In The News: Violence In The West Bank Serves As A Warning

Analysis: Upsurge In West Bank Violence Is Unmistakable Warning

As the investigation into the terror attack in Psagot, which targeted a nine-year-old girl, continues, it's worth zooming out and looking at the wider situation in the West Bank, where recent weeks have seen an unmistakable increase in violent attacks.

...figures released by the Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency] in its monthly report for September point to an unmistakable upsurge in Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilian and military targets across the West Bank and east Jerusalem. 

In September, security forces logged 129 attacks in total, compared to 93 in August. The upsurge included the murdersof two IDF soldiers last month, as well as 72 firebombings, four explosive attacks, and four instances of small arms fire.

The bottom line is that things are heating up in the sector. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are attempting to rebuild terrorist infrastructures and organize terror attacks against Israel from the West Bank on a regular basis.

In July, the PA's official television channel broadcast a program showing two Palestinian girls reading poetry. "Oh, you who murdered Allah’s pious prophets. Oh, you who were brought up on spilling blood. You have been condemned to humiliation and hardship. Oh Sons of Zion, oh most evil among creations .Oh barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs," one of the girls said.

At the moment, the embers in the West Bank are smoldering, and no one can say with certainty whether they will end up erupting in flames.

'Peace Process' Is Exploding

On Saturday night a Palestinian terrorist snuck into the Israeli community of Psagot, north of Jerusalem and near Ramallah, and either shot or stabbed a nine-year-old girl, Noam Glick. Noam was rushed to hospital in Jerusalem and, fortunately, is in stable condition.

The terrorist, however, melted back into the Palestinian population and has not yet been apprehended, and the attack was part of a pattern.

Meanwhile it was reported on Friday that terror attacks of all kinds rose “dramatically” in September, with a total of 133 (including, again, large numbers of rock- and firebomb-throwing incidents) compared to 68 in August.

It was last July 29 that the new round of ostensible Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was launched in Washington. It took months of heavy pressure on both sides by the new secretary of state, John Kerry, to reach that outcome.

The clincher was U.S. and Israeli acquiescence to the demand of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the talks be accompanied by Israel’s phased release of 104 “pre-Oslo” (pre-1993) terrorists, including convicted murderers of men, women, and children. The first batch of 26 were released on August 13.

The justification given for the talks, and for the large-scale freeing of murderers, was that the talks would “calm the Palestinian arena” and possibly lead to peace in nine months, the time span that Kerry determined for them from the outset.

If it’s clear by now that the Palestinian arena has not been calmed (let alone making peace preparations), it’s not the first time that talks have in fact prompted a spike in terror.

The original “Oslo” talks in 1993 were followed by almost three years of Palestinian terror attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis. The 2000 Camp David talks were followed by the even more lethal five-year Second Intifada, which killed about a thousand.

There are indications, too, that the current round of talks has been causative of the new terror wave.

Two weeks ago Palestinian-affairs expert Khaled Abu Toameh reported that “a connection seems to exist” between the two phenomena, with Palestinian groups—including the armed wing of Abbas’s own Fatah movement—vowing to escalate terror and stop the talks. It was already known that all the Palestinian organizations, from the Islamist Hamas to the relatively secular Fatah itself, fiercely opposed the negotiations.With Israel facing strategic threats, particularly from Iran to the east but also from the Syrian imbroglio and from Hizballah to the north, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wants to get along with Washington as well as possible and will not easily take such steps. Israel, having entered the talks, may also be in a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t position, with 58% of Palestinians predicting a Third Intifada if the talks “fail.”

In reality, the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is now on the back burner, and Sunni Arab states mainly see Israel as a tacit ally against Iran. As for the Palestinian dimension of that conflict, it is not clear how many dead and wounded there will have to be until it is understood that, so long as the Palestinians view Israel as the incarnation of evil, prodding them toward “peace” only makes matters worse.

The Nature Of Peacemaking According To Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an aggressive, seemingly petulant speech Sunday night at Bar-Ilan University. Between Holocaust references and criticism of Palestinian leaders past and present, he demanded that the Palestinian Authority recognize not only the unassailable fact of Israel’s existence, but the historic right of the Jews to have their own sovereign state in this land.

Whether Netanyahu, deep in his heart, wants a peace deal with the Palestinians is a question beyond the ken of any commentator – and is perhaps unknown to Netanyahu himself.

But his demand for Palestinian recognition of the Jewishness of Israel is no cheap tactic. It is the key to understanding his theory of the conflict, his view as to why the Oslo process 20 years ago failed, and his distrust of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the new round of talks.

When Israeli hawks complain about PA incitement, doves are fond of replying, “You make peace with enemies.”

But Netanyahu has a different view, not about PA incitement, but about the nature of peacemaking.

When a Western leader once sought to make peace with his enemy, he found himself undermined politically and transformed into a laughingstock of history. That leader was Neville Chamberlain – and the enemy was Adolf Hitler. When another leader sought to unite a fractured society riven by racial discord, his efforts transformed him into a revered figure and his peacemaking efforts continue to heal and unify long after his death. That leader was Martin Luther King, and his enemy was the white racism that had tormented American blacks through centuries of slavery and inequality.

The difference between Chamberlain’s failure and King’s success lay, in part, in their constituents’ view of the enemy. Soon after Munich, Britons came to view Hitler as implacably evil, and Chamberlain’s peacemaking efforts as accommodation with that unspeakable evil. (That this view of Hitler was correct is beside the point; the issue here is psychological. )

On the other hand, King did not call on American blacks to make peace with Ku Klux Klan murderers or the racist governors of southern states. 

Netanyahu’s demand for recognition has its roots in this Israeli experience. The Palestinians cannot bring themselves to end the conflict, Netanyahu believes, because they cannot bring themselves to compromise with an enemy they view as completely evil.

It is a mistake to view Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan 2 speech as indicating he is withdrawing, even in tone, from the peace talks. In fact, the renewed urgency of his demand for recognition — which he believes to be critical to peacemaking — might suggest that the talks are, at long last, getting serious.

Netanyahu Blames Mideast Conflict On Refusal To Recognize Jewish State

In a marked change in emphasis from a speech at the same podium four years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday voiced doubt over the possibility of a two-state solution, citing the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Speaking at the 20th anniversary ceremony of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, the prime minister placed blame for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Ramallah’s refusal to come to terms with Israel as a Jewish state.

“The Palestinians must abandon their refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to have their national state,” he said.

Netanyahu dismissed claims that Israel’s presence in the West Bank stood at the heart of the conflict, stating instead that as long as the Palestinians don’t internalize the Jewish state’s right to exist, there will not be peace.

Netanyahu: For Peace, Palestinians Must Recognize Jewish Homeland

Hizballah Is Secretly Pulling Its Fighting Men Out Of Syria, Elated By Victory

Just as the Iran-backed Lebanese Hizballah sent thousands of fighting men into Syria on the sly to fight for the Assad regime in the winter of 2012, so it is now pulling them back in the same furtive fashion in small, inconspicuous bands.DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources report that 1,500 Hizballah fighters are home out of 3,500 still awaiting repatriation last month. By early November, they are all expected to be out of Syria.

Hizballah’s leaders and backers rate the operation a major success: It gave President Bashar Assad a valuable boost for his regime’s survival against a major uprising. Hizballah’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war went through unopposed by the US or any regional power, such as Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia or Qatar. And, finally, Tehran for the first time fielded a surrogate force for a winning role to determine the outcome of a conflict in one of its most important strategic arenas.
Hizballah’s rapid exit from Syria is the outcome of five developments in the region and beyond:

1. It signifies the close interdependence of the US-Russian understanding for Syria’s chemical disarmament and the deal unfolding between the US, Russia and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Progress in negotiations with Iran is clearly interlocked with progress on Syria.

2. Assad and his regime are now firm enough in the saddle to dispense with Hizballah’s military assistance.

3. Hizballah needs to whisk its militiamen out of Syria before the inspectors of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-OPCW, the first of whom arrived in Damascus Tuesday, Oct. 1, fan out across the country and get down to work. The Lebanese Shiite group is anxious to keep its expeditionary force in Syria out of sight so as to preserve the closely guarded secrets of its makeup and modes of operation.

4. The Hizballah militia comes out of the Syrian war toughened by combat experience and well-trained in the running of regular military units in battle conditions under combined Iranian-Syrian command.

In comparison, Israel’s armed forces, the IDF, have not faced combat conditions in the field since the Second Lebanon War of 2006, while Hizballah, which is dedicated to destroying Israel, despite its heavy war losses, has just survived the test of fire on the Syrian battlefield.

5.  At Tehran’s behest, Hizballah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is turning his attention inward to Beirut. His assignment is to promote a political set-up that will support future accords on Syria between the US, Russia and Iran. He is therefore abandoning his strong opposition to a national unity government in Beirut and helping to get one installed.
In his latest speech Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Begin-Sadat Center of Bar Ilan University, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared: “The goal of Iran today is to control the Middle East and beyond, and to destroy the State of Israel. That is not speculation; that is the goal.”
But he had no word to offer on what Israel was going to do to stop Tehran achieving its goal or disarm Iran’s faithful operational arm to prevent it pursuing its master’s Middle East objectives.   

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