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Nissan Ratzlav-Katz is Opinion Editor for Arutz Sheva's Israel National News.com. More of his work can be seen at .
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By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
June 23, 2003
Sometimes, a little anecdote, a short news item, unremarkable in so many ways, reveals more truth than the most intrepid of investigative reports. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the following images are worth at least a dissertation on the true nature of the Israeli war on terrorism.
Ahmed Abu Sukkar, recently released (June 3) from an Israeli prison as a "goodwill" gesture designed to kick-start the Road Map plan, made a rather enlightening statement. As a simple foot soldier in the ongoing Arab terrorist war against the Jews, he was not wise enough, nor eloquent enough, to avoid expressing the authentic Arab position on terrorism. "We are not murderers. We are not criminals. We are people who seek peace and freedom," he said during a celebratory meeting with PLO leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Abu Sukkar later declared confidently to a gathered press corps, and in English: "They said we are terrorists, but we never killed anyone outside of Palestine."
Abu Sukkar, a PLO member, "never killed anyone outside of Palestine", perhaps, but he did kill many people in Jerusalem. On Friday, July 4, 1975, Abu Sukkar detonated an explosives-laden refrigerator in the Israeli capital 's Zion Square, killing 13 people and wounding more than 70. Among the dead were two children and among the wounded, two Americans. The PLO, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, claimed responsibility. The terrorist who carried out the "refrigerator bombing" was greeted last week in Kalandiya, south of Ramallah, by cheering crowds. "Abu Sukkar, the precious! Abu Sukkar, the hero!" they chanted.
Abu Sukkar's candor reveals, again, exactly what Fatah leaders Abu Mazen and Yasser Arafat mean when they say that they are against terrorism. The PLO, and by extension the Palestinian Authority, is most certainly against terrorism - in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Killing people in Israel, however, is not terrorism at all.
The "refrigerator bombing" took place in an Israel not yet blinded by Oslo fantasies. Addressing the Knesset plenum at the time, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared: "The murder serves as a warning not to get caught up in illusions about the intentions of the terrorist organizations... We must follow a strict policy of not negotiating with them. We must speak to them only in the language they understand, the language of the sword." Another Labor party Knesset member, Aharon Yariv, commented, "It is necessary to make clear the danger in the establishment of a Palestinian state...."
If the Abu Sukkar press conference shed some light on Arab behavior, then another recent incident shed some light on Israeli behavior.
On June 1, 2003, a 30-year-old female resident of PA-controlled Jericho was arrested by Border Police after she entered Jerusalem's Temple Mount area carrying a large bag, and shouted "Allah hu Akbar!" (God is great) and "I am going to blow myself up!" Police officers took the woman into custody unharmed. As it turned out, she was not carrying a bomb, but she said she was hoping to be shot dead to escape the abuse of her parents at home. The would-be suicide must have been quite disappointed to discover that all of the stories she had been fed by Palestinian Authority media about the trigger-happy Jews were false. The poor woman did all she could: she carried a suspicious bag, she shouted the Moslem equivalent of "bombs away!" and, just to be sure that the daft Israelis understood, she clarified her intentions to kill them. All to no avail.
These are the same Israelis behind the "massacre" in Jenin?
American soldiers in Iraq shot and killed seven unarmed civilians near Najaf when the vehicle they were riding in failed to stop at a military roadblock. Would those soldiers have waited to find out if the woman on the Temple Mount was a suicide bomber, or just suicidal?
A similarly enlightening event took place in late March, 2002, when Nachum Barnea, a columnist for the major Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, went to Ramallah to interview H'seyn a-Sheikh, the regional commander of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization. A-Sheikh, along with now-imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. During the interview with Barnea, a-Sheikh said that he was not there when Israeli troops came to his Ramallah home in search of him. He was with Fatah gunmen at the time, but he immediately called his family.
"Don't be afraid," the Fatah leader told his frightened children, "the soldiers won't do a thing to you."
That must have thoroughly confused the poor tykes, primed as they were by Arafat's television and radio for "martyrdom" at the hands of "the child-killing Israeli army." In one sentence, in his own words, H'seyn a-Sheikh admitted what all Arab propagandists know to be true: the Israeli army maintains moral standards far higher than their Arab enemies. PLO leaders, such as a-Sheikh, have intentionally targeted schools, children playing outside, teenagers at birthday parties and babies in their strollers. Then, when the news of such attacks reached the Arab cities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the streets became filled with people celebrating the massacres. Yet, in the case of Jewish soldiers, a terrorist leader can confidently tell his children, "Don't be afraid, the soldiers won't do a thing to you."
A similar silent admission of the high moral standards of the Israeli army is made every time Western volunteers offer to serve as "human shields" for Arab terrorists or property in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. A shield is only useful if it can protect those employing it. By their actions, the Western "shields" demonstrate their belief that Jews will hesitate to endanger non-combatants, even during counter-terrorism operations. They know very well which side of the Arab-Israeli conflict cares about human life, which side not. That is why they would not consider serving as human shields under PLO gunfire in Gilo, Jerusalem, or in Israeli cafes, or on Israeli buses. They know very well that their Arab allies don't care at all about innocent non-combatants, that, in fact, they seek out such innocents for extermination.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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