INCITEMENT TO GENOCIDE: THE REAL BARRIER TO PEACE
Most Palestinians endorse mass murder, rape, and beheading as “resistance.” Why? It’s simple: Rote learning.
This is the first of a three-part series on Palestinian incitement — the real barrier to peace.
On March 11, 1978, Dalal Mughrabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian woman, led a group of 13 terrorists from Lebanon by boat and landed on an Israeli beach between the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa. Realizing that they had missed their target destination of Tel Aviv, the group casually ate lunch on the beach, then ran into nature photographer Gail Rubin, a New Yorker and the niece of a U.S. senator. They asked her for directions to Tel Aviv and then Mughrabi shot Rubin point blank. They flagged down a taxi, killed its occupants and began driving to Tel Aviv. En route, they hijacked a bus full of civilians and proceeded to shoot Kalashnikovs and toss grenades at passing vehicles. They killed one of the bus passengers, tossed the body from the vehicle and carried on. They commandeered a second bus, piling the surviving passengers from the first vehicle onto the second one, amassing 70 hostages. After blasting through successive barricades, the bus was finally stopped by a roadblock just outside the northern edge of Tel Aviv. The terrorists launched a firefight with sub-machine guns, grenades and explosives against ill-prepared and lightly armed officers. When the battle ended, 37 Israelis and one American, among them 13 children, were dead. Another 71 were wounded. It remained the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history until October 7.
On International Women’s Day 2020, the official Palestinian Authority TV celebrated Mughrabi and other female terrorists: “They are the mothers of the leaders and the sisters of the heroes. They are the praiseworthy rebels who have carried the weapons and created generations of educated people.” A photo was tagged: “Heroic Martyr Dalal Mughrabi.”
Today, throughout Palestine, Mughrabi’s photo adorns posters and T-shirts. “Sisters of Dalal” groups exist on university campuses. In 2010, a town square was named in her honor. In 2017, a women’s center was named in honor of Mughrabi, funded in part by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and the government of Norway.
“We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” the New York Times quoted a member of the Fatah Central Committee saying at the dedication. “For us she is not a terrorist [but] a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”
A 22-year-old who attended the ceremony said, “Dalal sacrificed for her country and is a symbol for every Palestinian girl.”
There is nothing unusual in Palestinian society about the treatment of Mughrabi’s memory. The celebration of Palestinian “martyrs” is at the heart of the ongoing conflict and is part of a comprehensive strategy of incitement, of inculcating especially in the young a sense of the rightness of violence and a legitimacy of maximalist “resistance,” even as an alternative to negotiated peace. Palestinians from the youngest ages are encouraged to admire those who have died for the cause, to aspire to emulate them and, not coincidentally, to develop an intensively nurtured grievance-based loathing of Israelis and Jews.
Parents of “martyrs” are paraded on television as heroic contributors.
On May 13, 2020, when Israeli special forces entered a Palestinian town to arrest a suspected terrorist, a Palestinian teenager joined the confrontations and was killed.
The teenager’s mother was called on the phone by Mahmoud Abbas, the (ahem, moderate) Palestinian president, and rather than express grief or any other emotion a normal parent might be expected to demonstrate, she told Abbas she wished more of her children would die. The mother’s words, which were shared on the official Fatah Facebook page, were:
My son is a sacrifice for the sake of the homeland. A sacrifice for the sake of the entire people… I’m proud, proud of the entire people — I’m proud of it, and of the sons of Palestine, the young people of Palestine… I’m prepared to sacrifice even more. I’m prepared to give more martyrs for the homeland… It’s not a waste. My son’s blood is not a waste for the homeland.
To this, Fatah’s secretary for party’s local branch, replied: “May Allah grant you more.”
Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, is of course even more unrepentant in its bloodcurdling calls for genocide. Still, this is to take nothing away from Fatah, whose members and official media voices are often indistinguishable from Hamas.
Sultan Abu al-Einein, an adviser to Abbas on civil society organizations and a Fatah Central Committee member, said in a 2016 interview with the Palestinian news site Donia al-Watan:
If you ask me my blunt position, I would say — every place you find an Israeli, slit his throat. Likewise, I am against talks, negotiations, meetings, and normalization in all its forms with the Israeli occupation.
A person who advocates throat-slitting as a legitimate political tactic might rightly be assumed to oppose negotiated resolutions. It is perhaps an indication of how mainstream violence of the most grotesque variety is accepted in Palestinian society that he would feel the need to clarify that, while slitting throats is in his resistance toolkit, talks, negotiations, meetings and normalization are not. Just in case a listener somehow thought that he might endorse throat-slitting and a negotiated settlement.
One of the most notorious images of the Second Intifada spread around the world after two Israeli reserve soldiers tragically took a wrong turn and ended up in a Palestinian Authority-controlled area. The two men, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich, were dragged from their vehicle, beaten and eviscerated by a lynch mob. The indelible photo captured one of the perpetrators, Aziz Salha, beaming exultantly while waving his blood-dripping hands at the crowd below the window to the room where the soldiers were taken. Almost two decades later, the murderers were celebrated during a 2018 episode of the program “Giants of Endurance,” on official Palestinian Authority TV, where the host called their actions heroic.
Your morning TV program might start with a roundup of weather and sports. The official Palestinian Authority TV morning show opened one episode with: “Good morning to you, good morning to your pride, and to your hands preparing to throw stones and ignite the gasoline in the Molotov cocktails, greetings from the Good Morning Jerusalem program.”
Your kids go to university to get a rounded education or to develop a skill to help them succeed. Students at Al-Quds University receive quite a different message, with a monument on campus warning: “Beware of natural death; do not die, but amidst the hail of bullets.”
Yesterday, my post addressed Jewish settlements in the West Bank and how much of the world has declared them a “barrier to peace.” In this three-part series, I’m trying to illuminate the real barrier to peace.
Buildings can be torn down. Settlements can be evacuated.
What is far, far more difficult to clear away is hatred of the “other” once it is inculcated in the human mind. This is the reason we do not have peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
These examples are a tip of the iceberg of Palestinian incitement. Palestinian society is saturated in blood-soaked, genocidal, antisemitic calls to violence and murder.
Acknowledging this is not “racist.” Even pointing out (as I’ll do in the third in this series) that the vast majority of Palestinians endorse this violent rhetoric — and support the slitting of throats, approve of rape as a weapon of war, and back infanticide as a tool of “resistance” — is not a statement about the inherent characteristics of Palestinian people.
It’s simple rote learning.
Read Part 2 here.
We have donated for decades $US billions in aid from the whole world to the Palestinians as humanitarian aid. They have never built anything. Just fed the terrorist groups, raised generations of brainwashed kids ready to be terrorists and spread hate and violence everywhere every time. Not a single dime any longer. All they know to do is destroy what others have built. Defund the UN that empowers them.
Obviously the radical left doesn't care about what you describe here since it is a feature of what they actually want. What is impossible for me to understand is how the establishment can simply ignore this. Surely Anthony Blinken, Thomas Friedman etc. understand the truth of what you write here. Yet they ignore and place the blame on buildings. Why??? I don't believe these Democrats want Israel to be destroyed. I just don't get it. Are they insane?