What is wrong with this picture? An Israeli factory in the West Bank settlement of Barkan employs both Israeli and Palestinian workers. They work side by side, making a living, being productive, day in and day out. A Palestinian terrorist enters the factory, ties up two Israelis and slaughters them in cold blood. Israel is horrified. So is the Hamas terrorist organization, but why?
That’s what’s wrong with this picture. Hamas is bitter that the factory in the West Bank points to the reality of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence on the ground. Hamas called the attack “a new chapter in our resistance in the West Bank. The incident has proven that attempts of the PA [Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ rival] to normalize relations with the Zionist occupier are unsuccessful.”
Normalize relations. Hamas is tied up in knots over the fact that Israelis and Palestinians can and do work together. This is not peace on the political level, to be sure, but if political peace is to come, it can only be sustained by peace on the human level. In Barkan, peace was, and remains, on the human level, the murderous act of the terrorist notwithstanding.
True enough, Hamas is not just horrified by the normalization of relations. Hamas is also overjoyed at the deaths of two innocent Israeli Jews, but why? Because these deaths supposedly defeat the normalization of relations on the West Bank. Supposedly, because Palestinians continue to come to work and Israelis continue to employ them.
An Islamic Jihad spokesman said after the attack: “We call on our people to rise up against the settlements terror until the West Bank is freed from it.” Actually, it’s just the opposite. Each Palestinian terrorist attack results in another Israeli settlement, or in another expansion of an existing settlement. The only way for Palestinian terrorists to slow Israeli settlement expansion is to come the peace table.
Copyright © 2018 by the Intermountain Jewish News
