New York Times reporter Jody Rudoren accuses Israel of destabilizing both Israeli-Palestinian relations and the new “unity government ” of the Palestinians, and sentencing the Palestinians to collective punishment as it seeks to find the three boys kidnapped a week back, almost certainly by Hamas operatives. The three kidnap victims and their families are, of course, only deserving of a modicum of international sympathy, since they supposedly belong to “settler families” living on land “promised to,” and rightfully belonging to the Palestinians. (In fact, only one of the three families lives in a settlement.) In pretty much every story on the three boys in European papers or The New York Times, it is obligatory to mention the settler aspect, since this suggests the families to some extent had it coming to them for their participation in a colonial enterprise. Perhaps the only thing that could have muddied the waters further would be if the three boys had been wearing Washington Redskins tee shirts at the time of the kidnapping, which would have conclusively demonstrated their lack of concern for all those less privileged and more deserving of the world’s concern.
There are of course, plenty of destabilizing things going on in the Middle East, though hitchhiking teenage boys, and the Israeli government’s interest in finding them while they are still alive, hardly fall in that category. The unity agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas was a particularly destabilizing event. With no change in any of the expressed objectives of Hamas, the unity agreement was essentially a formal marriage between the PA and a terrorist entity committed to the murder of Jews in Israel and anywhere else they could find them. That agreement was bound to destabilize Israeli-Palestinian relations, as was the kidnapping of three teenage boys by the new partner in the PA government.
The Israeli search for the kidnappers and their victims is what governments in civilized countries do to protect their people. Kidnapping children is what terrorist regimes do and is designed to destabilize. Hamas clearly sees a path to power in the West Bank, much as it has achieved power in Gaza. Forcing the PA on the defensive — appearing to accede to Israeli demands to cooperate in the search for the kidnappers, while Hamas remains resolute in supporting such attacks, is bound to improve Hamas’ standing versus the PA among a population that loves to glorify terrorist killings and kidnappings and prefers them over deals with the “Zionist entity.”
The Hamas message of how Jews should be treated anywhere you can find them seemed to have been well understood in Europe — in Paris and Brussels and Antwerp in recent days. In Antwerp, it appeared to be Jewish 5-year-olds that proved so unsettling and destabilizing to the Muslim attackers.