More than one week into the search for the three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, the Palestinians have gone beyond mocking the boys and their families on social media with their three-fingered salute taunt. They are now attempting to use the Israel Defense Forces’ search operation as an excuse to turn the tables on the Jewish state.
Since neither Hamas nor their Fatah partners in the Palestinian government have produced the boys or the captors (despite PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s promises that his security services are aiding in the hunt), these political parties are beginning what is, in effect, a third intifada, as they send their own children and young people into the streets to resist army searchers, producing confrontations that inevitably lead to violence and casualties.
Having then provided the international media with a new set of grievances, the Palestinians now are claiming that those who both applauded the kidnapping and who are actively obstructing the lawful operations aimed at rescuing the boys are the real victims. The only question is how long it will take before the United Nations and the rest of the international community starts mulling resolutions condemning the Israelis for leaving no stone unturned in their quest to find the boys as well as for having the chutzpah to resist terrorism.
To listen to officials like Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki, the kidnapping is either an Israeli hoax or the act of Jewish criminals rather than terrorists. This variant on 9/11 truther myths is a mixture of the traditional imagery of anti-Semitism as well as modern disinformation. But like PLO official Hanan Ashrawi and her boss Abbas, al-Maliki’s real complaint is that the focus on Jews suffering at the hands of Palestinian terrorists helps “turn Israelis from aggressors to victims.” He’s right about that.
Though Israelis are routinely portrayed in the international media as the bullies of the Middle East, the kidnapping and the latest rocket attacks into southern Israel from Hamas-run Gaza (the independent Palestinian state in all-but-name that reminds Israelis what they would get if they withdrew from the West Bank) highlight the fact that it is Israel that remains under siege from its hostile Arab neighbors, not Gaza or the West Bank.
If there is any conscious attempt to manipulate public opinion, it is the efforts of Palestinians to turn a lawful search operation for the boys into a series of unfortunate violent incidents. What is happening is similar to past intifadas during which cynical Palestinian leaders sacrificed their children on the altar of hate for Israel in order to produce victims for the international media to aid the campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to self-defense.
If the Palestinians don’t want Israeli troops searching their towns and villages and fields for terrorist victims, they have an easy solution to their problem. They can demand that Hamas surrender the terrorists and produce the boys. Even more to the point, if they don’t want the present diplomatic stalemate to continue, which has left Abbas’s PA in control of most Palestinian areas but with Israel retaining the right to guard its security in the West Bank, they can return to the negotiating table and finally accept a peace offer that would, in return for their recognition that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people and a permanent end to the conflict, gain sovereignty over most of the territory they claim as their own.
But since the Palestinians remain uninterested in pursuing either of those rational options or in being led by people more interested in developing their economy and respecting human rights than in pursuing a century-old futile quest to destroy Israel, they are stuck in their preferred tactics of the past. That is why they are dusting off the old intifada playbook and trying to play the victim instead of ending this crisis or negotiating peace. While much of the international community will probably fall for this ploy, they should not expect the Israeli public to be so simple. After more than 20 years of failed efforts to get the Palestinians to take yes for an answer, the Jewish state is determined to defend itself. Those who attack their children and mock them are not the victims in this story.