The Palestinian Flare-up: Israel’s Grave Misjudgment for Terrorism
Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman
A wide spectrum of the Israeli news media has been mobilized to urge the Israeli government “to stamp out the (Palestinian) flare-up that is terrorizing the life of the Israeli public.” The right-wing media is preparing the ground, at domestic and international levels to justify the coming brutality of the Zionist killing machine and many Israeli writers and analysts have gone beyond normal bounds with extreme calls of incitement
Nadav Haetzni wrote saying he expected the Israeli army to do much more and to be “more daring and inventive in their plans to utterly crush, once and for all, this wave of Palestinian terrorism.” He then revealed how to confront “Palestinian incitement that is supporting the killings” saying “the immense evil we are facing should be annihilated with the iron fist of a brute force and not by self-control and containment. The families of attackers should be certain that their lives would be shattered as a result of their children’s terrorist acts and should work very hard to cleanse their children’s minds from such criminal thoughts”.
Gideon Sa’ar, a former cabinet minister and a current researcher in Israel’s National Security Council said the current Intifada is receiving public support by Palestinians, but that it is possible to overcome it. “Dealing with current events with the assumption that these attacks are being committed by individual terrorists, on their own, is wrong”, he wrote, adding that “it is a national conflict between us and the Palestinians. All Palestinian organizations are in support of the current violence against Israelis and are urging the attackers to increase their violent acts. It is apparent that the government is completely out of touch with reality in facing Palestinian terrorism by taking actions too late in most cases while the violence increases more and more.”
Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai warned that the current Palestinian flare-up is becoming a heavy burden inflicting heavy damage on Israel’s resources. “The continued wave of violence is reaping every day more and more Israeli victims”, he wrote, and is “causing detrimental effects on Israel’s economy and on Israeli mental state while steadily draining the assets of our national security agencies.” He described it as “a self-sustaining phenomenon” and it should be “stopped without delay before it turns into a popular uprising uniting the Palestinians in a single destructive mass against Israel”.
Political analyst Dimitri Chomsky, offered a rather realistic perspective on current attacks against Israelis, saying “Palestinians’ terrorism represent an illegal means of extremism resisting the illegal occupation and the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. It should be forbidden to encourage Palestinian terrorists ready to give up their lives to kill Israeli civilians in their struggle to end the Israeli occupation.” He said “the current wave of violence complicates the attainment of the political objectives held dear by the current moderate Palestinian leadership in its aim to attain a two state solution in which there will be a shared equal sovereignty over the country.” This sounds great, but does not relate to actual reality which is that a two-state solution is increasingly becoming a dead issue and the only active one is Israel’s work towards a complete Judaization of historical Palestine by colonial/apartheid Zionism.
An Arabic proverb says “the feeling of one being struck is not the same as one counting the strikes”. The term of terrorism is an invention of aggressors billing masses rising up against occupation. The vanquished masses of Palestinians living under a colonial occupation are now being called terrorists who are left with no viable alternative in their struggle to end it. History abounds with examples of national liberators who were once called terrorists, starting, in modern times, with Nelson Mandela. And a little back in time, the term was given to French resistance men who fought against the Nazi occupiers and back in history to Americans who faced up to the British colonial rule of their country. So, the ‘terrorists of yesterday’, soon became freedom fighters and world leaders after liberating their countries from foreign occupiers.
In the afore-mentioned cases, the terrorists were not Mandela, the French or the Americans, but were, at the time, the terrorist systems of South Africa’s apartheid, Germany’s Nazi and Britain’s colonialism.
Israeli journalist Uri Avneri pointed to the absence of peace and justice that prompt Palestinian acts of resistance. In his view, “the real terrorist is the one who goes to Syria to fight and kill, but in Palestine all factions of Palestinian civil society joined together in a flare-up to attain freedom and liberation from occupation. “They were left with no choice”, he wrote, but to use fear as a weapon to force Israelis to stay put in their homes. He said “the Israeli news outlets played the major role to spread this fear and enhance it within the minds and hearts of the Israeli public.”
Without a political settlement establishing an independent Palestinian state, the volcano of Palestinian resistance will keep its eruption without end. Therefore, the true meaning of the Palestinian flare-up which is really a national Palestinian uprising led by selfless young men and women, can be illustrated well by the slogan of the American Revolution which declared: “Give me liberty or give death.”
