The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada

[Valin]

The Atlantic:

Knife attacks on Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere are not based on Palestinian frustration over settlements, but on something deeper.

Jeffrey Goldberg

Oct 16, 2015

 

In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the entire Temple Mount.

 

Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory (the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy.

 

(Snip)

 

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.(Snip)

 

(Snip)

 

There is another status quo associated with the Temple Mount, however, that has been showing signs of weakening. This is a religious status quo. The mainstream rabbinical view for many years has been that Jews should not walk atop the Mount for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple that, according to tradition, housed the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy of Holies is the room in which the Jewish high priest spoke the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, on Yom Kippur.

 

The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, and Muslim authorities have prevented archeologists from conducting any excavations on the Mount, in part out of fear that such explorations will uncover further evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish presence. This mainstream rabbinical view concerning the Mount—that it should be the direction of Jewish prayer, rather than a place of Jewish prayer—has made the lives of Jerusalem’s temporal authorities easier, by keeping Muslim and Jewish worshippers separated.

 

In recent years, however, small groups of radical religious innovators who oppose the mainstream rabbinical view have sought to make the Mount, once again, a site of Jewish prayer. (Here is a New York Times Magazine story I wrote about these radical groups.) These activists have gained sympathizers among some far-right political figures in Israel, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not altered the separation-of-religions status quo.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

The One-State Solution, Cont’d
Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing.
Andrew C. McCarthy
October 17, 2015


The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed, this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”). Abbas is a longtime terrorism enabler, the right hand of Yasser Arafat, by whose intercession he rose to the top rank of the PLO and, ultimately, the Palestinian Authority. Naturally, the Obama administration has hallucinated him into a “moderate” Muslim “peacemaker” — just as the Bush administration did.

 

The ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab Left — those in the Nasser-Arafat mold — are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic, a coveted distinction in their culture. Abbas and his Fatah party must compete with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch, whose charter explicitly frames the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as dictates of Allah. As Caroline Glick perceptively explains, Abbas has more to gain from the perversely named “peace process,” which keeps the West invested in him, than from a peace settlement, in which an influx of Hamas sympathizers would likely drive him from power. Thus, he does his bit to stoke the violence.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Slaves of History

 

By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 16, 2015, 5:23 PM EDT

 

Following up on my post below, I wanted to call your attention to this piece in The Atlantic by Jeff Goldberg, discussing the current round of violence in and around Jerusalem but coming to a very different conclusion, at least a different emphasis. By all means, read the piece because there's only so fully I can capture his argument. But the gist is this: This violence isn't driven by settlements or really any of Israel's current policies. It goes back at least a century and is in essence one of Muslim supremacism and secondarily Palestinian-Arab supremacism, mixed with various obscurantist and paranoid ideas about Israeli intentions. As Jeff correctly notes, there were similar incidents almost a century ago, long before Israel was a state, let alone before the Israeli army conquered the West Bank in 1967. Let me say simply that Jeff is right. Indeed, right-wingers (which Jeff is not) constantly go on about why there were wars before 1967 if the Occupation of the West Bank is the cause of the conflict. That's a more clownish version of the argument Jeff is making. And as I've said, Jeff is right. But his explanation is incomplete and inert and that's what makes it such a flawed way of understanding the current situation.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/slaves-of-history

[Draggingtree]

October 18, 2015

An Islamist Intifada

By Jonathan F. Keiler

 

The current Palestinian Arab "uprising" against Israel appears to be a mostly Islamist offensive, not different in any significant ideological way from radical Islamist movements like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hezb'allah. The idea that it is motivated by Israeli policies, the stalled "peace process," or Palestinian Arab nationalism is nothing but propaganda, and the laziness and bias of the international press and political classes.

 

The violence is motivated by the Palestinian Authority's deliberate agitation , which knowingly taps into the Arab masses deep-seated hatred of Jews and other infidels.

 

The Authority has a parochial interest in diverting the attention of the masses from its own corruption and incompetence. It also wants to insulate itself against its Hamas rival in Gaza, which correctly sees the Authority for the hapless and rotten organization it is and would replace it with an incompetent and corrupt Islamist entity in the West Bank.

What neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas wants is independence, having rejected every opportunity to create a viable Palestinian Arab state. The Authority, like all Palestinian Arab leadership since the 1930s, has rejected every opportunity to create a Palestinian state,
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/an_islamist_intifada.html

[Draggingtree]

CURRENT PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI VIOLENCE IS NOT THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION

 

October 17, 201

5 · by sfrantzman · in Israeli democracy. ·

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

 

“Based on the volume of violent incidents and, more importantly, the identity of the people behind them, it’s easy to say: this isn’t an intifada. It’s something far worse,” wrote Asher Schechter at Haaretz on October 15. He called the current round of violence, in which dozens of stabbing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis have occurred, “a terrifying preview to a binational one-state Israel.

 

As if on cue, a whole slew of voices have emerged in the last week to claim that the recent mini-intifada or “terror wave” is actually what Israel will look like in the future as a “one state solution.”

 

Dovetailing with Schechter, Ari Shavit wrote on October 15 “Instead of Israelis and Palestinians marching slowly toward a common future, Israelis and Palestinians are filling each other with fear. The new Jerusalem war has the potential to become a sick civil war, in which there are no victors, but only the defeated, the bloody and the frightened. What happened? What is the nature of the lava that burst from the volcano? What happened is that the fondest dream of the extreme right and the extreme left has come true to establish one state here.”

http://sethfrantzman.com/2015/10/17/current-palestinian-israeli-violence-is-not-the-one-state-solution/

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

There is a family of Palestinians who run The Little Store in the neighborhood. They're good people, honest hard working...etc...etc, and you can hold a reasonable conversation with them about anything except this. Then it is like talking to a wall. Often I have pointed out the fact that 1. When an Israeli says Never Again, they really mean it, they are serious as a heart attack...2. They have nukes 3. If it looks like they are going down, they'll take everyone in the region down with them....Cairo...Damascus....Mecca/Medina...Amman....BOOM. Doesn't get though to them.

 

The problem is when we get right down to it is this.....Only One Side Really Wants Peace.

[Draggingtree]

@Draggingtree

 

There is a family of Palestinians who run The Little Store in the neighborhood. They're good people, honest hard working...etc...etc, and you can hold a reasonable conversation with them about anything except this. Then it is like talking to a wall. Often I have pointed out the fact that 1. When an Israeli says Never Again, they really mean it, they are serious as a heart attack...2. They have nukes 3. If it looks like they are going down, they'll take everyone in the region down with them....Cairo...Damascus....Mecca/Medina...Amman....BOOM. Doesn't get though to them.

 

The problem is when we get right down to it is this.....Only One Side Really Wants Peace.

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