The Enemy Within The Gates

Israel has, since its creation as a Jewish state in 1948, faced the violent enmity of its hostile surroundings. A Jewish enclave in a sea of Arab and Muslim countries at constant war with themselves and within their borders as monarchs and sheiks and tyrants of one type or another control their restive populations through intimidation and violence, whose one shared grievance is the potent hatred they share of the Jewish state.

The conflicts imposed on Israel from its inception as a state by the combined armies of the Middle East honed Israeli skills in defending themselves from the violence that permeates the very atmosphere of the geography they resumed their heritage statehood within. Eventually, after one failed assault after another, the neighbouring states tired of their humiliating defeats and gave off attacking Israel.

Into the breach stepped the Palestine Liberation Organization, two decades later. Their leader, Yasser Arafat, contended he was the national hero of a people without a national homeland, because the Palestinians spurned the offer extended at Partition by the United Nations to divide what was left of ancient Israel after Jordan took the lion's share, between the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. Attacks by the various militias of the PLO took the place of combined Arab armies.

Conventional warfare took a back seat to guerrilla warfare, and that warfare went far further afield than the Middle East, to teach the international community that they were not immune to terror attacks, though the victims were usually Jews abroad. And the reputation of Palestinian 'fighters' was born. They honed that reputation by committing one atrocity after another, but gaining the world's attention.

Thereafter, threats to the Jewish state and its Jewish citizens emanated largely from the two Palestinian Territories, Gaza and the West Bank. Eventually, a separation wall that the international community condemned as apartheid in spirit, and the state of Israel condemned as an 'occupying power' for being forced to protect itself by asserting itself militarily in self-protection, paid a lull to the suicide bombings and the carnage that ensued.

This photo, shared on Twitter, says, "This is the way, the al-Aqsa Intifada (Twitter)

And Israel celebrated itself as a Jewish state yes indeed, but one which generously incorporated into citizenship status those Palestinian Arabs who continued to live within the confines of its borders. Where under a strained democracy taking into account the vicissitudes and threats of the neighbourhood, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel were guaranteed the same freedoms as Israeli Jews.

Yet in east Jerusalem which Israel captured from Jordan in 1967, no-go zones exist similar to the Muslim banlieues in Paris, the Muslim enclaves in Germany, in Belgium, in other European countries where non-Muslims risk their lives to enter among socially unassimilated Muslims.

And now it is from among the east Jerusalem Arab residents that attacks are inflicted upon Israeli Jews, and even from among Arab Israelis in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, where chance encounters between Jews and enraged Palestinian 'youth' wielding knives, clubs, screwdrivers, rocks and firearms turn into psychotic, deathly episodes of rage.

Hardly surprising since Palestinian Authority leaders treasure a school curriculum teaching Palestinian children to hate and to view violence as the key that will unlock the land that Israel sits upon back to the possession of the Arabs.

The latest pretext to accusing Israel of plotting 'genocide' upon Palestinians is the urban legend that has Israeli authorities scheming to remove from Islamic control of the waqf, the third most sacred Islamic site of the Noble Sanctuary, which the Jews, viewing as the most sacred site in Israel, call the Temple Mount. Authority was vested in the waqf under an agreement between Israel and Jordan which had formerly controlled access to the Temple Mount, denying Jews entrance.

The attacks have become so frequent and so deadly, committed by young Palestinian men and women in their teens and 20s, that deaths have occurred on both sides, enraging Palestinian leaders at the carnage that Israel is wreaking on defenceless Palestinians. Defenceless Palestinians who find defence in the offence of stabbing and stoning unwary Jews, creating victims of innocent bystanders while claiming victimhood for themselves.



Since the provocations on the part of Palestinian youth at the Temple Mount where the presence of Jews visiting their sacred site is viewed by Arabs as desecration of their Noble Sanctuary, clashes have spiralled and so has the rhetoric of Israel as a harsh occupying power, diminishing the freedoms and entitlements of Palestinians. Worshippers of Islam will be satisfied only when Jews are no longer permitted to ascend to the Temple Mount where in any event, they are forbidden from praying; only Muslims may pray there at the al-Aqsa mosque.

The circulating rumours, spurred on by the PA that Israel plans to change the religious approaches to the sacred site, has brought violent hostility to a head. Israel's official denials have been spurned. Even while the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas continues to decry the "filthy feet" of Jews upon the approach to the Noble Sanctuary, their presence desecrating the holy Muslim site, but no obligation existing in the minds of Muslims that Jews too have a primary heritage right to worship at the most sacred symbol of Judaism.


Fatah and Hamas have declared a "Day of Rage" to which Palestinians, including those living within Israel's borders as citizens have responded. They are incited by their leaders' accusations against Israel of "escalating its crimes against our people". Daily, more attacks take place, and daily Jews are murdered, and in response Palestinians lose their lives. Stabbing, shooting, stoning, whatever comes most usefully to hand, with martyrdom to the cause the motivator, seasoned with fury and hatred.