By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY
According to a front-page story in today’s Haaretz, everything you thought you knew about the Jewish terrorists suspected of perpetrating last week’s horrific murder of a Palestinian baby is wrong. The accepted wisdom, propagated by everyone from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to Haaretz’s own editorial pages, is that the terrorists are motivated by a “climate of incitement,” in which extremist statements by right-wing rabbis and politicians lead them to believe that anything, even murder, is permissible to achieve their goals. But Israel’s premier counterterrorism agency – which, unlike espousers of the accepted wisdom, has spent years studying the terrorists up close – doesn’t buy it.
These few dozen hardcore terrorists, the Shin Bet security service told Haaretz,heed neither rabbis nor politicians; they are “anarchist anti-Zionists” who consider even “extremist” rabbis too moderate. Moreover, their goal isn’t to promote Jewish settlement or stop territorial withdrawals or any other goal shared by the “extremist” rabbis and politicians; rather, it’s to overthrow the State of Israel itself and replace it with a religious “kingdom.” In this, they differ fundamentally even from the “price-tag” vandals, whose goal was limited to deterring house demolitions in the settlements and whose tactics – albeit completely unacceptable – were generally confined to vandalism, “with no clear intention to cause bodily harm.”
In other words, these terrorists don’t reflect a widespread “sickness” in Israeli society, as Rivlin likes to say; they are no more representative of mainstream Israel than neo-Nazi fringe groups are of mainstream modern Germany – and perhaps even less.
So how racist and extremist is mainstream Israeli society? Well, consider the following collection of news items from the last few days alone:
• The OECD just issued a report praising Israel’s efforts to increase Arab employment, though noting that much remains to be done.
• Israeli government figures show a sharp rise in the workforce participation rate among Arab women over the last 20 years, from 19 percent to 32.5 percent.
• The Economy Ministry just inaugurated special scholarships for Bedouin engineering students, the latest in a series of affirmative action programs for the Arab community. Under another program, the government funds 85 percent of research at Arab high-tech startups, compared to only 50 percent at Jewish startups.
• The government recently started investing in tourism development in Arab communities; inter alia, it sponsored Ramadan events in various Arab towns this year and ran a nationwide campaign encouraging Jews to visit them. As Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, noted, this doesn’t erase past discrimination, but “On the symbolic plane, this represents a significant step forward in government policy.”
• The Druze Arab town of Beit Jann had the highest pass rate in the country on the 2013-14 matriculation exams.
• Salah Hasarma just became the first Arab coach of a Jewish soccer team in Israel’s top league.
• While a few Israeli Arabs have joined Islamic State, they aren’t flocking to do so at the same rate as Arabs from other Western countries. This, argues Prof. Hillel Frisch of Bar-Ilan University, indicates that Israeli Arabs are less dissatisfied with their lives than Arabs in many European countries – or at least, more aware of how lucky they are not to be living in the chaotic hell across the border.
To understand why the above news items are so important, consider a Biblical analogy I heard from rabbi and journalist Yishai Fleisher last week. When the king of Moab wants the prophet Balaam to curse the Jewish people, he deliberately takes him to a place where “you will not see them all, but only the outskirts of their camp” (Numbers 23:13). Why? Because when you focus exclusively on one tiny fringe element of Israel, it’s easy to curse it. But when you see the whole of Israel in all its complexity, it’s much harder.
In this case, the tiny fringe is perpetrating horrific attacks on Arabs in an effort to overthrow the state. But the state it seeks to overthrow is investing heavily in trying to better integrate its Arab citizens and rectify past discrimination against them.
And if you’re going to choose a single part of Israel’s mosaic to represent the whole, the mainstream that promotes integration is surely a more representative piece than a lunatic fringe trying to overthrow the state.
Originally published in Commentary on August 3, 2015
This article by The Commentary would seem to be a cover for the truth of what happened which has been used as a false flag operation against Jews and Judaism.
Israeli society is split down the middle. It is split on this central question which is very similar to a massive split throughout western society as a whole. The question is: ” …Is the Palestinian Arab movement a true national movement or is it an expression of Muslim Jihadist Antisemitism? THAT is the issue. THAT is the issue that is splitting Jews in Israel and is the issue that needs to be cleared up”…
The Sharon disengagement from Gush Katif in Gaza and another area in the “West Bank” was not meant to be a one off but was meant to lead to a total disengagement from large areas of the West Bank and the creation of a unitary obviously Judenfrei “Palestinian” state.
However Sharon was very nearly not able to complete even the Gaza withdrawal because the Hamas rockets were raining down on the IDF even as they withdrew from Gaza and even more importantly the masses of Israelis especially Israeli youth were showing strong misgivings about the whole Gaza withdrawal. It was that movement of the Israeli (can I call it?) mass movement that stopped Sharon advancing towards his cherished aim of creating the Palestinian Arab State, imposing a dictatorship over the Israeli people, thus instituting Jihadism inside of the Arab segment, a Jihadism meant to solve that issue once and for all.
Sharon was thus that section of Israeli society which continued to deny the central fact mentioned above … that what Israelis were always facing was a facet of the Muslim Jihad, all carefully wrapped up inside the Arab “Narrative” of lies concerning Jews driving “Palestinians” from their homes in 1948 and 1967, a narrative never answered by the Israeli elites, who controlled the state coffers, and who always had the means to answer those lies but would not ever do so.
Thus this is the basic divide inside of Israeli society. Is the Arab Palestinian Narrative and Continual Agitation against the Israeli Jewish State part of that International Muslim Jihad, or is it not?
That is the divide in Israeli society and there is no other divide. Of course there are many other “disagreements” but they are not so central as this. Jews have always fallen into many brackets. There have always been Jews with strong religious convictions and there have been Jews with strong atheist convictions. They have always managed to rub along together just fine. There is no problem here and there never has been a problem for the good and simple reason that both a religious Jew and an atheistic Jew can be bound together in a devotion to a Jewish Homeland, which is another name for the internationally recognized concept of national liberation.
It was totally a similar situation in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. There a witchhunt was raised against Slobodan Milosevic on an international scale and from there the biggest lie in the history of humanity was constructed by the Media, that is the so-called “Srebrenica Massacre”. There are two main lessons:
LESSON 1 … that in Yugoslavia the central issue was that the Christian Serbs were fighting against especially and above all the Islamist Jihadist and anti-Serb bigot Izetbegovic. He wrote “there can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions”. The struggle was against the Jihad just as the struggle in Israel is against the Jihad. Serb hatred, Jew hatred, these are the forms but the content is the Jihad which comes out of the religion/ideology of Islam
LESSON 2 … that having created the Big Lie of Srebrenica there can never be any going back by the Media. There are far too many journalists, Media Outlets, Newspapers, who have expended huge amounts of money and their own eputation. So the Big Lie needs to be continued and reconstructed anew day by day and week by week without end. There is no possibility of breaking through on this as long as the Big Media control the Narrative.
It will be the same in the Big Lie of the arson attacks in Duma. The key evidence, but evidence which has only been allowed on the pages of the Jewish patriotic Israel National News, and only once there, is that of the young Jewish “settler” who visited the place, a visit organized by left wing groups for their own Israel-hating ends.
Yonadav Tapuch travelled to Duma to pay his condolences to the family. He did so as part of a group of “settlers” who were used and who in the end were denied an occasion to speak to the family. These Jews well meaning from the Jewish villages were photographed in a certain way that propagandistically will be used against them.
However Yodadav Tapuch an ordinary Jewish man on that trip simply reported a few basic facts which are undeniable
1. There are reports that a feud existed inside this Muslim village between two families and going back 15 years. This can have great bearing on the truth of this affair.
2. The report from Duma itself said that two houses and not one was attacked. The first proved to be empty. Then these unknown arsonists found that the second house was not easy to enter or to firebomb from the front. They are said to have therefore went round the back, entered, had contact with the family, fired it, left, masked, oh and they had chosen houses in the centre of the village, so they had to make their way right out of that village, not an easy task for strangers. It seems that these arsonists had no fear, had all the time in the world, and they did all of this in a village which let them and let them have all of that time in the world to do this.
3. Our young Jewish chap had travelled out to the village by bus and on the bus he was alarmed at the hatred for the Jewish people in the villages of Judea and Samaria being expressed by those Jewish (activists against the settlers) people on the bus
Let me finish with the very revealing words of this young Jewish man in his twenties as to what he learned, and saw, all of which was and is immediately available to one and all who want to know the truth, but obviously truth here is not on the agenda at all:
“It was impossible to ignore some of the more curious aspects of the story. I would start with the fact that the two houses (I had always thought only one house was burnt) are located in the center of the village, and that in order to get there we had to travel a number of minutes from the entrance. Duma is spread out over a gigantic area, and the houses are situated at the end of a winding road, among fences and yards.
“According to the Duma version, the attackers burnt one house, then saw that it was empty, and so they went to set fire to the next house. The second house is enclosed by a fence, and the windows are covered by a dense lattice; a firebomb cannot be hurled through the windows, and in any event it is very hard to reach the windows behind the fence. The arsonists had to go around the house, enter the yard, and place the firebombs through the lattice. According to the Duma version, the attackers entered the house, stood over the parents and did not let them leave until the flames engulfed the house. Only then did the arsonists run away from the village.
“I can only say that when the arsonists are ultimately caught, we will get to hear a fascinating story of why they chose to navigate their way all the way into the middle of the village, and how they had time to set a house on fire, wait to find that it was empty, then walk around and enter another house and set it on fire, wait with the parents, spray graffiti in two places – including with a little design of a crown! – and then run away through the middle of the village with all the townspeople surely already up and on their feet seeing the flames and hearing the family’s cries. Something here is very fishy…” “