First victory, then peace

Emily Amrousi’s piece about rape as an act of terror should be required reading for everyone who thinks that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is about borders and Palestinian statehood.

There is one passage that stood out, about the 2006 rape and murder of 9-year old Lipaz Himi:

Anwar Ahdush, a resident of the village of Tzurif and a member of Fatah’s Tanzim who had entered Israel illegally, confessed to the crime. Two days before raping and murdering Himi, Ahdush killed another Jew, David Ben-Hamo, with an axe. When police questioned him for the first time, he said he had committed both acts as “revenge for the suffering of Palestinian mothers,” and added that he had also planned to murder a female soldier and kidnap a bus carrying schoolchildren and steer it down a ravine.

When Judge Dalia Ganot of the Tel Aviv District Court asked Ahdush why he had committed the act, he answered: “Because tomorrow this girl will grow up, be in the army and murder our children.”

When he was asked why he trained at shooting, he answered, “Because we are in a state of war.”

“A war against a 9-year-old girl?” the judge pressed.

“For us, there is no 9 years old or 10 years old,” he answered. The fact that since Ahdush’s arrest his family has been receiving a stipend of NIS 4,000 ($1,100) per month from Fatah is further evidence that the crime was nationalistically motivated.

Some random thoughts that came to mind:

Israel has no death penalty, and lately a history of releasing murderers either to ransom kidnapped Israelis (even dead ones) or to “strengthen Palestinian moderates.” Fatah, the organization headed by Mahmoud Abbas to which Anwar Ahdush belonged, is counted as ‘moderate’. When prisoners are released, especially those that have murdered Jewish civilians, they are welcomed as heroes.

When Yasser Arafat returned from exile after the Oslo Accord created the Palestinian Authority (PA), he instituted a wide-ranging campaign to deepen the hatred of Jews and Israel in the Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian educational and religious systems and all Palestinian media were focused on this objective. The Palestinian Media Watch organization provides hundreds of examples, which include crude Jew-hatred, denial of Jewish history, distortions of recent events, sheer invention of ‘war crimes’, blood libels, religious conspiracy theories, adulation of terrorists and exhortation to martyrdom.

The Palestinian Cause, as it is taught, takes various forms, but what is common to all of them is the end of the Jewish state. The campaign has been continued, even strengthened, under ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas.

In the US today there is a controversy about laws restricting certain breeds of dogs, which some consider inherently dangerous. Others say that the dogs, which are often adopted by drug dealers as guards or set to fight one another, are only aggressive when trained to be. In the case of the Palestinian Arabs, we have the result of deliberately training a population of humans for hate and violence. Unsurprisingly, it works. The various Palestinian factions have all adopted versions of this strategy. It is a kind of warfare, an adjunct to the kinetic kind.

On the other hand, Israeli media, for the most part, tries to humanize the Palestinians. If there is an Israeli ‘Cause’, it is presented as peace. This is a mistake. Israel doesn’t need to — shouldn’t — adopt a philosophy of hate, like the Palestinian Arabs. But it’s essential to understand that the Jewish nation is at war with the Palestinian Arabs, and has been for almost 100 years. If the survival of the state and consequently the Jewish people is important, then our primary objective has to be victory. Peace will follow.

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