Horovitz:
The fight needs to be physically taken to the enemy. But it also needs to be waged educationally — in the schools and the mosques and online.
Israel
on Monday is enduring yet another day of incessant terror attacks. The death of
an 18-year-old Israeli, stabbed in the stomach as he stood with friends at a
gas station on Road 443 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has just been
confirmed. A few hours ago, two teenage Palestinian girls pulled out scissors
in an attempt to kill Israelis in Jerusalem’s main Mahane Yehuda fruit and
vegetable market, and wound up injuring a 70-year-old Palestinian man from
Bethlehem.
And
those were only the two worst attacks so far today — on a day that also saw the
funeral of yesterday’s terror fatality, Hadar Buchris, 21, a young Israeli
woman who was murdered at the Gush Etzion junction south of Jerusalem just
hours before yet another terror fatality from the self-same spot, American
yeshiva student Ezra Schwartz, 18, was laid to rest in Boston.
The
national mood is grim. The fear of attack is relentless.
Critics
say the government, the army, should be doing a better job of preventing the
attacks. There’s some basis to the complaint that the Gush Etzion junction
should be more effectively protected; it’s been the site of numerous attacks,
and the IDF is again now looking at ways to safeguard those who use it.
But the
fact is that Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians live in intimate
proximity in our part of the world. And when much of the Palestinians’
political leadership, spiritual leadership, educational system, mainstream
media and social media relentlessly preach the hatred of Jews, the fundamental
illegitimacy of the Jewish state, and the ostensible religious requirement to
kill and be killed, the murderous consequences are difficult to defend against
hermetically.
This
latest terror surge is unlikely to pass quickly. A whole new generation has
been filled with loathing for Jews, for Israel. Not all young Palestinians are
going out stabbing; not all of them have been recruited to the killing fields.
But the purported religious imperative is pushing more and more of them to act
— several times a day, of late.
While
foolish outsiders bend over backwards to supply legitimacy for the terrorism,
bemoaning the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli control, it should not
need stressing that this new systematic incitement of violence — just like the
evil Second Intifada suicide bombing onslaught of more than a decade ago — is
both utterly unjustifiable and entirely counterproductive. It can only render
the prospect of Palestinian statehood more remote. As we mourn our daily dead,
Israelis are well aware that the toll would be far higher were the suicide bomb
factories of Jenin, Nablus and other West Bank cities still manufacturing
explosive belts and indoctrinating their wearers. The new stabbing surge is an
immense deterrent to any notion of again relinquishing security control of the
West Bank, as Israel had done in the years before the Second Intifada erupted
in 2000.
As we
watch all those Palestinian kids’ TV shows urging Jew-killing, read the Fatah
and Hamas calls to murder, see the mothers and fathers of the daily murderers
hailing their “martyred” children, the last thing we’re saying is, Let’s
entrust these people with full sovereignty, so that they can more easily
fulfill their stated ambition of pushing us into the sea. As we guard against
them, all our differences — the arguments over settlements, over how to
maintain a Jewish-democratic Israel, over what more we can do to create an
environment more likely to encourage moderation — are simply overwhelmed and
rendered irrelevant.
For
now, Israelis are having to adjust their daily lives, to minimize their
vulnerability, to guard against the banal norm of relaxing when out and about.
More security forces are being deployed. The intelligence hierarchies are
working overtime.
None of
which constitutes a means of defanging Islamist terrorism at its source. For
that — precisely as with the mass terror onslaught in Paris 10 days ago, and
the dire ongoing threat of further Islamist terror coming West — what’s needed
is concerted action at the grassroots.
When
people come at you with a gun or a knife or scissors or bombs or their car, you
had better stop them first. Ideally, you’ll identify and thwart them before
they set out. The fight needs to be physically taken to the enemy. But it also
needs to be waged educationally — in the schools and the mosques and online.
The advocates and apologists must be afforded no tolerance.
We’ll
not beat the many-headed Islamist terror monster until that ostensible
religious imperative is shattered — until radical Islam, that is, is exposed,
marginalized and ultimately defeated as the murderous death cult it is.
