Vendetta Claims a Victim

Arab teenager

According to Lee Smith whose beat is the Mideast, Arabs are better at feuding than making war. This is why it was not only a terrible crime, but a tragic mistake when apparently Jewish extremists—outraged by the kidnap-murder of three teenage Jewish boys, Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach and Gil-ad Shaar—invited an Arab-Jewish blood feud by kidnapping and killing an innocent Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. Multiple arrests have been made in Israel with relative alacrity—in contrast to the Palestinian Authority which lacks the will or the ability or both to arrest those responsible for the triple murder. Whoever killed the Arab boy, Mohammed Hussein Abu Khdeir, should be prosecuted and punished to the maximum extent of the law for a terrorist crime that weakens the moral foundations of the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said as much and virtually every other Israeli in publish life has said as much.

“The abduction of the Arab teenager was carried out by extremists, acting on their own, who stand condemned by every sector of Israel’s democratic society. The kidnapping and murders of three Israeli teens, who have not been yet captured, was carried out by members of a terrorist group (Hamas) that is part of a Palestinian government,” declared Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The young men arrested for burning alive the Arab boy are being compared to European berserk “football hooligans.” No analogy is adequate to the depravity of the crime, but a better one is the kidnap-murder in Paris in 2006 of Jew of Moroccan descent, Ilan Halimi.

There are those among left-wing Jewish commentators whose initial reflex was to demand that we place the kidnap-murder of three Israel teens “in political context.” “Providing this context may be taboo at a time when the entire country is focused on the fate of three kidnapped Israeli teens, wrote journalist Mairav Zonszein, “but it is part and parcel of the story here.” Gidean Levy in “Haaretz” went so as to declare: “Only Israel is permitted to carry out illegal, immoral operations. Only it is permitted to be sanctimonious, to be shocked and to shout from the rooftops when others do the same thing to Israel.”

Zonszein, Levy, and other critics of the Jewish state in western newspapers as well as Israel should take more seriously the perverse reactions—and not only by Palestinians—to the kidnap-murder of three Jewish teens whose deaths should give us all pause.

President Mahmoud Abbas forthrightly condemned the kidnappings and murders, but many Palestinian men-in the street didn’t. After the kidnapping, sweets were passed around West Bank cities as if to mark a celebration. Then the Israeli ambulance carrying the three slain teenagers was stoned. Other Palestinian commentators claimed—before the bodies were found—that it the kidnapping was a put-up job or phony snatch perpetrated by the IDF or the Shin Bet. Following the lead of Khaled Mashaal, Hamas political chief, who called the three boys “soldier-settlers,” Mahmoud al-Aloul, a senior Fatah member, speculated on Facebook, “Let’s think well of the growing possibility that all what’s happening is a play that wasn’t produced well and that no one was kidnapped in the first place.” The mother of Amer Abu Aysha, one of the two Hamas operatives being sought for the kidnap-murders, said she would be proud if her son participated.

“Every occupation provokes resistance of all kinds, peaceful and violent,” said Pedro Brieger, on Argentine public television. Brieger, a virulent critic of Israel who happens to be Jewish, when on to declare that “Every day Israel kidnaps people and also kills people, but this news doesn’t get reported in the international news agencies. You have to remember that these three young hostages were in a territory where the United Nations determined that Israelis had to withdraw. Israel is like a Pac-Man eating advancing Palestinian territory. Brieger’s “facts” were erroneous— Gush Etzion, the settlement from which the three boys were kidnapped was Jewish even before 1948—and his tone vicious.
Now that the Arab boy has been sacrificed on the altar of vendetta, Arab commentators—ever ready to make a bad situation worse—are invoking as a justification for rioting that the murder’s motivation was not revenge, but rather was that the that Jewish killers took the life of a non-Jewish child to use his blood to make matza. Those who sow dragon’s teeth should be wary lest they too ultimately be devoured by the dragon.

Virtually nobody in official circles in the Mideast or the West is praising the Israelis for a swift, competent criminal investigation. The U.S. State Department took its time to condemn the murder of the three Jewish boys—including an American citizen whose name the State Department spokesperson could not remember— but has wasted no time in condemning Israel authorities for inflicting injuries on the murdered Arab boy’s American-born cousin who was arrested in Jerusalem for participating in violent demonstrations. It used to too be said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Internationally, anti-Israel hypocrisy has now become the lifeblood of international diplomacy.

There are lessons to be learned from the recent cycle of violence to date in the Holy Land:

• First, Hamas may have kidnapped and killed the Israeli teenagers, but supportive Palestinian reaction was a product, not just at spontaneous anger against “the occupation,” but of a generation of brainwashing of Palestinian youth (some as young as three) by television programming including cartoons characters and other indoctrination and propaganda glorifying the cult of anti-Israel jihad and martyrdom. Western governments including the United States can no longer afford to cast a blind eye to such incitement.

• Second, the Israel government should admit its humanly understandable but disastrous error in the 2011 release of 1027 terrorists, including those collectively responsible for murdering 569 Israelis, for Corporal Gilad Shalit. Never Again.

• The potential of continuing Israeli-Palestinian kidnap murder vendetta is catastrophic. In addition to Jews and Palestinians killing each other, there is the potential of fratricidal violence between both Palestinians on Palestinians and Jews on Jews.

To offer excuses and counter-excuses for fratricide—and Israelis and Palestinians and Jews and Arabs are brother’s in God’s eyes—repeats and compounds the crime of Cain (who also had his excuses) against Abel. If this mutually suicidal cycle is not halted, Israel democracy will suffer, but so will the Palestinian people. Talk of resuming the on again, off again, so far chimerical “the peace process” may be well-and-good, but the truth is that there can be no peace until the Palestinians, from top to bottom, repudiated the genocidal agenda of Hamas (currently part of the Palestinian “unity government”) and sincerely recognize Israel’s right to exist as a democratic society in which Jews as well as Arabs are safe and secure. Only then will Israel be willing to make the additional painful concessions that may be necessary to achieve true peace.