The Biden administration is also trapped in a “conceptzia.” For multiple reasons, chief among them Biden’s need to appease his Arab-American supporters in swing states such as Michigan and Ohio, the White House has been promoting the notion of “settler violence” against Judea and Samaria Arabs, which its spokespeople are equating shamelessly with the incessant attempts on the part of Arab individuals, squads, and rioting mobs to hunt down Jews.
This maligning of history, veracity, and decency, is now resulting in the administration and anti-Israel members of Congress trying to torpedo a much-needed shipment of 24,000 M16 assault rifles to Israel. The weapons, valued at $34 million, are being purchased directly from American manufacturers, but the State Department, which in turn must also notify Congress about the sale, is slowing down the sale.
Barak Ravid broke the story on Axios Monday, that the State Dept. and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md, among others, are demanding “that any sales not be used to fuel extremist violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.”
Here we go again. In the feverish minds of anti-Israel lawmakers, and the folks at Foggy Bottom, bands of Jewish avengers are roaming the countryside seeking to murder innocent Arab bystanders. Someone should go to Joseph Goebbels’ gravesite to tell him his Big Lie theory has been proven one more time. As the NY Times put it so eloquently: “President Biden and his top aides are increasingly worried about rising violence in the West Bank,” and it’s not about routine stuff like the drive-by murder of Elhanan Klein, 29, father of three with a baby on the way from Enav in Samaria. Biden and the boys are worried about settlers.
More than 150 PA Arabs have been killed since October 7, but even the NY Times points out that the bulk of those killings were at the hands of IDF forces who took out terrorists who were trying to kill them. There was one killing by a Jewish settler, an IDF reservist who went on a walk with his family on Shabbat and they were attacked by local Arabs who threw boulders and rocks at them. It was clearly self-defense, or as the President preferred to describe it: “Extremist settlers pouring gasoline on fire.”
In the end, according to Ravid, Israel was forced to promise that none of those weapons would be delivered to readiness squads in Judea and Samaria, who, of course, needed them the most. With many of the men of the Jewish settlements away on reserve duty in Gaza or up north, Jewish civilians have never been more vulnerable. Add to that a new, idiotic, conceptzia-ridden decision of the Central Command Commander, General Yehuda Fox, to permit Arab villagers to harvest their olive trees right outside the settlements’ boundary lines, and you’ve got yourself a new massacre just waiting to happen.
Head of Samaria Regional Council Yossi Dagan was livid: “Someone here got confused. The residents of Judea and Samaria are in great danger. The fear is that what happened in the south will happen in the Judea and Samaria settlements adjacent to the Palestinian villages of the terrorist Palestinian Authority. I demand that the Prime Minister inform the Americans now that weapons will be given to all the soldiers, including those living in Judea and Samaria. We will not differentiate between one blood and another here.”
Turns out we will, and we do. As we reported on October 12, Dagan signed an arms deal for the purchase of hundreds of improved assault rifles to reinforce the readiness squads in the council’s settlements, with millions of dollars he fundraised abroad. So far, the deal for the purchase of 200 improved IWI ARAD assault rifles designed for the infantry, special forces, and law enforcement units. But the settlements, and even more so the outposts, need many more weapons.
As the NY Times pointed out, both Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have stressed in recent days that “a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel is the best long-term solution to the decades-old conflict.” In that context, the Times surmised, “Settler intimidation of Palestinians, leading to their displacement from strategic areas of the West Bank, makes any prospect of that much more difficult.”
That’s the thing about conceptzias, once you’ve got one of them stuck in your head, it takes 1400 dead Jews to get it out.
