Soccer Dad

Unhappy Anniversary

We just passed the 4 year anniversary of the latest wave organized violence - sometimes called by the sanitized term "intifada" as if it were merely a political revolt - perpetrated against Israel by the Palestinians. I figured that a corrective history lesson would be in order. From Yahoo! news there are, so far, two feature articles about this anniversary. The one from the NY Times, "Intifada's Legacy at Year 4: A Morass of Faded Hopes" by Steven Erlanger might well have come from the PA's propaganda department.

Sgt. David Biri was Israel's first fatality of the current wave of violence. He was killed by a roadside bomb near Netzarim. David Biri was killed prior to opposition leader Ariel Sharon's walk along the Temple Mount.

Here's how Erlanger described the early days of the violence:

What began as a popular uprising quickly became a low-intensity war

A roadside bomb is not a product of a popular uprising. It is planned. This was low intensity war from the start. There may have been riots from the start, but that doesn't make it a popular uprising. The "Aksa intifada" was planned from before Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.

The early violence focused on Israeli in uniform. David Biri was a soldier. The second victim of the violence, Border Police Supt. Yosef Tabeja was a policeman on joint patrol with a Palestinian. The Palestinian pulled out his gun, yelled "Allahu Akbar" and killed Tabeja. The Palestinian claimed that their guy was crazy. I believe (though I have no proof) that the Palestinian on joint patrols were told to turn on their Israeli partners. This occurred on the same day as Sharon's visit, so this murder was likely not in response to the visit.

The Israelis who were pinned down when Palestinian snipers killed Mohammed Al-Dura, likewise, were soldiers.

I guess that the brutal lynching of Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich could be classified as popular, even though they were soldiers. The picture of one of their murderers proudly holding his bloody hands aloft is one of the indelible pictures of the early violence.

My point, lost in some of this rambling, is that the violence carefully orchestrated. A roadside bomb requires organization and planning. But what else is there? There's more. Here's an excerpt from a letter from then Israeli Ambassador Yehuda Lancry to Kofi "Oil for Food" Annan, dated October 2, 2000.

The events in these areas represent the latest and most severe developments in a wave of violence that has been building over the past few weeks. The attacks began with the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails in the vicinity of the Netzarim Junction on 13 September. This was followed by the killing of an Israeli soldier by a roadside bomb on 27 September, and the murder of an Israeli police officer by a Palestinian policeman in a joint patrol on 29 September.

The events of this past Friday on the Temple Mount represent a further escalation of the Palestinian violence. Muslim worshippers, out of a desire to violently confront both Israeli police and civilians on the eve of the Jewish New Year, hurled rocks and other objects at Jewish worshippers gathered at the Western Wall below. Israeli police attempted to turn back the protesters through non-violent means, but the mob persisted, attempting to force its way out of the Temple Mount area and through the Mughrabim gate to the Western Wall plaza. At this point, Israeli forces, who had been deployed outside the perimeter of the Mount, were compelled to enter the area to push back the charging mob. The stone-throwing mob continued in its violence for a period of more than four hours.

Regrettably, the wave of Palestinian violence did not stop there. During the last 24 hours alone, there have been over thirty incidents of unprovoked live gunfire directed against Israeli civilians and security forces. One Israeli civilian was shot and killed at close range when dropping his car off at a Palestinian-owned garage in the village of Maskheh.. A soldier was killed, and a civilian moderately wounded, in a shooting near the town of Beit Sahour. Two Israeli policemen were wounded in gunfire from armed Palestinian security forces near Jericho and Palestinian attackers opened fire on a school bus near Shiloh.

Note the beginning of that excerpt. "...wave of violence that has been building over the past few weeks." The violence was organized and started in the middle of September. And how can I corroborate this further? How about this:

Over the past several weeks, the Palestinian Authority has granted extended vacation leaves to dozens of jailed Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists, among them militants who were involved in serious terror attacks against Israel.

It is clear, that though the article paints the release of these terrorists as a way of appeasing the "extremists", that it also coincided with the increase of terror noted by Lancry. Clearly Arafat gave them a "green light" if he didn't actually coordinate with them.
Erlanger noted:

Local actors like mayors, kinship networks, and armed militias compete for authority in the vacuum and "the result is growing chaos throughout the West Bank," the report said.

Well actually that is nothing new as Graham Usher noted back in 1997:

"Since the PA was installed in 1994, Arafat has based his rule on two crucial constituencies. One was his Fatah movement, many of whose cadres were absorbed into the PA's burgeoning and often lawless security forces. But the other was Arafat's deliberate reempowerment of Palestine's traditional or tribal families, like the Abu Samhadanahs or, for that
matter, the Al-Dhairs. In Rafah, the two constituencies have become one,
with tribal and political loyalties so interwoven as to be inseparable.

"For Palestinian analysts like the sociologist, Isah Jad, the PA's "revival of tribal structures" is not only inimicable to Palestinian hopes for a law based and democratic society. It is corrosive of the modern national consciousness Palestinians have forged out of their conflict with Israel. For 30 years, says Jad, "the national movement conducted a long struggle to weaken loyalty to the family and the tribe and strengthen the concept of nationalism and loyalty to the homeland. Any rebuilding of tribal structures will reinstate the family and the tribe as the individual's first loyalty."

And of course Erlanger spends much time bemoaning the poverty of the Palestinians despite the massive infusion of foreign aid. But never once does he ask the most important question: What if the Palesitnian Authority had spent the past eleven years creating industry and political progress instead of creating and acquiring weapons, and promoting grievances, hatred and terror. Wouldn't they have a state by now? By looking at the results of the failed Palestinian Authority, he misses the main questions. Shouldn't he be looking at the politicians, diplomats and, yes, journalists who didn't hold the Palestinian government (and society who supported the terror) accountable for its multiple breaches of the Oslo Accords? Israel under four Prime Ministers, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak did all they could to create a viable Palestinian state. But instead of looking at that, they focused on the perceived failures of these Israeli governments to make their concessions more appealing to the Palestinians.
It's also worth noting that with the advent of this violence most of the media threw all caution to the wind when it came to objectivity when reporting on the Middle East and actively supported the perpetrators of violence. HonestReporting.com started in response to this. The Photo that Started it All was of a Yeshiva student, Tuvia Grossman - bloodied after being beaten by an Arab gang - being rescued by an Israeli policeman. Despite many problems the NY Times, followed by many other newspapers captioned the photo as the policemen beating the "Palestinian" in the foreground. (The Baltimore Sun published the photo with the false caption five days after the truth was widely known. They claimed that since the Sunday section was published early in the week, they didn't have the information in time. If truth was so precious to the Sun, they would have done a second run.)

The late Scott Shuger did an excellent expose of the sanitizing of the lynching of Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich, "Making Excuses for Ramallah".

Finally it took awhile but James Fallows undermined the common fairytale that Israel killed twelve year old Mohammed Al Dura. The aeriel picture the Israeli army provided should have made it clear that the Israeli troops under fire had no clear shot at the Al Dura's position. (I'll have to find it, I know that it's on the MFA website.) This was a myth that should have been debunked immediately.

Maybe this anniversary should be spent by the media looking at themselves and correcting their terrible slant that only allows the terror against Israel to continue with impunity.

Finally check out Israel's MFA "Four years of Conflict." There's a 40 page Word document available at the site.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at October 3, 2004 5:34 PM