If an Arab is dead, then an Israeli Jew must be to blame.
This is what the Palestinian Authority wants the world to believe. The P.A. has now added a new layer of horror to the tragic wave of murders within the Israeli Arab community by promoting conspiracy theories that—incredibly—blame Israel for the killings.
More than 150 Israeli Arabs have been murdered in recent months by fellow Arabs. Most are the victims of organized crime. Some were “honor killings”—extremists murdering Arab women for transgressing Muslim moral strictures. And some of the killings may be related to deep-rooted clan rivalries.
But the P.A. claims that it has found the “real” culprit: Israel.
As far back as May 30, the official P.A. daily newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, announced that the Israeli government had “moved the crime organizations out of the Jewish towns and planted them in the Arab society,” as part of a plot “to subordinate the Arab willpower to this policy.”
There must be more than a few governments around the world that would be very interested to learn how Israel is able to move entire crime organizations from one city to another. That kind of skill could really come in handy!
There’s another reason for this Israeli conspiracy, according to Omar Hilmi al-Ghoul, former senior adviser to P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and now a columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida: It’s “one of the forms of ethnic cleansing” that Israel is undertaking, “a prepared and systematic plan, behind which stands the Israeli deep cities in the Palestinian cities and towns.” (So he wrote in his June 3 column.)
This lunacy—there’s no other way to describe it—is now conventional wisdom in the P.A.-governed territories. “No one disagrees” (no one!) “that the Israeli government [is] responsible for the phenomenon of the spread of violence and crimes of murder in the Palestinian society within the Green Line,” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida asserted on June 7. “[The] clear goal is to preoccupy the society with its internal problems and leave it as a marginal and dismantled society.”
In his column the next day, Omar Hilmi al-Ghoul embellished the conspiracy theory. The killings of Israeli Arabs, he asserted, were connected to the fact that the State of Israel “was established to indiscriminately murder and destroy the members of the Palestinian Arab people … in order to steal the land, the history and the Palestinian Arab narrative … ”
The P.A.’s news agency, WAFA, reported on June 12 that Israel “is spreading strife” among Israel Arabs in order “to destroy the spirit of unity in the Palestinian society. … It wants you to constantly fight among yourselves.”
A cartoon in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida that same day showed an ugly Israeli policeman watering a plant that was holding a knife. The plant was labeled “Palestinian society in the 1948 [territories].”
Official P.A. television on June 25 featured an Israeli Arab journalist named Suheil Diab, who declared that “the official Israeli policy [is] to escalate every conflict and every tension in the Palestinian public … they want to escalate every internal conflict, whether it is familial, tribal or ethnic.” Instead of challenging Diab, the program’s host piled on, agreeing that Israel is indeed trying “to dismantle the Arab public.”
Another P.A. TV show, “Talk of the Hour,” featured an “Israeli-affairs expert” named Tawfiq Abu Shomar on its July 27 program. He asserted that “the crimes of murder” among Israeli Arabs are “part of the organized, deliberate and preplanned strategy of Judaization.”
The killings are committed by Israeli “undercover forces” working together with “mafias, hashish and drug dealers, and collaborators—the tools of the Israeli security forces,” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida announced on Aug. 5. And the P.A. newspaper made it clear that it’s not just the fault of the current Israeli government. “Successive Israeli governments” have conspired “to commit cheap and cowardly acts of murder in order to achieve the goal of willingly expelling the Palestinian civilians from their cities and villages.” So says the official voice of Israel’s “peace partner.”
(Thanks to Palestinian Media Watch for the translations.)
The Oslo II agreement of 1995, signed by Israel and the P.A., explicitly requires the Authority to “abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda” against Israel.
Yet day in and day out, the P.A. actively incites its citizens to believe that Israel is engaged in the constant slaughter of Israeli Arabs as part of its secret genocidal strategy. Why? It’s not complicated. The P.A. simply wants Palestinian Arabs to hate Israel and Jews.
When we read about horrifying episodes of anti-Jewish incitement throughout history, it may seem incredible that people could believe Jews poisoned wells or baked the blood of Christian children into Passover matzahs. How could anybody think such things?
Well, wonder no longer. The Palestinian Authority is actively engaged in spreading the 21st-century version of the medieval blood libel. When will the international community respond to this outrage?
