RUTHFULLY YOURS

Against Israel “most of Palestinian resistance is basically nonviolent,” stated Kairos Palestine Secretary General Hind Khoury on September 21 at Washington, DC’s Dumbarton United Methodist Church (DUMC). Such alternative reality statements from Khoury raised no visible concern from a small evening audience of over 20 mostly white and older listeners, for whom she preached progressive Palestinian gospel truth.

Various indications even before Khoury spoke confirmed that DUMC in tony Georgetown is firmly part of the religious left, such as the entrance sign proclaiming a pro-LGBT a Reconciling Congregation. Chett Pritchett, executive director of event host Methodist Federation for Social Action and a homosexual “advocate for LGBTQ equality in the Church,” introduced Khoury in his home congregation. A yellow “Black Lives Matter” banner in front of the organ in the second-story sanctuary and several accompanying photographs of African-Americans throughout the church showed DUMC’s emphasis on racism.

Despite Pritchett’s introduction of Khoury with an “amazing list of superlatives to her name,” such as a Palestinian Authority (PA) ambassadorship to France, her presentation offered no insight.

“Today was my turn,” said a resident of Elazar in Gush Etzion in the West Bank, referring to his brush with Palestinian terrorism on Wednesday morning.

Driving on the Tekoa road to Jerusalem — which he took because his Waze satellite warned of traffic on his regular route — freelance journalist Josh Hasten (a show host at the now-defunct Voice of Israel online radio station) found himself prey to a mob of Arabs in balaclavas preparing to pummel him with rocks and concrete blocks.

“And it happened a mere 500 meters away from a checkpoint manned with IDF soldiers,” Hasten told The Algemeiner.

The checkpoint in question is the roadblock between the east Jerusalem Arab village of Sur Baher and the Israeli neighborhood, Har Homa. It was here, shortly before Hasten was confronted with dozens of young men on the rampage against passing Jews, that 38-year-old Rivi Lev Ohayon was nearly lynched.

Lev Ohayon was on her way to work in Jerusalem from her home in Tekoa, when she was ambushed by a group of rock-wielding Palestinians, who shattered her car’s windows. One of them began to beat her, while trying to pull her out of the vehicle.

“I saw my death,” she told a Channel 2 news team from her Jerusalem hospital bed, where she is being treated for light wounds – which could have been far greater had Lev Ohayon not managed to accelerate and tear away from her attackers. Rather than wait for an ambulance to arrive at the nearby checkpoint, as she was instructed to do when she phoned for help, she drove home, where paramedics whisked her off to the hospital.

Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA spokesman, suggested that donor countries, instead of contributions, should be charged a compulsory annual fee.

The Palestinians’ desire appears to be to preserve the refugee problem at all costs, and not to resolve it in any just way — not in the Arab states and not in the Palestinian state that will be established next to Israel.

It is therefore clear that the Palestinians refuse to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel and are not willing to agree to the return of the refugees to the Palestinian state; their only objective is to destroy and displace Israel.

If Israel is genuinely an “apartheid state,” why do its people accept Arabs as citizens, while our racist brother Arabs refuse to?

Does anyone really think the Jews so stupid as to believe that we Arabs, who slaughter one another without giving it a second thought, will be particularly generous towards them if we succeed in realizing the right of return to Palestine?

“I saw a mob of 40 to 50 masked Palestinians on the side of the road. They were holding rocks and cinder blocks. … I have no doubt that I would be dead now if I hadn’t used my gun. They were going to kill me.” – Josh Hasten, Oct. 7, 2015.

Arab children watch other Arab children on television throw rocks and firebombs, and speaking of knifing and shooting Jews, and they want a part of the action.

When Arabs hear from their leaders that Jews are “desecrating” Islamic holy places with their “filthy feet” and plotting to destroy them, it is a code, telling them to go out and attack Jews.

Yesterday, a friend, Josh Hasten, was set upon by a crowd of rock-wielding Palestinians, while he was driving to Jerusalem. “I saw a mob of 40 to 50 masked Palestinians on the side of the road. They were holding rocks and cinder blocks,” Hasten said. “As they approached my car, I took out my gun and fired one round in the air. The shot obviously scared them and they ran up the hill away from the road. I have no doubt that I would be dead now if I hadn’t used my gun. They were going to kill me.”

The first rains that follow the High Holy Days have come to Jerusalem. As always, a blessed relief. But no relief seems imminent from the renewed tensions that have descended on the city. A series of brutal murders and attempted murders of Israeli Jewish civilians by Palestinian Arab Muslims have taken place over the last two weeks [1]. These have occurred against a backdrop of violent demonstrations and protests in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and increasingly among Israel’s Arab citizens.

For five years, Israel has lived a strange and contradictory reality. The Arab world is in an advanced state of meltdown. A number of formerly strong states have effectively ceased to exist. Syria, Iraq, Yemen are today merely names for areas in which sectarian militias battle one another. These states have collapsed along their ethnic and sectarian fault lines. The results have been bloody and are not yet over.

Yet on the edge of all this, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has remained quiet. An anomaly. This is the only place of non-Muslim sovereignty between Europe and India. The existence of a sovereign area successfully defended by the Jews — a group traditionally despised and ridiculed by Muslims — has long been a source of rage and humiliation for both Sunni and Shia.