There are Palestinians, obviously not all of them, whose hearts soared at the sight of last week’s fires, which wiped out thousands of acres of land surround Jerusalem. There are too many Palestinians who rejoiced at the sight of the flames burning their “stolen land,” turning it into blackened fields.
While so many peoples’ hearts were wrung at the sight of the embers and the destruction and the burned homes and the smoke – theirs swelled with joy. I know this because in the past few days, I’ve been talking to a few of them. They are smart enough not to be interviewed on the record, but too happy at the suffering of others to hide it.
I found them after encountering a few social media posts from Palestinians and Arab Israelis. One was the well-known Haifa historian Dr. Johnny Mansour, a lecturer at Beit Berl College. Mansour and his colleagues aren’t dancing with joy, but they choose to stress what, in their eyes, the fires exposed: the “geographic, historical truth” of what the “Zionist colonial project” was hiding – “sights that no one expected,” Mansour said.
He cited “agricultural terraces that Palestinians worked for decades, the result of the Palestinian peasant’s hard work, sweat, and blood to preserve his land and make a living off it, landscapes that the ‘project of occupation and Zionist uprooting,’ with its ‘colonial institutions’ planted with trees to destroy what the peasants created and to hide the land and the characteristics of the region.”
Mansour, who sees Palestinianism and its agricultural expressions as natural, and Zionist forestation as a foreign weed, is not alone in his views. The discourse in Arab Israeli society, much like among the Palestinians, is redefining the green landscapes of the land and sees the forestation planted as a method of hiding the Palestinian past and the remains of the villages that existed around Jerusalem until 1948.
Back during the wildfires of 2016, the Fatah movement adopted a similar stance, underscoring “The Palestinian identity of all Palestinian rocks and trees being burned now, which are part of our historic Palestine….” There would be no point in bringing up the “diagnosis” of Mansour and people like him, whose views of the Zionist enterprise and the return of the Jewish people are well-known, if it weren’t for the nationalist pyromanaics whose discourse repeats the same perception: that the fire is a blow to the enemy and the “occupied land” at the same time. Or in other words, “If I can’t have it, neither can you.”
Dancing on the roofs
This approach is nothing new. Many Palestinians danced on their roofs 30 years ago, when Saddam Hussein fired missiles at us (and them) during the Gulf War. Last May, many gathered at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem were happy at the sound of the sirens as rockets were fired on Jerusalem, the city where they themselves live.
In the last few weeks, another version of “If I can’t have it, neither can you” emerged in the Haifa District Prosecutor’s Office. A few Arab prosecutors asked to be exempted from handling cases against Arabs who rioted during Operation Guardian of the Walls. This is an unacceptable position for anyone who has supposedly made a commitment to go after anyone who breaks the law, especially those who try to murder or attack Jews. When Khalil Awad, 52, and his daughter Nadin, 16, were killed last May in a village near Lod by a direct hit from a rocket fired by Hamas, there were Arab Israelis in Lod and other places nearby who refused to condemn the attack. Years ago, I witnessed a similar situation that took place after a major terrorist attack in Jerusalem in November 2002, in which 11 people were killed and over 50 wounded in a suicide bombing on the No. 20 bus.
When I got to Shaare Zedek Medical Center to interview the wounded and their loved ones, I met Arab students from the Galilee who were studying at David Yellin College and living in rented apartments in the Beit Zafafa neighborhood, like their wounded friends. All my and my colleagues’ attempts to get them to condemn the despicable act were in vain. From their perspective, despite knowing the wounded personally, the suicide bombing was legitimate.
There are plenty of signs that last week’s fires, like waves of wildfires in 2019 and 2016, were at least in part another mutation of Palestinian terrorism. Retired Fire and Rescue Services official Ran Shalaf, who used to head arson investigations for the department, said as much five years ago. Fire and rescue officials, as well as defense officials, are saying exactly the same thing today, and the Public Security Ministry also thinks that many of the fires were arson. According to ministry data, some 37,000 dunams (9,100 acres) are burned in Israel every year. This equates to two-thirds of the jurisdiction of the city of Tel Aviv.
Bennett and the ‘fire terrorists’
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, back when he was serving as education minister and was not politically dependent on MK Mansour Abbas and his Muslim Brotherhood party, explained that there was no such thing as a “random wave of fires,” but rather “a wave of ethno-religious terrorism by fire terrorists that is designed to murder civilians in their homes, hurt people, damage property, and create a threat.” In 2016, Bennett demanded that we “call it what it is.” At the time, he was also talking about the Palestinian Authority, which last week sent fire trucks to battle the fire that was burning in the Judean hills. Bennett thought that the PA shouldn’t be let off the hook, after “lighting fires of hatred and throwing antisemitic poison at school students in its textbooks and its official TV station, it offers help putting them out.”
This time, too, findings could lead to the conclusion that this was the work of fire terrorists, although even now, there is no accepted legal standard of evidence to prove that a fire was set because of an ethno-religious motive. There is only great frustration that the parties at fault will not pay for their deeds.
In 2016, the fire burned for five days in the hills around Jerusalem, the Galilee, Gilboa, in the Sharon region and on the Carmel. A total of 80,000 people from the Haifa area were evacuated, and the Fire and Rescue Services reported that they had addressed over 1,700 separate fires. The Shin Bet security agency and the Israel Police arrested 37 suspects, both Arab Israelis and Palestinians. Most were released. Only six indictments were filed against 13 suspects. The ethno-religious motive was mentioned in only one. Most of the cases ended with short prison sentences of under two years, even though an arson conviction carries a 15-year sentence, according to the law. It’s very hard to understand the people who set the fires. Anyone who loves their land and the landscapes of his homeland – Jew or Arab – doesn’t burn them.
{Written by Nadav Shragai and reposted from the IsraelHayom website}