Washington Equates Arab Terrorism With ‘Settler Violence’
The United States has demanded that Israel treat its own citizens, should they act violently towards Palestinian Arabs, in exactly the same way it treats Arab terrorists who are out to murder Jews.
In a rather clumsy attempt at appearing balanced towards the parties to this endless conflict, (resurrecting the “honest broker” label it claimed to be wearing in the past), President Joe Biden had his deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Robert Wood, slice into Israel at the Security Council Monday.
Sounding condescendingly like a berating parent, Woods declared that the US “expects to see equal treatment [by Israel] of extremists – whether Israeli or Palestinian [SIC]”.
“In a statement that could only have been directed at Israel,” wrote The Jerusalem Post, “Wood clarified that this meant ‘arrests, convictions and punishments, as well as equal allocation’ by Israel ‘of resources to prevent and investigate violent attacks’”
While there have been a handful of Jewish acts of extremism against Arabs over the years, Israelis are not terrorists, the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews eschew violence, and Israeli society enormously distances itself from the few individuals who have crossed that line – unequivocally condemning them.
Muslim “Palestinians”, on the other hand, excel at terrorism. It is the form of violence they have embraced and pursued year in, year out, for decades. They implant the glorification of terror into the minds of their youngest children, holding up “death for the sake of Allah” as the highest goal. Murderers of Jews are lionised as shaheeds (martyrs) in their communities, and the US-supported PLO/PA financially incentivises this terrorism with its pay-to-slay policy.
Israel is a democracy. It has a security service that includes police and defence forces which are accountable under law. A huge slice of the national budget is spent securing the citizens of this country against the massive forces of terrorism that are spawned, nurtured and unleashed from the areas under PA and Hamas control.
Where altercations break out between Jews and Arabs in Samaria and Judea or, as was seen three times on Monday, in the Old City of Jerusalem (where Arabs deliberately provoked confrontations with Jews), the police do intervene where possible. Where Israelis are suspected of breaking the law they are arrested and charged accordingly. Where individual Israeli soldiers abuse their authority and are found in breach of military regulations, they are investigated and arrested, including court-martialled and imprisoned. Violent wrongdoing by Jews is not sanctioned in this society.
By vivid contrast, not only is the fomenting of Arab violence against Israelis encouraged in the Palestinian Authority, but so-called PA policemen have themselves been involved in anti-Israel terrorism on numerous occasions.
By what measure, one wonders, does the Biden administration expect Israel would be able to – or should even be expected to! – equally divide its resources between the small rash of incidents of Israeli anti-Arab behaviour and the ever-oncoming waves of Arab anti-Israel terrorism?
Oh, and Deputy Ambassador Wood added one more thing in his speech at the UNSC: that Washington intends to see the “status quo” maintained at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and that the administration opposes “provocative actions and rhetoric related to the holy site”. This was clearly in anticipation of incoming National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s wishes to open the Jews’ holiest site to Jewish prayer – something the “progressive” US administration will not support.
Notably, the PA and Jordan as well as Hamas, have warned of violent responses to this Jewish prayer.
It seems that Washington, which has been unable to stifle expressions of dismay, misgiving and even alarm at the choices made by the Israeli electorate in the November 1 election, has decided to adopt a specifically unfriendly stance towards the Jewish state in anticipation of the incoming government’s policies.
Unfriendly, and in recent weeks, repeatedly interfering: In November, the FBI was tasked with investigating the IDF (!) following the death of a journalist who was shot while covering a firefight between Israeli forces and Arab terrorists in Jenin last May. On December 13, the State Department called for accountability from Israel after an Arab teenager was killed while standing in close proximity to a terrorist being engaged by Israeli forces. And on Sunday, “the US embassy in Jerusalem’s Palestinian Affairs Office” supported calls by the PA to investigate a collision between an Israeli and an Arab-owned vehicle on Saturday in which two Palestinian Arab brothers died. The PA claims the Israeli carried out a deliberate ramming attack.
No one can be sure what the future of the Israel-USA relationship (it
used to be called friendship) looks like, but it does seem set to face a
more intensely trying time than ever before.
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