“I’m proud of him.”
That’s what the father of Dafna Meir’s murderer said when the Palestinian media asked him what he thinks of his cold-blooded son Murad Adais.
On Sunday afternoon, Adais butchered Meir in her home, in front of her children.
Whether Adais Sr. is really happy that his son will rot in prison is less important than the fact that he said what he said to his home crowd.
He knows that his audience thinks his son is a hero. And so he played to his audience.
Since last September when the Palestinians began their current terrorist onslaught, killers like Adais have been characterized as lone wolves. But a study published last November in Mosaic online journal by Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar shows that this characterization is both wrong and unhelpful.
Polisar studied Palestinian public opinion data from surveys conducted by four independent research groups over the past 25 years. His data exposed three key aspects to Palestinian positions about Israel that all bear directly on the current Palestinian terrorist offensive.
His first finding is that throughout most of the past quarter-century a solid majority of Palestinians have supported terrorism against Israelis.
Moreover, the more murderous an attack, the more it is supported.
Polisar’s second finding was that the vast majority of Palestinians hate Israelis and believe that Jews have no right to the Land of Israel, and therefore our state has no right to exist.
Taken together, these first two insights lead to one clear conclusion about the nature of the current Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israelis. As Polisar explained, they show that this campaign is not being carried out by “lone wolves,” who have been incited by Palestinian Authority propaganda. Rather, that propaganda reflects the murderous hatred that the vast majority of Palestinians feel toward Israelis and Israel.
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Adais and his comrades may or may not be members of terrorist groups. But they are the loyal representatives of their terrorism-supporting society.
Obviously, any talk of a peace process in this climate is utter folly. The most Israel can aspire to is to deter the hate-soaked Palestinians from attacking us.
This brings us to the third insight of Polisar’s study. Twenty-five years of survey data make clear that most Palestinians believe that terrorism pays.
And the plain fact is that they are right. For the past generation, the Palestinians have only benefited from killing Israelis through terrorism.
The fact that Israeli concessions to the Palestinians have strengthened their conviction that terrorism pays rather than convinced them to make peace shows that all concessions in the face of terrorism are dangerous.
While the majority of Israelis have learned this lesson and so elected governments that oppose appeasement, the Palestinians have learned that the Israeli public does not have the final word on whether or not they will be rewarded for their crimes against humanity.
The Palestinians believe that Israel is dependent on Western goodwill. So to the extent that the West pressures Israel surrender to Palestinian demands, the US and the EU work hand in glove with Palestinian terrorists and prove that they are right to murder mothers in their homes in front of their children.
This week US Ambassador Dan Shapiro proved the Palestinians right, yet again.
At the outset of his speech before the Institute of National Security Studies on Monday, Shapiro issued a pro forma condemnation of “barbaric acts of terrorism” against Israelis.
But that was just clearing his throat. In his substantive remarks, Shapiro accused Israel of institutional racism in Judea and Samaria.
Shapiro’s slanderous accusation channeled and escalated his boss Secretary of State John Kerry’s anti-Israel libel from two years ago. In early 2014, Kerry alleged that if Israel didn’t cough up Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem soon, it risked becoming a criminal apartheid state in the future.
By falsely alleging that Israel uses one (lenient) law against Israelis and another (iron fisted) law against Palestinians, Shapiro gave substance to Kerry’s two-year-old assault. And in claiming that this state of affairs exists today, he transformed Kerry’s incendiary claim of an apartheid future into a defamatory rap sheet for current imaginary offenses.
The timing of Shapiro’s blood libel was significant for two reasons. First, the day after a Palestinian murdered Meir, and hours after another Palestinian stabbed another Jewish mother in the late stages of pregnancy, the US ambassador told the Palestinians that America blames Israel for their barbarism.
Shapiro maligned Israel just as the Council of Europe announced it was firming up its rules for labeling Jewish-made products from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and published a document on its plans for handling a unicorn called “the Middle East Peace Process.”
Both the EU’s announcement about labeling Jewish products and its document about the nonexistent “Middle East Peace Process” were notable for two reasons. First, they made no mention whatsoever of terrorism. As far as the Europeans are concerned, the only side preventing peace is Israel. And to bring peace, the EU calls for the Jewish state to be treated like Jews in Europe – that is, singled out for discrimination, abuse and insults.
The near simultaneity of Shapiro’s slander and the EU’s latest discriminatory steps against Israel tells the Palestinians that they should keep up their attacks. Israel will be hard pressed to launch an effective counterattack with the Americans and Europeans breathing down its neck demanding concessions.
The message these statements communicate to Israel is actually worse than that. The simultaneity of these remarks was not coincidental.
Neither was State Department spokesman James Kirby’s condemnation of Israel’s lawful land policies in the Jordan Valley, which was followed immediately by a similar condemnation by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and a call by the PA for a UN Security Council resolution against Israel. Taken together they show that we are in the midst of a coordinated US-led political offensive against Israel.
How is Israel supposed to defend itself against this coordinated terrorist-diplomatic onslaught? How can Israel keep the Americans and Europeans at bay and deter the Palestinians from murdering its citizens? Beyond the counterterror measures that are already being carried out, Israel needs to act on three levels.
On the diplomatic front, the government needs to change the focus of its public diplomacy.
The government currently accepts the false claim that the Palestinian terrorist onslaught is being carried out by lone wolves. Its public diplomacy is limited as a consequence to condemning official Palestinian Authority incitement.
This line is wrong and counterproductive.
It lends credence to the false conclusion that the assault is limited and can therefore be overlooked by Westerners eager to attack Israel.
In their public pronouncements, our officials should direct their remarks against Palestinian society as a whole. So too the government should attack the radical Left in Israel and in the West that supports a society that seeks to annihilate Israel, applauds barbarism and kills anyone who wishes to live at peace with Israel.
Wednesday, a storm erupted in England following The Sun’s publication of the findings of an undercover investigation of so-called human rights groups broadcast on Channel 2’s investigative news magazine two weeks ago. That investigation showed senior “human rights” activists Ezra Nawi from Ta’ayush and Nasser Nawaja from B’Tselem plotting to turn over to the Palestinian security forces a Palestinian who wished to sell land to Jews. Nawajah and Nawi acted with the full knowledge that he would be tortured and killed. In a heated debate in the British Parliament, lawmakers demanded to know why the government was funding B’Tselem with taxpayer funds.
In other words, the lawmakers showed that a policy of exposing the barbarism of Palestinian society and the fanaticism of its Western supporters is effective.
The second area where the government must act is in its settlement policies. Although it will be difficult for Israel to face down the Obama administration and respect Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in the coming year, nothing is stopping it from destroying illegal EU-financed Palestinian construction in Area C.
The government should act forcefully to remove all of the EU-constructed illegal Palestinian settlements in Area C of Judea and Samaria. The place the government should begin demolition is at the illegal Palestinian settlement outside the national heritage site of Sussiya, just kilometers from where Dafna Meir was murdered. The dual purpose of that specific EU-financed illegal building project is to threaten the Israeli communities of Sussiya and Mitzpe Yair and to deny the historic significance of the ancient Jewish city of Sussiya.
Destroying the squatter community will send a potent message to the Palestinians and their Western abettors.
At the same time, the government should speed up the pace of building new Israeli communities across the armistice line from Sussiya in the northern Negev around Arad in state lands being threatened by the EU-supported Beduin who are working in coordination with the Palestinian squatters in the South Hebron Hills.
The final thing that Israel needs to do in the face of the Palestinian terrorism supported by Western political warfare is to rub the EU bureaucrats’ faces in the fact that Israel is succeeding where their governments are failing. It isn’t enough for Israel to call for the Jews of France and the rest of Western Europe to make aliya. Over the past two years, aliya from Western Europe has reached all-time highs. As the governments that single out the Jewish state for abuse prove on a daily basis that they cannot protect their Jewish citizens, more and more European Jews are heeding the call and moving to Israel.
But over the past several months, it has become apparent that for all our goodwill, Israel has not figured out how to absorb its newest citizens. Dentists, pharmacists and other professionals are chewed up and spit out by a bureaucracy of professional guilds whose protectionist licensing requirements are convincing many people to turn around and go back to Europe. The government must make it an urgent priority to break the guilds. It is far more important to enable Jewish professionals from France to work in their fields in Israel than to protect the antiquated licensing requirements of hidebound professional cliques.
Israel is under a coordinated assault by the Palestinians who hate us and the Europeans and Americans who are hostile to us.
Our options for dealing with this assault are not optimal. But they are formidable. If we make judicious use of them, we can flummox the White House and the EU, and at a minimum, we can begin to prove to the Palestinians that their faith in terrorism is no longer justified.
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