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Stan Goodenough is an experienced journalist who has written about politics in South Africa and the Middle East for such organizations as The Daily Dispatch of East London, South Africa, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post, and the Virtual HolyLand website. He has been a South African gentile resident in Israel for 12 years. Stan is editor of and .
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By Stan Goodenough
September 5, 2003
Courtesy of Jerusalem Newswire.
On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported that 10,000 Palestinian Arabs and 1,000 merchants had been allowed to leave the Gaza Strip to work and earn their living in Israel "proper."
Thanks to the futile exercise cruelly misnamed a "peace process" (Madrid, Oslo, Road Map, take your pick), the Arabs in Gaza remain some of the poorest in the world, a situation only exacerbated by the repeated closures Israel is forced to impose on the PA-uncontrolled areas.
Just as Israel's economy has been brutalized over the past three years of Palestinian-planned and waged terror warfare, so too has the "ordinary" man in the street in Gaza City and Khan Yunis had to pay the price for his leaders' bloodlust.
Still, contrary to widely held, media-fuelled, perceptions, Israel cares about people, including its most avowed foe: the Palestinian Arab. Witness its repeated restraint in the face of massive casualties it has suffered at the hands of Arafat-approved and applauded 'suicide' bombers.
And like Arafat, fully 60 percent of the Palestinian Arabs praise and worship these mass murderers.
Two weeks ago, Arafat winked at Hamas, and Hamas sent a killer to blast apart the softest possible target - a Jerusalem bus full of ultra-orthodox Jewish families, including many children, returning home from prayers.
One week later, a poll conducted by the Office of Palestinian Information showed that 62 percent of Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza support ongoing terror attacks against Israel, with 56 percent saying they felt such attacks serve Palestinian "national interests."
And yet, instead of sending warplanes to bomb whole neighborhoods of Arabs cheering at the news of the massacre, Israel, with unparalleled precision and care, goes after the individual killers, and gets them.
Arafat doesn't even warrant a smack.
Now, name one other country that would have shown such moderation. Such folly. No self-respecting government would allow the butchering of its babies to go unpunished.
I call it folly, not because I am a warmonger, certainly not at all because I think Israel should indiscriminately mow down Arab men, women and children, no matter how many of them applaud such barbaric behavior on the part of their own.
No, what I call folly is when Israel declares on one day, as it did Monday, that it has decided to fight the terrorists "to the death" and then, two days later, allows thousands of those who support those very terrorists and their deeds to enter Israel and earn a living that will alleviate their misery.
What I call folly is, when, just hours after Arabs fire five anti-tank missiles at a Jewish community in Gaza, damaging a building and sending at least one of its residents into shock, the 11,000 are still allowed to pass through the checkpoint.
Surely this is not the way to wage any war, let alone win it?
It's not the way to send a message and expect it to be taken seriously.
It's as if Israel has little understanding of what it means to draw red lines and then act when they are crossed.
Repeatedly shouting, "wolf," and then failing to kill the beast will only encourage the pack to keep on coming, keep on killing.
Which means that Israelis keep on paying in blood for the kindness of their leaders.
The story - some call it an urban legend - is told of the American General John "Black Jack" Pershing who was in charge of a U.S. garrison in the Philippines in 1911. Responding to numerous terror attacks by Muslims, Pershing ordered the perpetrators caught, tried and, all except one of them, executed by firing squad.
After making them dig their own graves, the soldiers tied them to the execution posts, then slaughtered a number of pigs in front of them, rubbing the bullets they would use to shoot the terrorists in swine blood and fat. As the legend goes, this terrorized the terrorists, whose Islamic faith taught them that if pigs contaminated their bodies they would go to hell instead of as martyrs to paradise.
Their corpses were buried under the pigs' remains, and the one terrorist who had not been killed was released to tell his fellow mujahedin what he had seen. For the next 50 years, Islamic terrorism was unheard of in those islands.
Was "Black Jack" Pershing the subject of a damning commission of inquiry? Was he disciplined, dismissed?
No, the president apparently promoted him for crushing the terrorist threat.
True or not, the lesson in this tale is that an effective way to deal with Islamic terrorists is to terrorize them in return by robbing them of their hope of a blissful eternity in a virgin-stocked heaven. For sure it's not to be nice to them in the hope they will say thank you and repent.
Two years ago, then-deputy Israeli police minister Gideon Ezra took the idea seriously and suggested that burying Palestinian suicide bombers with pig skin or pig blood could deter potential attackers. No one apparently took him seriously.
A friend of mine who believes that Israel should "fight a war like a war" likes to tell the Black Jack story to his Israeli friends. Why not treat the Palestinian Muslim killers in the same way, he asks quizzically, much to their horror. These Israelis, whose fellow Jews are being blown to bits around them, could never agree to support anything so "barbaric."
Strangely, the possibility that the meting out of deserved justice to a few tens of cold-blooded murderers could save the lives of hundreds, even thousands of innocent Jewish civilians finds no currency with them.
So, instead of smashing the enemy with a mailed fist, Israel extends an open hand and welcomes them into the heart of its towns and cities.
History has already recorded the awful consequences of exposing Jews to lethal danger in this way. As we brace for the next act of terrorism, what, we are left wondering, will it take for Israel to finally wage this war, and win it?
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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