You couldn’t draw a better cartoon illustration of the Netanyahu government’s complete inability to cope with the reality of relentless Arab violence.
At the end of a particularly exhausting day Tuesday, rife with terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, Petach Tikvah and Jaffa, with one dead tourist and at least 13 injured Israelis, five of them critical, all of it taking place before and while Vice President Joe Biden was starting his state visit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a late night emergency security meeting in Jerusalem. It included Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan, Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich and representatives of the IDF and Shabak. No doubt, the question before them was nothing short of existential: how to put an end to an Arab intifada that since September has claimed 372 victims, according to the national EMT service Magen David Adom — 34 dead, 36 critically injured, 8 moderate to critical, 66 moderate, 228 light, and more than 115 panic victims.
What this group of top notch leaders and experts offered in response was to put up better fences. And repair the holes in the fences that are already up. That’s the strategy, in its entirety.
Here’s what the Joe Biden visit day looked like from the perspective of Arab violence (source: Hakol Hayehudi): Arab woman attempted to stab police in the Old City of Jerusalem; Arabs threw rocks at vehicle near T’koa; Arabs threw rocks at Ras el Amud in Jerusalem; Arab woman stopped at Qalandiya check point carrying a knife, confessed she was on her way to commit terror attack; Arabs shot paint bullets at cars on Gush Etzion highway; Arabs threw rocks at vehicles at Anta junction, breaking windshield; Arabs threw rocks at vehicles near Ha’Okfim junction in Gush Etzion; Arabs threw rocks at vehicles near HaZeit junction on the Judea Crossing highway, causing damage; Stabbing attack in Petach Tikvah, an Arab stabbed a Haredi man who used the same knife to kill the attacker; Shooting attack in Jerusalem, an Arab shot from a moving motorcycle at police near Damascus Gate, two policemen were critically wounded, the terrorist was shot dead; An attack in Jaffa, an Arab murdered one Jew and stabs 9 others in three different areas of the Jaffa harbor, not far from where VP Biden and former president Shimon Peres were discussing the chances of a peace plan; Arabs threw rocks at a bus near Ujah in the Jordan Valley; Arabs threw a Molotov cocktail at a police check point in Abu Tor, Jerusalem; Arabs rioted in Issawa, Jerusalem, near Hadassa hospital; Arabs rioted in Kafar Hizma in Binyamin region; Arabs rioted in Silwan neighborhood, Jerusalem; Arabs rioted in Abu Tor, Jerusalem.
That was just one day’s detailed reporting. If you browse through the Kol Hayehudi pages online, you’ll discover that every single day in the past six months looked more or less like this one, with most of the riots and stone throwing and even firebombing going unreported in the Israeli media, much less abroad, because they’ve become the rule rather than the exception. Israeli media bothers to report these only when someone is hurt, the rest of the media only when someone is killed — and as often as not, put the blame equally on the killer and his or her victim. For six months.
So that the list on the table among the men and women responsible for Israel’s security included not only the 372 cases in which Arab violence drew some Jewish blood, but all those daily incidents of violent lawlessness, roughly 20 incidents a day, 180 days so far, give or take, that’s 3,600 Arab violent incident reports.
The conclusions of Netanyahu’s late night security meeting delivered a decisive message of ineptness, lack of initiative, and a disheartening absence of imaginative thinking.
The security meeting ended with an official communiqué, detailing steps the Netanyahu government will take at once to resolve the pestering Arab lawlessness. First, it will begin at once to repair holes in the separation fence between Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria, as well as complete the building of the fence in the Tarqumiya crossing area in the South Hebron Hills.
It turns out that the gaps in the separation fence are being used by PA Arabs to enter Israel without proper residency permits. The man who murdered the American student in Jaffa harbor Tuesday night was an Illegal resident from a village near Qalqilya, in PA territory.
The cabinet also decided on quick paced legislation to punish individuals who aid and abet illegal residents in green line Israel. There will also be legislation banning Palestinian media channels that engage in incitement to terrorism. Also, all trade and work permits acquired by family members of terrorists will be revoked.
Minister of Science, Technology and Space Ofir Akunis (Likud) made things seem even more hopeless when he posted on his Facebook page Wednesday morning: “The barbaric terror which receives support from the great inciter Mahmoud Abbas continues. We must expel terrorists’ families, we must.”
If the Netanyahu meeting’s conclusions sounded pathetic, the Akunis dreams of expulsions are delusional. Israelis know that such an attempt, effective as it may be (the jury is out on that one, not all terrorists love their families), the Supreme Court would toss such a law on the same afternoon it was enacted.
It appears that Netanyahu is unwilling to do what it takes to effectively stop the violence, which any cop or army squad leader knows: you go there and you make sure they all stay home, for as long as it takes, then go door to door and arrest or kill suspects. Containment from afar does not work with criminals and works even less with terrorists who don’t even have the need for self-reservation to slow them down.
The last time the IDF took decisive action against terrorism was after the Passover massacre at the Park hotel in Netanya, on March 27, 2002. Thirty civilians were killed and 140 injured in a suicide bombing attack during the seder. The IDF invaded the PA and spent the next two years destroying the terrorist infrastructures in Judea and Samaria. They did what an effective security force must do to get results: go door to door and pick up or kill the bad guys.
Only a complete curfew on the PA would bring an end to the daily terror attacks, the rioting, the rock throwing and firebombing on the highways. To win the army must shoot on site curfew violators, suspend all traffic, all commerce, and carry out large-scale arrests, until whatever infrastructure has emerged there is brought down again. Nothing else will work, and as long as Netanyahu, probably for very good reasons having to do with Israel’s maintaining good relations with its foreign allies, is unwilling to take these effective measures, the Jewish hemorrhaging will persist, and, judging from Wednesday’s new acts of terrorism, will even increase.