Israeli Terrorist Targets

"No country has endured more acts of terrorism over a prolonged period than Israel. From before the state was established in 1948 and ever since then, Israelis have been the targets of terrorist attacks, both within Israel and around the world."
"In one week alone [March 2002] Palestinian suicide bombers struck at a restaurant in Haifa, a Jerusalem supermarket, a cafe in Tel Aviv, and a hotel in Netanya, the latter during a meal for the Jewish holiday of Passover [that one alone killed 30 and wounded over 140]."
"When one considers the huge toll in Israeli lives that Palestinian terrorism during the second Intifada took [13,000 attacks, 1,030 deaths, 5,788 injuries representing 0.1 percent of the population], the ability of Israeli society to cope ... is quite remarkable."
Dr. Dov Waxman, political science professor, researcher, Northeastern University, Boston

Israel News Flash: Palestinians in #Gaza celebrating the SUCCESFUL Israeli bloodshed, their first HOLY attack during #Ramadan

The Arab population living in the area called Palestine before the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for partition, to allow for the creation of the State of Israel  with Arabs taking  a similar part of the geography, now speak of themselves as indigenous "Palestinians", when historically, the word Palestinian always referred to the Jewish inhabitants of the area. Having co-opted that identity, they now co-opt history and heritage, refusing to admit that Jews ever lived in ancient Israel, that Jerusalem was their capital, that the Temples of Solomon ever stood on the Temple Mount.

The visit to the Temple Mount, the most sacred symbol and site in Judaism, by then-head of Likud, Ariel Sharon, was the ostensible spark that fired the second Intifada, orchestrated by that master manipulator of Palestinian-wrught atrocities, Yasser Arafat. The bloody second Palestinian Intifada began in September of 2000 and lasted until 2005. During which time Israelis had little option but to live with ongoing terror courtesy of Palestinian incitement to violence against Jews as interlopers, usurpers, foreigners who had no right to land the Arabs wanted for themselves.

Palestinian Arab young men with masks, inside Al-Aqsa Mosque (some wearing shoes), stockpile rocks to use for throwing at Jews who visit the Temple Mount, September 27, 2015. Gatestone Institute

Most of the over thousand Israelis who died during that period through ongoing atrocities perpetrated as "resistance", were civilians vulnerable to suicide attacks, while they went about the business of life, appearing in cafes, crowded outdoor markets and while travelling on public buses. After 19 months of the second Intifada, 44.4 percent of the population of Israel had been either directly victimized by an attack or their friends or relatives had been victims. During all that time, Israelis did not organize vigilante counter-attacks.

Jews have long been accustomed to suffering violence from others who find their presence loathsome. After the liberation of the death camps in the closing hours of the Second World War, no survivors undertook to form revenge attacks on Germans or others who were involved in their incarceration, forced labour, starvation, torture and mass murder. Jews who attempted to return to their homes in Europe from which they were transported to the death camps found hostility from former neighbours who had taken their possessions and their homes and who on their arrival to reclaim them, were attacked and sometimes murdered.

The only solution seen by European Jews was to have the opportunity to re-create their own homeland which would be their place of refuge, where all Jews wherever they lived elsewhere in the world would be welcomed to. And there they could be assured that their security and humanity would be respected and protected. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that grants citizenship to and protection of non-Jewish minority ethnic and religious groups, vulnerable to attack elsewhere in the geography.

And, it is the only country in the world where, when news of murderous attacks against Jews take place, can be shrugged off as either irrelevant to world order or a symptom of desperation by downtrodden and oppressed people fighting against their oppressors. This Orwellian view of the people who have been and continue to be viciously attacked by surrounding enemies -- not the least of which are the Palestinian militias which incite ordinary Palestinians to do likewise -- seen as the perpetrators of violence, not its victims is unique to Jews.

When news media and world leaders speak of the atrocities that take place around the world, from Europe to Africa, the Middle East to Asia, mounted by fanatical Islamists like Islamic State and al-Qaeda and others of their ilk, they never equate them with Fatah and Hamas mounting attacks on Jews in Israel, and nor does Israel appear in lists of countries that have suffered immense fatalities through viral attacks such as those that take place in Belgium, United States, France, Britain and Spain.

BBC -- An impressive air of normality in much of tourist-packed Nice is deceptive. As well as grief, bewilderment hangs in the sea air.

France has suffered three major terrorist attacks in the space of a year and a half. "Suicide terrorism can be particularly effective in terrifying people because it projects an aura of fanaticism, which makes the threat of future attacks seem more likely", advised Dr. Waxman. Well -- future attacks, more of them, and deadlier ones are expected to occur  with greater frequency in the West and in the East. But those that occur, sometimes on a daily basis in Israel, appear to the rest of the world as casual byproducts of the nation's status in the Middle East and therefore, evidently of no account.