Twisted Narratives

"The great patriots ... who don't go to bed at night before praying for a unified, undivided, greater Jerusalem, are now proposing to dissect it, divide it and return it back 48 years in time."
Nehemiah Strassler, Haaretz

"With respect to the Palestinian population [in Jerusalem], Israel has a lot of work to do, as it does with the social needs of its Jewish population."
"But the primary problems here are the deliberate lies being spread [about the Temple Mount/Haram as-Sharif]."
"Israel has no interest in creating divisions in Jerusalem. [Israel] has a right to use the same security measures which every other city facing urban rioting has used."
Dore Gold, senior Netanyahu adviser

Zaka Rescue and Recovery team at scene of stabbing attack Jerusalem's Old City
Copyright: Reuters

The violence by Palestinians fomented by their leadership even as they deny having a hand in the incitement destabilizing Israel, continues unabated. Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, made public statements and continues to make them, which clearly demonstrate his destabilizing agenda. He is adamant that Israel has destroyed the process of the peace talks, yet he and his negotiators have done little to nourish those talks with the intention of reaching an agreement.

Each time that Israeli negotiators agree to the Palestinian Authority demands for greater and greater concessions without budging one iota from conceding anything of their own volition to the process to move an agreement closer to fruition, the PA simply ups the ante, with additional demands. The core issue,  however, is the security and recognition of the Jewish state. And though semantics enter the scene with the PA agreeing that Israel is in the geography legally, they will not concede that it was created and it exists as a Jewish state.

To do so would negate their demands for the return of Palestinians in a number that would equal the number of Jews in Israel, destroying the very existence of a Jewish state. Israel agrees to compensation for those Palestinians who lost land and possessions when an estimated 600,000 of their number fled the nascent state. No offers, needless to say, comes from the Arab world to compensate the 800,000 Jewish Arabs who were exiled from the Arab states on the creation of the State of Israel, their properties confiscated.

International critics of Israel continue to point out the offensiveness of the dividing wall between the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. In fact, it is a defensive device, of a type that exists elsewhere in the world to protect one ethnic or religious community from the violence of another. Turkey, which deplores Israel's 'violent' intentions against the Palestinian 'victims', made a wall separating Turks from Greeks on Cyprus a necessity, resulting from Turkish violence against Cypriot Greeks.

Hamas, for its part, has now recommended that Palestinians put a halt to their knife attacks against Jewish Israelis, recommending that the faithful trade in their knives for more effective weapons they can drive directly into groups of people where the chances of multiple deaths are enhanced over the death of a single individual; as praiseworthy as a knife is, a vehicle is simply that much more effective.

On Sunday, an Arab who had armed himself with a gun and a knife fired on a southern Israel bus station killing an Israeli soldier, wounding ten people. The knife-and-gun wielding terrorist entered the central bus station in Beersheba to shoot and stab people. After killing the soldier, five police were wounded and five civilians as well. The assailant was shot and killed.

"They want to humiliate us", said Taher Obeid, 26, a janitor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of the new checkpoints set up between the Arab sections of Old Jerusalem and the Jewish segments of the city. Cars exiting must squeeze through crossing points where soldiers stop every vehicle to ask for identification. Some drivers and passengers are requested to lift shirts and roll up pant legs to prove they are unarmed.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has said time and again that he has no intention of altering the ground rules on Jewish approach to the Temple Mount; scheduled in small numbers and accompanied by a police escort to ensure that no harm comes to them from threatening Arabs who will not countenance Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism, while unrestricted access to the third holiest site in Islam is guaranteed to countless Arabs.

The PA insistence that the Old City of East Jerusalem must be recognized as the capital of a Palestinian state comes up hard against the Jewish reluctance to have Israel's historical capital divided; in doing so, a Jewish presence at Judaism's most sacred site would be forbidden, for the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas have stated repeatedly and clearly that no Jewish presence would be tolerated anywhere within a Palestinian state.

Though of course it is perfectly all right for Palestinian Arabs to hold Israeli citizenship, to vote, to be treated equally under the law, to have Arab Palestinian parliamentarians in the Knesset, and to be treated in Jewish hospitals even when they violently attack Jews.