A week of terror in March brought home the harsh reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: appeasement won’t stop the attacks on Israeli civilians.
On 22 March, a former teacher and ex-convict who had known ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) went on a rampage in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Armed with his car and a knife, he killed four people and injured two – all innocent Israeli civilians – before being shot and killed himself by a passerby, who took action to prevent further bloodshed.
Hamas spokesperson Abd al-Latif al-Qanou welcomed the attack, according to the Jerusalem Post, saying ‘the crimes of the occupation are met only with heroic stabbing, ramming and shooting operations.’
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, like Hamas, rejects a two-state solution and seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment in its place of an Islamic state. It also cheered the attack, saying ‘the operation comes in the natural context of responding to the crimes of Zionist terrorism in the occupied Negev.’
The attack was the third stabbing attack in a week, but the first in which people were killed instead of merely injured. It was the deadliest attack within Israel since a truck ramming in Jerusalem in 2017, which killed four Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers and injured 15.
Deadly week
On Sunday, 27 March, two ISIS terrorists opened fire at a bus stop in Hadera, a town some 50km north of Tel Aviv, killing two and injuring 12.
The attack occurred on the same day as senior diplomats from Israel, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Egypt attended a summit in the Negev desert.
The summit follows up on the historic Abraham Accords of 2020, which normalised relations between Israel and the various Arab neighbours, to expand the scope for economic and security cooperation between the six countries.
ISIS took formal credit for the attack, which it called a ‘twin immersive commando attack by Islamic State Fighters’.
Days later, on 29 March, a Palestinian Arab gunman went on a shooting spree in the ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
This time, five civilians lost their lives, before the shooter could be taken down.
The attack brought the total casualty count to 11, making it the most deadly week of terror since 2006. Many more attacks were thwarted, with hundreds of suspects being taken into custody.
Just over a week later, on 7 April, yet another terrorist opened fire in Tel Aviv, this time in an area with restaurants and bars on Dizengoff Street in the central part of the city, killing two and wounding several more people.
Again, Hamas celebrated the attack, with Hamas official Mushir al-Masri saying: ‘Resistance operations are a natural response to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.’
Apparently, ‘resistance operations’ are equivalent to ‘murdering innocent civilians on a night out on the town’.
Wave of terror
Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett is one of the leaders, alongside Yair Lapid, of an unprecedented multiparty coalition government that includes Israeli Arab representation, and ousted the right-wing conservative Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2021.
Bennett encouraged Israeli civilians to arm themselves, saying: ‘Israel is facing a wave of murderous Arab terror. Security forces are acting. We will fight terror persistently, stubbornly and with an iron fist. They will not move us from here. We will win.’
He wasn’t just posturing. He was tapping into widespread public opinion, and responding accordingly.
A poll released on 4 April by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that 83% of Arab Israelis and 64% of Jewish Israelis feel no personal security, while 70% of Arab Israelis and 66% of Jewish Israelis said they were pessimistic about Israel’s security situation in the foreseeable future.
Alarmingly, 78% of Jewish Israelis (85% of self-described right-wingers and 51.5% of those who consider themselves left-wing) feel that in the fight against terrorism, all means can be used and moral considerations should not be taken into account. This is a doubling from 38.5% who said so back in 2018.
The Israeli popular mood is fearful, and increasingly vengeful, as Arab and Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians rise leading up to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began on 2 April, and the Jewish Passover, celebrated this weekend.
Failed appeasement
With the two-state peace process largely stalled, Israel has been following an appeasement strategy designed to ‘shrink’ the conflict, by trying to reduce frictions and supporting the Palestinian economy.
Instead, it changed its strategic focus to building alliances with other Arabic countries to form a bulwark against the region’s biggest bully, Iran, which stokes much of the terrorism aimed against Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
However, the nature of its enemies closer to home are undermining this approach.
The Gaza Strip is ruled by an Iran-backed, internationally-recognised terrorist organisation, Hamas. Hamas routinely fires deadly rockets at civilian targets all over Israel.
The West Bank is nominally governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which last held an election when Yasser Arafat died in 2005, and has since then remained under the dictatorial control of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, now more than 17 years into his four-year term.
The disapproval rate of the PA among Palestinians is as high as 73%. They’re sick of its cronyism and corruption.
The problem is, if new elections were held today, they would be won by either Ismail Hanir of Hamas, or Marwan Barghouti, once a senior member of Fatah’s armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and currently serving a lengthy prison term for murder.
Fatah is not moderate
Not that the Fatah government is much better. Although it hoped for a kinder and more generous US administration under President Joe Biden, it has instead faced cuts in funding from donors all over the world, because of its employment and funding of terrorists and inclusion of virulent antisemitism in Palestinian schoolbooks.
The PA, much like Hamas, has described deadly terror attacks against Israeli civilians as ‘popular resistance’.
It has a policy to reward terror, by paying stipends to imprisoned terrorists, paying allowances to the families of jailed or wounded terrorists, guaranteeing jobs to terrorists upon their release from prison, and granting pensions for life to terror convicts who spend five or more years in prison.
Under the PA, terrorists are viewed as brave heroes who fought and sacrificed for the cause. All this is a clear incentive to commit terror attacks.
In a survey of Palestinians, asked about the most effective means of ‘ending the Israeli occupation and building an independent state’, as many as 68% favoured violence. Forty-four percent wanted a full-blown terror campaign. Only 25% of respondents wanted negotiations.
Having failed to re-legitimise its rule by means of elections in 2021, which Abbas called off for fear that Fatah would lose to Hamas, Abbas is now giving his constituents the violence they seem to want.
Escalating violence
Abbas has ratcheted up the rhetoric, saying that ‘this land belongs to the Canaanites who were here 5 000 years ago – and we are the Canaanites.’
He doubled down on the so-called ‘pay to slay’ policy, and has had the temerity to demand that Israel pays the PA for it.
At a memorial for three Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorists killed by the IDF, he promised to ‘pay Israel back double’.
Far from being the moderate alternative to Hamas, Fatah is escalating the violence, and is equally unwilling to accept the notion of a Jewish state.
Nothing but the destruction of the Jewish state and the expulsion of the Jews from the Middle East will satisfy the Palestinian leaders or their people. They continue to prove that terrorism against civilians is their preferred means to achieve their goal.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to hear firm words from Israeli leaders, vowing to defeat terror and defend their country’s right to exist. They remain, after all, under constant attack, and their people are, rightly, afraid.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the same as the Daily Friend or the IRR.