Much attention has been focused on acts of vandalism and violence in Arab villages that have been perpetrated by Jews living in the West Bank. This is entirely appropriate. Any challenges to the rule of law by the tiny group of extremists who have attacked Palestinians in what they call “price tag” attacks to retaliate for Arab actions or Israeli government crackdowns, or who seek to resist the lawful efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to keep order, must be put down with determination. But as deplorable as their acts are, the reality of the situation in the West Bank is one in which Palestinian violence against Jews is a daily fact of life. That was brought home earlier this week with a roadside shooting near Hebron in which cars carrying an Israeli police officer and his family were riddled with bullets on the way to a Passover seder. The murder of Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrachi and the wounding of his wife and 9-year-old son was just one more example of a growing number of incidents in which Palestinian attacks on Israelis have escalated.
The international press and Western governments tend to shrug their shoulders about such crimes. This stems from either a belief that the Palestinians can’t be expected to restrain themselves from violence against Israelis or from a feeling that the Jews, by their presence in the disputed territory, have it coming. This is monstrous, but just as distressing is the fact that little effort is made to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for the violence. As the Israeli government has attempted, with little success, to bring to the attention of the world, the Palestinian Authority incites violence against Jews and Israelis in its official print and broadcast media. Moreover, the fact that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas told a group of left-wing members of the Knesset that he wouldn’t officially condemn the murder until a “full investigation of the incident was concluded” spoke volumes about the inability of Israel’s peace partner to even make symbolic, let alone tangible, efforts to promote peace.
Should this affect the ongoing negotiations being promoted by the U.S. between Israel and the PA? The negotiators are right to say that terrorists should not be allowed to sabotage peace. But so long as the PA continues to pay salaries to those who commit such crimes, it is not possible to separate such incidents from the talks. Should they be caught, Mizrachi’s murderers will, as the Times of Israel’s David Horovitz wrote today, be confident that the PA will not rest until they are freed. How can anyone seriously think peace is possible so long as we know that is true?
The PA reaction to Mizrahi’s murder mirrors virtually every other reaction of the PA to the thousands of violent incidents carried out against Jews since the Oslo Accords. PA officials make amorphous comments condemning violence when speaking to the Western press but never follow up with similar, official statements when talking to their people in PA media in Arabic. Meanwhile the government of the independent Palestinian state-in-all-but-name that already exists in Gaza cheered the murder when Hamas endorsed the attack.
The focus on the stalled peace negotiations and the Palestinian demand for defined borders for the state they hope to create on the West Bank tends to encourage a mindset that sees the conflict as one that is primarily about territory. But the PA’s encouragement of terrorism—both explicit and tacit—illustrates once again that Israeli demands for gestures that show Abbas’s commitment to end the conflict are fundamental to the creation of any lasting or even temporary peace. So long as the PA and their Hamas rivals legitimize attacks or rationalize them as an understandable reaction to the indignity of being forced to live alongside Jewish communities, there is little reason to believe that redrawing Israel’s borders will put an end to the violence.
While the Palestinians deserve the lion’s share of the criticism for this, some of the blame belongs to both the U.S. and Israel. Just as it did in the 1990s with regard to the reprehensible activities of Abbas’s predecessor Yasir Arafat, U.S. attempts to whitewash Abbas make it unlikely that the PA will reconsider its actions. Similarly, as Horovitz notes, Israel’s willingness to engage in prisoner exchanges, which allow terrorists to think any prison sentences they get for their crimes are merely temporary inconveniences, also encourages violence.
While those who claim to constitute the “peace camp” both in Israel and the United States tend to regard any attention given to Palestinian crimes as a distraction from the more important work to negotiate an agreement, so long as the PA isn’t forced to pay a price for its misconduct, Secretary of State John Kerry’s already dim chances for success are reduced to zero.
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