Israel faces tough questions. Even tougher is the deafness to the answers.
Palestinians have certainly made up their minds that Israeli soldiers killed the well known Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, during an Israeli raid in Jenin. For the sake of argument, let’s abandon the sensible thing. Let’s not insist on a true investigation, which requires Palestinians to supply the bullet that killed her, and which the Palestinians refuse to supply. Let’s assume that Israeli fire killed the journalist.
Also for the sake of argument, let’s overlook the fact that an officer in Israel’s anti-terror unit, Noam Raz, died of wounds sustained in the clashes.
Still further, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Israeli police rushed the funeral for no good reason whatsoever. Video of this Israeli act went viral. Israel came off as insensitive to the dead, doubly offensive for having caused the death to begin with.
Assume all this: Israeli guilt for the killing, exacerbated by Israeli insensitivity at the funeral; the death of the Israeli not part of the discussion.
What response might an impartial observer offer in light of all this?
One word: context.
The secondary question is how the Israeli forces behaved in Jenin. The primary question is this: What were Israeli forces doing in Jenin in the first place? In the answer to this question is the answer to the questions posed in the headline to this editorial. What’s with Israel, anyway?
The context is this: the fomenting of Palestinian Arab terrorism in Jenin that resulted in the cold-blooded murder of multiple Israelis in multiple terrorist attacks over the past two months. By definition, terrorism is the murder of innocents. By definition, a government’s first duty is the safety of its citizens. Israeli forces were in Jenin to ferret out suspect terrorists in an effort to prevent further cold-blooded murder of Israeli innocents.
To those who say, “Israel has no business in Jenin!” we say, “Amen.” Let Jenin free itself of hatred and Israel will have no business in Jenin. There will be no one killed by Israeli forces there. Not a terrorist and not a journalist.
We write during the week that Palestinians mark “Nakba,” “Catastrophe,” their characterization of Israel’s founding in 1948, specifically, the declaration of Israeli Independence on May 15, 1948. We bring this up because the very same moral astigmatism that generates the term Nakba blames Israel for the death of the Palestinian journalists 74 years later in Jenin.
By “moral astigmatism,” we mean this: Perception of the consequence alongside blindness to the cause. In 2022, a Palestinian journalist is killed. That is the consequence. The cause is the incidents of Palestinian Arab terrorism that preceded it. The consequence is perceived, the cause — the context — is not perceived.
The Palestinian mourners of the death of the journalist are blind to the cause.
The same moral astigmatism governs the Palestinian response to Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 — supposedly, the initial provocation in the “cycle of violence.”
During the war, some Palestinian Arab lost their homes. This was the consequence. The cause was the prior, unprovoked invasion of five Arab armies of the UN-designated area for a Jewish state in Palestine.
This invasion constituted the Arab rejection of the UN-designated area for a Palestinian state in Palestine.
The Palestinian critics of the consequence — their “Catastrophe” — are blind to the cause, their invasion.
The Palestinian critics of the Catastrophe actually object to a self-determined Jewish community in Palestine to begin with. For Israel did not come into being until May 15, 1948, the date marked by Palestinians as the “Catastrophe,” but the massive Arab invasion of the territory designated by the UN for Israel began earlier, in 1947, before Israel even existed. Only a Jewish community did. That is what the Palestinians then and much of the Palestinian leadership today, certainly including Hamas, object to: any independent, corporate Jewish community in Palestine.
No Israeli state, no West Bank, no checkpoints, no F-15s, no Knesset, no IDF, no Startup Nation, no influx of Holocaust refugees — long before any of these — the Palestinian Arab leadership was at war with the small Zionist communities in Palestine.
To many Palestinians, it’s as if “Nakba” fell out of the sky in 1948.
It’s as if the death of the journalist fell out of the sky in 2022.
It’s as if the Israeli control of the West Bank fell out of the sky in 1967.
Consequences seen, causes not seen.
Missing in the current dispute over the events in Jenin is the same thing missing in the long, painful history of Israeli-Palestinian relations: one word. Context.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
