Ignoring Violence against Israelis

 Video Of The Week-Palestinian Peace Activist Speaks - https://tinyurl.com/4xmr2r7k

For the full article from Yisrael Hayom by David M. Weinberg go to; https://tinyurl.com/8vw2rntc

There has been a lot of kerfuffle lately about "settler violence" in Judea and Samaria, focusing on recent "settler rampages" in Huwara and Burin (south of Nablus) and attacks on Palestinians harvesting their olive crop.  The UN has an entire bureaucracy (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA) devoted to cataloging the "precipitous rise in settler violence." It has a "Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967" who harps on "settler violence" non-stop, as well. The UN says that in the first ten months of 2021 (latest statistics available) there were 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians – 302 attacks against property and 108 against individuals.

American Jewish groups have now joined the outcry against "settler violence" too, with the Anti-Defamation League, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Israel Policy Forum, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism, and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism writing recently to Prime Minister Bennett and his foreign and defense ministers to condemn these attacks. The seven groups called the attacks "terrorism and political violence" committed by Jewish Israeli extremists.

As Bennett said to The Jerusalem Post last week, "In my view, this violence by Jews, which does not reflect the half million normative Israeli citizens in Judea and Samaria, is shameful, and whoever does it wants to dismantle Israeli statehood… I will not allow this to continue." Indeed, in December he convened Israeli security chiefs and ordered them to use all the tools necessary to put an end to such violence.

Foreign Minister Lapid responded this week to the Jewish organizations, also assuring them that Israel is cracking down on violence against Palestinians. At the same time, Lapid warned that "we should not allow (reports of such violence) to be abused to tarnish the entire State of Israel or to be manipulated by those who seek to delegitimize the State of Israel."

According to an important new study published this week – which unsurprisingly was ignored by the global media, by the UN, by "human rights" NGOs, and even by American Jewish organizations – over the past year there were over 4,000 rock and bomb throwing incidents in Judea and Samaria, perpetrated by Palestinian extremists and terrorists against Israeli Jews.

These attacks included over 500 Molotov cocktail attacks (firebombs), leading to the injury of more than 150 Israelis. There was a 210% rise in rock throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020, and a 156% rise in bomb throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020.

Worse still – according to the study authors, Lt. Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila and Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch of "Habithonistim: Israel's Defense and Security Forum" – is that the Israeli prosecution and courts have done much too little to deter and punish Palestinian perpetrators of violence.

In 95% of the rock and bomb throwing cases brought before Israeli civilian and military courts in 2019-2020, the sentences handed down against perpetrators were far below the maximum sentences possible in Israeli law. Some sentences were miniscule, amounting only to days of incarceration.

Worse yet still is that not all Palestinian attackers were prosecuted. In 2020, only 21% of rock throwers (in reported and documented incidents) were indicted and prosecuted, and only 33% of bomb throwers were indicted and prosecuted.

Col. Hirsch, who was head of IDF military prosecution in Judea and Samaria until 2016, adds that Palestinian terrorists are incentivized twice over to commit acts of violence: once by weak Israeli prosecution, and once again by the Palestinian Authority's pay-for-slay program, which provides NIS 600 million a year in salaries for jailed terrorists and their families.

Col. (res.) Amir Avivi, CEO of Habithonistim, believes that the entire issue of "settler violence" has been blown out of proportion by ill-meaning NGOs and European governments, and this certainly this is true when compared to Palestinian attacks on Israelis. "Without meaning to diminish the ugliness of extremist attacks on Palestinians," he says, "300 or so attacks a year against Palestinian property and 100 attacks against individuals pales in comparison to 4,000 Palestinian rock and bomb attacks a year aimed at killing Israeli civilians!"

"And 300 attacks on property and 100 attacks against individuals committed by a few extremists at the fringes of a half-million-person strong and peaceful community of Israelis who live over the Green Line calculates to a level of violence that is lower than the level of violence (by Israelis against Israelis) that afflicts greater Tel Aviv."

Given such dangerous and escalating Palestinian violence, and given Israel's weak response to such violence, one would expect to hear (but disappointedly cannot hear) a call from American Jewish organizations for an Israeli crackdown.

In this vein, it is not late for liberal American Jewish organizations to pen another, more loving public letter to Israeli leaders. They might also want to write (and write first) to the American government, insisting that Washington use its aid levers to force an end to Palestinian attacks; so that Palestinian leaders terminate financial support for, and glorification of, terrorist attacks on Israelis.

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