{Originally posted to the authors’ website, This Ongoing War}
Take a moment to consider two mostly-unreported events from last night (Monday) in the ongoing Arab-on-Israel terrorism lottery.
A rocket was fired into southern Israel around midnight. It of course came from some rocket launching pad operated by aspirational, terror-minded Gazan Arabs, and was fired in the vague, general direction of Israel in the evident hope of hitting something. Something painful to Israelis, naturally. Through good luck or providence – but not because of any lack of malicious intent – that goal was not achieved, and the inbound rocket:
exploded in an open area in the Shaar Hanegev region of southern Israel. There were no physical injuries or damages. [Israel National News, March 14, 2016]
Times of Israel adds a few additional details, quoting the IDF, that it landed in an open area west of Sderot, and that Tzeva Adom, the IDF’s alarm siren system for warning of incoming rocket attacks and giving people in the landing area a few seconds advance notice to rush their families to a place of relative shelter, did not go off:
suggesting the rocket detection system deployed around Gaza calculated that the rocket would land far from populated areas. [Times of Israel]
Then in Jerusalem, another near-invisible blip on the news radar:
…[P]olice thwarted a stabbing attack planned by two Palestinian women at the HaZeitim Crossing checkpoint in east Jerusalem Monday night. According to police, the suspects – both from Abu Dis, and aged 24 and 29 – hid knives in their bags. When security personnel found the weapons, the women confessed to attempting to travel to the capital to carry out stabbing attacks against Jews. They were immediately placed under arrest… [Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2016]
People who think of these two attacks as insignificant near-misses will miss the point. Each could easily have brought tragedy into the lives of ordinary people on our side, the Israeli aspect of the conflict. That, in fact, was plainly the intention. In the first case, the attackers missed. In the second, they were detected and stopped before carrying out the violence they intended to inflict. In both cases, the assailants had no concrete targets – anything or anyone within Israel would have met their needs. And in both cases, they did essentially everything they needed to do in order to reach their goal.
That they failed says something about vigilance, fortune and/or fate. It certainly says nothing about any reduced appetite for killing on their side. There is no sign of an outbreak of calm or of a passion to co-exist or compromise emanating from their side. If and when good luck or divine intervention somehow fail us, there will be much worse outcomes from the inevitable (and yes, Palestinian Arab incitement to murder and savagery ensures that they are inevitable) attacks to come.
The forces pushing Palestinian Arabs, among them females and children, to throw away their lives and freedom in pursuit of martyrdom or merely attention are also barely understood. Consider what must have been the back-story to the efforts of the fifteen year-old Palestinian Arab girl, a child by any definition, who is the centerpiece of this blog post of ours: “22-Dec-15: A knife-wielding Palestinian Arab child and her two arrests“.
It’s not surprising that most people don’t know about the worrying daily realities of the Arab-on-Israeli war of terror. Such daily “near-misses” and other failed or thwarted attacks are so rarely reported outside our neighborhood. They therefore have close-to-zero impact on public awareness of how people live their lives on a razor’s edge in an ongoing war.