By Evelyn Gordon in the Commentary
on July 20, 2016
Following last week’s terror attack in Nice, a Belgian Jewish
organization issued a highly unusual statement charging that, had
European media not spent months “ignoring” Palestinian terror against Israel
out of “political correctness,” the idea of a truck being used as a weapon
wouldn’t have come as such a shock. But it now turns out that European
officials did something much worse than merely ignoring Palestinian attacks:
They issued a 39-page report, signed by almost every EU country, blaming these
attacks on “the occupation” rather than the terrorists. The obvious corollary
was that European countries had no reason to fear similar attacks and,
therefore, they didn’t bother taking precautions that could have greatly
reduced the casualties.
The most shocking part of the Nice attack was how high those
casualties were: The truck driver managed to kill 84 people before he was
stopped. By comparison, as the New York Times reported on Monday, Israel
has suffered at least 32 car-ramming attacks since last October, yet all these
attacks combined have killed exactly two people (shootings and stabbings are much
deadlier). Granted, most involved private cars, but even attacks using buses or
heavy construction vehicles never approached the scale of Nice’s casualties.
The deadliest ramming attack in Israel’s history, in 2001, killed eight.
Firstly, this is because Israel deploys massive security for mass
gatherings like Nice’s Bastille Day celebrations, forcing Palestinian assailants
to make do with less densely-populated targets, like bus stops or light rail
stops, which greatly lowers the death toll. As an Israeli police spokesman told
the New York Times, an Israeli event comparable to the one in Nice would
entail “a 360-degree enclosure of the area, with layers of security around the
perimeter,” including major roads “blocked off with rows of buses, and smaller
side streets with patrol cars,” plus a massive police presence reinforced by
counterterrorism units “strategically placed to provide a rapid response, if
needed.”
Secondly, Israeli security personnel have no qualms about using
deadly force against terrorists in mid-rampage if less lethal means would take
longer to succeed because they understand that the best way to save innocent
lives is to stop the attack as quickly as possible. This lesson was driven home
by a 2008 attack in which a Palestinian plowed a heavy construction vehicle
into a crowded Jerusalem street. A policewoman tried to stop him without
killing him; she wounded him and then climbed into the cab to handcuff him. But
while she was trying to cuff him, he managed to restart the vehicle and kill
another person before he was shot dead.
Now consider the abovementioned EU document, first reported
in the EUobserver last Friday, and its implications for both those
counterterrorism techniques. The document is an internal assessment of the wave
of Palestinian terror that began last October, written by EU diplomats in the
region and endorsed in December 2015 by all EU countries with “embassies in
Jerusalem and Ramallah,” the EUobserver said.
And what did it conclude? That the attacks were due to “the Israeli
occupation… and a long-standing policy of political, economic and social
marginalisation of Palestinians in Jerusalem,” to “deep frustration amongst
Palestinians over the effects of the occupation, and a lack of hope that a
negotiated solution can bring it to an end.” This, the report asserted, was
“the heart of the matter”; factors like rampant Palestinian incitement and
widespread Islamist sentiment, if they were mentioned at all, were evidently
dismissed as unimportant.
The report’s first implication is obvious: If Palestinian attacks
stem primarily from “the occupation,” there’s no reason to think anything
similar could happen in Europe, which isn’t occupying anyone (at least in its
own view; Islamists might not agree). Consequently, there’s also no need to
learn from Israel’s methods of dealing with such attacks.
In contrast, had EU diplomats understood the major role played by
Palestinian incitement—for instance, the endless Internet memes urging
Palestinians to stab, run over and otherwise kill Jews, complete with
detailed instructions on how to do so—they might have realized that similar
propaganda put out by Islamic State, urging people to use similar techniques
against Westerners, could have a similar effect. Had they understood the role
played by Islamist sentiments—fully 89 percent of Palestinians supported a Sharia-based state in a Pew poll last
year, one of the highest rates in the world—they might have realized that
similar sentiments among some European Muslims posed a similar threat. And had
they realized all this, the crowds in Nice might not have been left virtually
unprotected.
No less telling, however, was the report’s explanation for Israel’s
relatively low death toll. Rather than crediting the Israeli police for
managing to stop most of the attacks quickly, before they had claimed many
victims, it accused them of “excessive use of force… possibly amounting in
certain cases to unlawful killings.”
If the EU’s consensus position is that shooting terrorists in
mid-rampage constitutes “excessive use of force,” European policemen may
understandably hesitate to do the same. In Nice, for instance, the rampage
continued for two kilometers while policemen reportedly “ran 200 meters behind the truck
trying to stop it”; the police caught up only when a civilian jumped into the
truck’s cab and wrestled the driver, slowing him down. Yet even then, an
eyewitness said, “They kept yelling at him and when he did
not step out – they saw him from the window taking his gun out.” Only then did
they open fire.
Not everyone shares the EU’s blind spot about Palestinian terror.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Africa earlier this month, the
leaders he met with said openly that one of the main things they want from
Israel is counterterrorism assistance. They understand quite well that
anti-Israel terror isn’t some unique breed that other countries can safely
ignore; terror is terror, and any tactic tried by Palestinians is liable to be
quickly imitated by Islamist terrorists elsewhere—from airplane hijackings to
suicide bombings and, now, car-rammings.
But European officials, entrenched in their smug belief that
anti-Israel terror has nothing to do with the terror they face, are incapable
of acknowledging that Israel’s experience might be relevant. And therefore,
people died who might still be alive had the lessons of Palestinian terror
against Israel been learned.
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