Why Murder Becomes a National Sport Jonathan S. Tobin
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/palestinian-murder-becomes-national-sport/
Foreign observers are somewhat puzzled by the latest twist in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They are used to seeing angry young Palestinian men lashing out in violence. But they are surprised by the fact that young women appear to be the backbone of the “stabling intifada” in which, in addition to shootings, gasoline bomb and rock throwing attacks, individual Palestinian terrorists are going out every day and seeking out Jews on the street to murder with knives.
What drives young girls and women to do murder and to usually sacrifice their own lives when, as has often happened, Israelis defend themselves against attempted butchery with armed force? In its feature on the subject published today, the New York Times attempts to answer the question with the usual explanations about Israel being to blame: “anger over decades of Israeli military occupation, fading hopes of statehood and a rebellion against Palestinian leaders.” But, the piece, written by the paper’s Palestinian stringers, also alludes to the drumbeat of incitement from those same leaders as well as the popular culture of hate that is part of the daily fare of the media controlled by them. When you strip away the usual cant about the conflict, it’s clear that it takes more than political grievances to make young people abandon their own lives in order to shed the blood of strangers. Tired talking points about statehood or borders aren’t a sufficient explanation. Only religious fervor and pure hatred can motivate a person to behave in such an inhuman fashion.
For all of the scratching of heads about troubled teenagers as well as brides and good students choosing “martyrdom” over life, the conundrum of Palestinian behavior is not to hard to figure out. Last month scholar Daniel Polisar set off a debate about the Middle East peace process with a study published in Mosaic Magazine that sought to analyze data about Palestinian public opinion. Anyone seeking to understand the new intifada as well as the motivations that are driving young women, in particular, to try to personally murder people on the street would do well to read his findings. Polisar’s conclusions after analyzing 30 years worth of public opinion surveys were that support for violence against Israel and Jews had broad, mainstream support among Palestinians. These beliefs were not rooted in the desire for statehood or an end to the occupation of the West Bank, the complaints that Westerners believe is the core of the conflict with Israel. That’s because the same large majorities believed Jews had no right to any part of the country, including the part that is within the 1967 lines.
In other words, what we might ordinarily see as barbaric behavior — personally taking a knife to stab and slash random pedestrians — isn’t merely considered normative for Palestinians. As long as the intended victims are Jewish (or thought to be Jewish since some of the attacks have resulted in Arabs mistaken for Jews being attacked), most Palestinians consider them fair game for murder.
Indeed, confirmation of this comes from the man that President Obama considers to be the great Palestinian “moderate” and “champion of peace.” As Palestine Media Watch reports, last month Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas praised the stabbings: “We said to everyone that we want peaceful, popular uprising, and that’s what this is. That’s what this is. However, the aggression of firing bullets has come from the Israelis.”
At the time of the statement, 14 Israelis had been killed and 167 wounded in 167 separate attacks. But in Abbas’s mainstream Palestinian view, these assaults were “peaceful,” and it was the attempts of Israelis to defend themselves by shooting those who sought to do murder that was “aggression.”
No one should be shocked by his callous support for murder. Abbas continues to cynically spread lies about Jews with “their stinking feet” planning to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount, the same canards that Haj Amin al-Husseini, his Nazi predecessor as Palestinian leader, used to incite pogroms in the 1920s and 30s.
As Polisar’s study points out, such Orwellian statements don’t come out of a vacuum any more than the stabbings. They are a product of incitement and demonization of Jews that is daily fare on the official media Abbas’s party runs in the West Bank as well as the work of their Hamas rivals in Gaza.
Indeed, as Memri.org reports, Hamas TV in Gaza recently broadcast comments from a senior member of the terror group in which he repeated the traditional blood libel usually associated with Medieval Christianity: The claim that Jews kill children in order to knead their blood into the matzah baked for Passover. That this comment comes from a senior Hamas leader who is also the holder of a Ph.D. in Palestinian literature also tells you all you need to know about what passes for intellectual thought in these circles.
Throw in the popular music broadcast throughout the territories that also incites people to murder Jews and to destroy Israel, and you have a toxic environment in which murder becomes not only acceptable but a praiseworthy act. As the Timesstory notes, parents of slain terrorists who stabbed or sought to kill Israelis are not only proud of them but conduct bizarre betrothal parties, in which dead boys and girls become “engaged.”
As one Palestinian source for the Times notes, this is not a political argument but a culture that romanticizes murder of Jews. Abbas has personally admitted, that he and Yasir Arafat rejected offers of statehood that would have given them control of almost all of the territories that their foreign friends claim they want. Whatever one may think of West Bank settlements or the need for Israel to make concessions for the sake of peace, it is not a dispute over terms of a two-state solution that has made murder the national pastime of the Palestinians.
So long as Palestinian identity is inextricably tied to the war against a Jewish state — no matter where its borders may be drawn — and their culture considers Jews unworthy of life, let alone sovereignty over even a piece of the country, peace isn’t possible. Even worse, unless a sea change in that culture occurs, the majority of Palestinians and their “moderate” as well as extremist leaders, are going to continue to think slaughtering Jews is the occupation of heroes and heroines.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine
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