Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and Israel are the terrorists,” banners representing terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad waving above the crowd, gangs of “youths” attacking Israeli police throughout East Jerusalem, barrages of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, and the usual condemnations of Israel and calls for “restraint” from the “international community” – all sadly are business as usual. And the “business” is the demonization of Israel and the obscene double standards indulged by too many in the West.
The Israeli authorities have quickly tracked down and arrested 6 Israeli minors as suspects in the killing, even as the killers of the Israelis are still at large. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said, “We do not differentiate between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them.” The speed of the arrest, and Netanyahu’s unequivocal identification of the crime as an act of terrorism, should underline the differences between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which seemingly is making little effort to hunt down the main killers of the 3 Israelis, and the Authority’s political partner Hamas, which praised the killings. As Netanyahu pointed out, “The murderers [of the Israelis] came from the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority; they returned to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority is obliged to do everything in its power to find them, just as we did, just as our security forces located the suspects in the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir within a matter of days.”
But Israel’s enemies are unlikely to draw the proper conclusion from this contrast, or even take time to note how comparatively rare such violence on the part of Israelis is compared to the thousands of Israelis murdered by Palestinian Arabs over the decades. Rather, the moral and intellectual idiocy of the “cycle of violence” meme will determine reactions to this murder on the part of those too lazy or timid to choose a side, even as they hold Israel up to standards of behavior and forbearance no other country would accept. But there are good and bad sides in this conflict, and which side has the moral high ground can be seen by comparing further the reactions of each to the recent murders.
Listen, for example, to the response of Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas to the kidnapping of the Israeli teens, delivered at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Saudi Arabia: “Those who kidnapped the three Israeli teenagers want to destroy us. First and foremost [these teenagers] are human beings like us. It is our responsibility to search for them and to return them to their families. We will hold their kidnappers accountable, whoever they are.”
For those impressed by these comments, notice that the first sentence condemns the kidnapping not as a moral evil or a terrorist act, but as a tactical blunder damaging the Palestinian Arab program of destroying Israel by “stages.” Bad p.r. is the problem, not the evil of terrorism or the deaths of 3 innocent teenagers. This sort of comment is consistent with Abbas’s past habit of joining general condemnations of terrorist acts to complaints about their bad timing or damage to Palestinian interests. Speaking of the Second Intifada and its brutal terrorism, Abbas commented, “If we do a calculation we will see that without any doubt what we lost was big and what we gained was small.” Later, speaking out against a rocket attack from Gaza, he said, “This is not the time for this kind of attack,” which suggests there is a time for shooting rockets at women and children. That is, blowing up innocents is not wrong, just inefficient at that particular time for achieving the long-term goal of a Palestinian state that eventually will include the territory of Israel.