The
Wall Street Journal
The truth about why
Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust.
 |
Israeli security forces and emergency services
next to the body of a
Palestinian who carried out a stabbing attack in the old city of Jerusalem
|
By BRET STEPHENS
If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might
have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this
headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph:
“Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and
the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly
drawn in.”
Read
further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is
perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli
Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza
Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such was
the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when
Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in
the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two
Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a
2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and
killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the
chest and back.
Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two
elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On
Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus
stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a
14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a
failed suicide bombing.
Regarding
the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have
resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the
peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas just
declared the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews
to pray atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has
barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary
“cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one
and the same time.
Left out
of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say.
As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is
ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We
bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood,
blood spilled for Allah.”
Then
there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall
today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded
address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build
walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of
their throats.”
Then,
brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”
Imagine
if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about
African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting
it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it
comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and
implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his
country has been stolen from him?
And would
this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is the
stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In the
Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater Israeli
culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing victims
to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence of
black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?
Didn’t
think so.
Treatises have been written about the
media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that
aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been
seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging
knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen
as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of
the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing
Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.
Above
all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when
it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially
when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it
when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically
good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of
empathy.
Today in
Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one
at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve
as an apologist, and an accomplice.
Write bstephens@wsj.com.
***
Bret Stephens deserves
another Pulitzer for this piece
