"On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem a n immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves"
(Zechariah 12:3)
The European Union’s new foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini, visited the region over the weekend and insisted on the urgent need for a Palestinian state with the eastern half of Jerusalem as its capital.
“We need a Palestinian state - that is the ultimate goal and this is the position of all the European Union,” said Mogherini while in the Gaza Strip, adding later during her stop in Ramallah that “Jerusalem can be and should be the capital of two states.”
Mogherini said that establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is a “global” objective, and that Israel is obstructing this important and worthy goal by continuing to allow Jews to live in areas claimed by the Palestinian Arabs, in particular on the eastern side of Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by once again stating that “Jerusalem is our capital and as such is not a settlement.”
Speaking to reporters ahead of his own meeting with Mogherini, Netanyahu stressed that “the neighborhoods in which we are living…and we’ve been building, have been there for close to 50 years… Everybody knows that in any peace arrangement they will remain part of Israel.”
Indeed, the issue of Jerusalem remains perhaps the largest stumbling block to international efforts to conclude a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. A firm majority of Israeli Jews insist that after millennia of longing for a return to Jerusalem, the city must never again be divided, while Palestinian leaders say they won’t accept any peace deal that doesn’t give them control of half the city, including the Old City and Temple Mount.
Two terrorist stabbing attacks on Monday claimed the lives of two young Israelis and left three others wounded during a day of unrest across the Holy Land.
The first stabbing took place at a train station in central Tel Aviv, where an 18-year-old Palestinian youth attacked a young Israeli soldier. The soldier was stabbed repeatedly in the leg while the assailant tried to seize his automatic rifle. A passerby who tried to intervene was lightly wounded.
The injured soldier was found without a pulse by first responders, and underwent emergency surgery. He later succumbed to his wounds.
The second attack occurred a very short time later at a bus stop near the Judean cluster of Jewish communities known as the Etzion Bloc. There, a Palestinian man attempted to carry out yet another vehicular terror attack by ramming three people waiting at the bus stop. When that failed, he leapt from the car and began stabbing his intended victims.
A 25-year-old Israeli woman was killed after being stabbed in the neck, and two other people were wounded, one seriously, before a nearby security guard shot and subdued the attacker.
Both terrorists were arrested. The first was identified as a follower of Hamas, while the second is a known member of Islamic Jihad.
In other violence, Palestinian Arabs stoned public buses and Jerusalem’s light rail, causing damage, but no injuries.
A day earlier, an Israeli man narrowly escaped being lynched when his car was surrounded at the entrance to the Arab town of Tayibe. A local man saved the frightened Jewish victim by pulling him away from the scene just before his car was torched.
The latest escalation of violence is being pinned on last Friday’s killing by police of a crazed knife-wielding Arab man near Nazareth. Kheir Hamdan was among thousands who were violently demonstrating against Israel when police showed up in the village of Kfar Kanna. Hamdan rushed the police van and began hitting the windows with his knife before being shot.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected such justification for this new wave of violence, and vowed that those behind it would fail in their effort to “kick us (the Jews) out of here.”
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