terrorist, demolish his house, and deport his entire family. End of story.
exactly. next to pouring pig fat on the dead terrorist’s body, this tactic, aimed at the family-honor obsession of moslems, makes sense. will Israel adopt it? of course not. Jews are too divided and too weak inthe kishkes and beitzim to do so.
This may be a start but it will certainly take a long time. For over 70 years the Palestinians have preached jihad and martyrdom in the name of Allah and “From the river to the sea”; denying any legitimacy to a Jewish Homeland. For 70 years the Palestinians have taught generations of their children the virtue of martyrdom for the cause. There can be no peace with those who are determined to kill Jews.