Since June 2021, for the first time in 12 years, Israel seems to have a weak prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Israel needs its strong tribe status. Israel needs a statesman. Now. Pictured: Bennett (right) and his foreign minister, Yair Lapid, on June 13, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images)<
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- The years before 2021 had brought relative calm and improvements. The United States had cut much of its funding for the Palestinian Authority, which had been used for terrorism. As a result, terrorism had substantially decreased. When the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and drastically sanctioned Iran, the mullahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had less money to finance and arm Hamas. ISIS was crushed. A rapprochement began between Israel and the Arab world and led to the Abraham Accords, signed between the United States, Israel, and five Muslim countries – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Kosovo and Sudan. For the first time in decades in the Middle East, “peace, security and prosperity” held sway.
- The election of US President Joe Biden, however, quickly revealed that better lives for people in the region, including the Palestinians, were about to end. The Biden administration immediately returned to the policies of the Obama years. It restored the funding that Palestinian leaders use for terrorism, without first stipulating that the terrorism had to stop. The Biden administration resumed nuclear negotiations with Iran — through an intermediary from, of all places Russia. (Iran did not allow the US officials in the room.) The US government itself had named Iran “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism;” now the Biden administration was again enabling the ruling mullahs — who call for “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” — soon to have an unlimited number of nuclear weapons, the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them, and billions of dollars for terrorism and resuming their efforts to take over the oil-rich Middle East. Meanwhile, America’s interlocutor, Russia, has been working with Iran on how it can evade US sanctions for invading Ukraine so that both countries may further enrich themselves by Iran selling Russia’s oil.
- When “settlement expansion” is made to sound as grave a transgression as murder, terrorism will resume.
- Since June 2021, for the first time in 12 years, Israel seems to have a weak prime minister, Naftali Bennett. He has evidently promised to work in “quiet coordination” with the Biden administration and never criticizes the administration’s anti-Israel policies.
- The leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas see that an anti-Israel administration is in place in Washington and draw their own conclusions.
- Sunni Arab leaders are currently “trying to decide whether to grovel to Iran, or stand with Israel… Israel has but one option – to become the strong tribe of the Middle East”. — Caroline Glick, Israel Hayom, March 25, 2022.
- Israel needs its strong tribe status. Israel needs a statesman. Now.
Beersheba, Israel. March 22. Mohammed Abu al-Kiyan rams his car into a rabbi riding a bicycle, killing him, then drives to a gas station and stabs a woman to death there, and then drives to a shopping mall and stabs two more people to death. After fleeing the mall, he crashed his car into another vehicle and was finally shot and killed by armed civilians as he charged at one of them with a knife.
On March 27, Ayman and Ibrahim Ighbarieh open fire at people standing at a bus stop in Hadera, kill two Border Police officers and wound ten more people before they, too, are shot and killed by off-duty police officers who were eating nearby.
March 29, in Bnei Brak, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Diaa Hamarsheh, murders five people in a shooting spree before being shot dead by policemen, one of whom Hamarsheh had mortally wounded.
How can left wing Two-Staters be purged from the entrenched Deep State commanding heights of power which they hold even when they can’t win an election? That’s the question. People don’t change their minds often. It’s the people in charge who need to be changed. And they call that democracy? Is there a mechanism? I know Lapid has stymied every vote in the Knesset to rein in the courts on matters of executive and legislative policy in line with every other parliamentary country in the world.
It certainly doesn’t help that Raam is holding Israel by the short hairs when anti-Zionist Arabs who justify terror shouldn’t even be in the Knesset. Or the fears of Biden, the UN, the potential collapse of the Abraham Accords and losing informers among the Arabs. There’s just so much paralyzing fear. Ben Gurion took chances with less.
It seems very obvious that appeasement will not get the desired results. All parents know that instinctively, so why are Israeli politicians so naïve?
Actually we already know why. The judiciary in Israel makes every effort to sandbag reasonable reactions to Arab provocations and recent news shows that on a daily basis. Think, for example, about the Sheikh Jarrah issue and the courts response. Then come the military commanders who are responsible for everything that happens in the so-called occupied territories. They don’t want to get their fingers dirtied by dealing with the issues under their responsibility.
It’s easiest to lean back and make it seem as if someone else messed up, but unfortunately, that is the MO at all levels from the government through the judiciary, the police and the army.
How often have we heard that housing schemes in Judea and Samaria were stopped due to “outside pressure”? How often have we heard that Jews were banned from praying at the biblical sites, not to speak of Christians? On the other hand, taking it out on “regular” Israeli citizens is the usual approach taken to solve any issues. Just read the news!