It is thirty days since Or Eshkar died. He was killed on one of Tel Aviv’s busiest streets, at the corner of Dizengoff and Sderot Ben-Gurion, on his way to a wedding with two of his friends. He was shot by a Palestinian, shot for no reason at all except for being a Jewish man who lived in the Jewish state of Israel. He was 32 years old, an athlete who had participated in a number of Iron Man competitions. He could have been you or me had we been on the street at that time. I myself had been on that street many times, six times a day in fact during a six-week period when I had rented a place on Sderot Ben-Gurion a minute’s walk from that corner.
During my stay I had not once thought I could have been killed walking down Dizengoff Street. When people ask me if I am worried about getting killed visiting Israel, I tell them I am more worried about the danger when I live in the Diaspora than when I am in Israel. Once there I don’t think about it. Now I realize I simply absorb the Stockholm Syndrome under which Israelis live day in and day out. It is odd in a way, because I also tell Israelis whom I befriend that I think they are victims of the Stockholm Syndrome, accepting Palestinian terrorism as a fact of life which is totally unacceptable. But they have lived with it so long they have come to accept it as normal, the price of living in the country. What’s more, they think they can continue to manage this situation through a medley of security policies which by and large work, the by and large involving what one security expert calls mowing the grass every so often and, of course, a certain number of fatalities, the probability that it might include them being statistically low enough to be bearable.
All this is reinforced by the political pablum that has become the stock-in-trade of Israeli governments and their friends in the international arena. On the right as on the left politicians and generals vow after every attack that the terrorists will be hunted down, their homes demolished, and future attacks deterred. That the murders keep coming indicates that such assertions are but a mantra that has no basis in reality, just as the much vaunted two-state solution is a pipe dream of Jewish left-wing intellectuals now bought by pusillanimous western governments and entrenched in their foreign ministries like the French Maginot Line of the 1930s. Their tepid denunciations of Palestinian terrorist attacks which never mention the word Palestinian are usually accompanied by exhortations to reduce tensions in the area directed to their Israeli counterparts. This circus of pipe dream utterances fools no one but the already deluded. Or Eshkar was murdered in broad daylight walking in the heart of Tel Aviv by a Palestinian gunman. Three weeks later Lucy Dee and her two daughters, Maia and Rina, were killed by a Palestinian terrorist in the Jordan Valley. And so it goes. Jewish corpses pile up. Tourists who don’t look Palestinian go down in the crossfire as well. On the national day of mourning that precedes Israeli Independence Day the list of victims will be intoned and condolences will once again be offered to their families. Someone will read the poem by Alterman called The Silver Platter written in 1947 to commemorate the youths who gave their lives that the State of Israel might come into being. And then everything will return to normal, to that normal theatre of the absurd to which it is time to put an end.
Tracking down the terrorists and arresting them will not deter future Palestinian attacks. Blowing up their families’ homes will not deter future Palestinian attacks. Why should they? If a Palestinian suicide bomber – which is basically what a Palestinian gunman is - has set out to become a martyr, what need has he of a house? What need does even his family have of a house when they have raised their son to do his dastardly deed, and what care they if their house is destroyed when the Palestinian Authority will give them a lifetime monthly stipend with which to build a new one? But there is one house all Palestinians seem to care about, since they all are always ranting that the Jews are bent on destroying it: the Al-Aksa Mosque. For a century now the Arab Muslim cry has gone up that the Al-Aksa mosque is in danger. Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly warned that the Jews are defiling the mosque with their dirty feet. Hamas has justified every attack against Israel from Gaza in the name of protecting the Al-Aksa mosque. Clearly, this is a house that the Palestinians hold dear, if only in their usual twisted way, and therefore this is the house that Israel should demolish. The Israeli government should call in the sappers and implode the Al-Aksa mosque. It would remove forever a rallying cry of the Palestinians to murder and mayhem. It would make clear to them the consequences of their unending war against the Jews and the Jewish state. It would show them that a hundred years of lying about Jewish designs on the Al-Aksa mosque have finally resulted in the Jews’ taking them seriously. They would learn that their words, like those of the boy who cried wolf, have consequences. Henceforth they ought to pay attention to what they say and what they do, because if the demolition of the Al-Aksa mosque is not convincing enough for the Palestinians to cease their terrorist attacks, there are more steps that will follow. Cutting off electricity to Gaza. Sending in troops to Ramallah to remove its pathetic excuse of a government. And that would be only for starters. Ultimately the Palestinians will wind up with nothing, which is exactly what they deserve.
Of course there are people who would raise objections. They will say such an action is fanning the flames of more violence, as if the flames are not high enough yet. They will say this is collective punishment for actions that are undertaken by individuals, the lone wolf explanation of terrorism. But such explanations are false. They ignore the fact that Jew hatred and bloodlust to destroy Israel are inculcated at every pore of Palestinian society. In the mosques. In the schools. In summer camps and on soccer fields. Parents raise their children to hate Jews and kill them, and when their children are killed in action, celebrate them as martyrs and hand out sweets before turning to their next sons. Imams reinforce these beliefs at prayers. Teachers reinforce them in textbooks. Political leaders extol them. Given this environment, it is little surprise that on any given day a Palestinian, even an educated Palestinian, decides to set out and hunt for Jews to kill, sometimes to rape first and kill later. No directives are needed; no orders come down from the official or unofficial chain of command. That is why Finance Minister Smotrich was absolutely right when he said that the village of Huwara should be destroyed after the daily rock throwing by Palestinians there killed two Israelis. Given that this had been going on for years unchecked by the Israeli army, Jewish residents of Har Bracha who had to endure these daily attacks went on a rampage and gave the Palestinians a taste of their own medicine. The IDF had to go in to restore order; two Jewish residents were arrested, then freed by a Jerusalem court. They were then rearrested by the Shin Bet and have been held in detention for two months now. Everyone jumped on the Finance Minister for his comments, but as he explained, he had not been calling for vigilante justice; he had been calling for proper measures to be taken by the IDF under government orders. But the government as usual temporized, and soon the normal course of business resumed operations. Huwara residents, supported for murdering Jews by a majority of polled Palestinians, again started stoning Jews who passed on the road through their village, and a month later a gunman opened fire on an Israeli man and his wife as they drove by, nearly killing him. If the residents were removed and deported, the rock throwing and murder would stop altogether. Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, where are you?
The same members of the Israeli establishment who organized the protests against judicial reform have been responsible for this failed policy to deal properly with the Palestinians. But never do they admit their errors, not on Oslo, not on the Gaza disengagement, not on their constant disparaging of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir as racists and extremists. In their latest war against the Jewish state whose democracy they claim to want to save, they put the entire country at risk, encouraging the young to refuse to serve in the army and spreading lies as egregious as those the Palestinians never tire of repeating. Half the country, it seems, has bought into that cultural cesspool, to the point that the Third Jewish commonwealth is now in need of its own band of Maccabees. Or do all those JINOs – Jews in name only in Israel and abroad– think Hanukkah is only a fairy tale and an excuse to eat potato pancakes and doughnuts? All those Jewish organizations in the Diaspora should have been raising their voices to condemn the protestors and the people who were organizing them, call them to account and remind them of the people who offered up their lives on the silver platter of Zionism. They could and should have remembered Or Eshkar who did just that, so that his life would not have been snuffed out in vain. I never knew the man, but I am willing to bet he was a blessing. I only hope his memory will be one too, but I am not willing to bet on that.
Stephen, your words and thoughts as expressed here and in our recent private exchange are a recipe for disaster.
Hard to bear.