“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem,” President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian National Authority, said on September 16th. “This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah.”
The attacks might not have come immediately after Abbas’s words, but come they did. Since the beginning of October, Palestinians have initiated over 65 stabbings, mostly in East Jerusalem, eight shootings and eight car rammings. Over a dozen Israelis have been killed, and more than 150 wounded. The shooting dead of two Palestinians by Israeli forces, after one of them allegedly stabbed a policeman, on November 30th reflects a much broader problem.
Maybe you’ve seen some of the videos: a man mowing down civilians, then hopping out of his car to continue chopping at one with an axe; two teenagers boarding a quiet bus and stabbing an 80 year-old woman in the neck; an encouragement released by Palestinian authorities that depicts a man heroically chasing down and killing two caricatured Jews.
But probably not. Instead the media response has been subdued, and reporters have taken measures to present an equivalency between attackers and victims. Headlines especially, do not paint a representative picture. CAMERA, an organisation that focuses on pointing out biases in Middle East reporting, points to examples: CNN’s “Palestinians shot boarding kid’s bus”; BBC’s “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two”; the Wall Street Journal’s “Two Palestinian Teenagers Killed, Two Injured by Israeli Police.”
In none of these does the reader get a clear picture of what actually occurred: that armed Palestinians tried to board a bus and kill its passengers; that a man was shot after he killed two Israelis; that the teenagers, one of whom had just stabbed a 13 year-old on a bike, were killed because they were attempting themselves to kill policemen and passersby in the street.
All this serves to epitomise what is a greater bias in the media and the international community—one that castigates Israel and often glosses over or downplays Palestinian wrongs. A poorly conceived comment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that called the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem the instigator of the Holocaust rather than just an instigator was lambasted across the globe. The fact that the Palestinian Authority, under its law of the prisoner, pays the salary of Palestinians who have committed violent acts against Israelis flies mostly under the radar outside of in Israeli journalism.
It would be folly, of course, to attribute this imbalance to anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are often assumed to be closely linked, and while it is probably true that at least some Western commentators opposed to Israel are also anti-Semitic, the large majority certainly are not. Israel is, undeniably, a flawed state and rightfully warrants censure at times.
Actions such as their expansion of the West Bank settlements and racist statements by government figures like the former Foreign Affairs Minster Avigdor Lieberman deserve all the ire they have provoked. They are indicative of a right-wing government under Netanyahu, a highly abrasive figure himself, which has worked less hard than many of its predecessors to protect the rights of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
But we also need to understand the circumstances that have brought Likud and the Jewish Home, among more conservative parties, into power. They are circumstances that should be eminently understandable to us in the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris: those of being unsafe in one’s own home, under siege, with the threat of death poisoning the air. And for Israel, such a position is augmented all the more by an existential threat—one that has existed since its conception. A slip-up, and the Israeli state has the potential to be no more.
Look, too, at how France has responded to one terrorist attack: with the declaration of a state of emergency, a bombing campaign, and a surge in Islamophobic sentiment, towards both French natives and Syrian refugees. The doctrine of state security has superseded all others; one would not be amiss in surmising that any action that President Francois Hollande could take to secure French safety would be welcomed by most of the electorate.
It is this mood that has driven Israel to the feelings of isolation and anger that pervade the public space. This mood, but magnified by what is perceived as discriminatory international opprobrium—between 2006 and 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council published 62 condemnations of Israel, more than on the rest of the world combined—and by repeatedly spurned attempts at peace—like in the 2000 Camp David talks, where Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat an almost complete reversion to the 1967 borders just to have Arafat walk away from the table without a counteroffer.
Israel must hold itself to a higher moral standard than its enemies, and so ought the rest of the world—it does have advantages that put it in the driving seat, relative to the Palestinian Authority, and as a country with the same values as most Western democracies, it cannot forget its calling to be liberal and fair to all.
But nor can we forget that Israel has taken long and hard measures time and again to be as perfect a democracy as it possibly can, given the constraints upon it; even now, it provides hospital care to Palestinian assailants. And before we jump to criticise, we must keep in mind how the United States, or the United Kingdom or France would respond to a constant security threat—and question if we really think that Israel has done any differently than the best among us would have done.
