The Hand that Rocks the Knife
Thursday, October 15, 2015 | Tsvi Sadan ISRAEL TODAY
Based on his previous "successes," John Kerry's pending visit to Israel will either end up achieving nothing or actually increasing the violence. Since Kerry has discovered the reason why so many Palestinian hands are rocking so many knives, it is worth looking into it.
In his Harvard lecture this week, Kerry determined that "there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing." This frustration, he says, is caused by “a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years.”
I don't know the source for Kerry's information. A safe guess would be that he was given short headlines from radical left-wing Israeli sources that are manipulating statistics for their own gains.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, however, true to 2014, construction of new homes in Judea and Samaria increased by 3.1%, representing a 52.5% decrease from the previous year. Additionally, the 7% increase in the Jewish population in these areas actually supports the settlers' complaint of a de facto building freeze in Judea and Samaria.
Kerry's explanation is found to be baseless, but there are other popular explanations about the Palestinian frustration that causes them to knife Jews, including poor living conditions and unemployment.
But over the course of the past weeks, enough information has surfaced to demonstrate that this, too, is not the source of frustration. Pictures of the dead knife-wielding terrorists are proudly displayed in the spacious houses of their families or next to their expensive cars.
Nor can a lack of education opportunities be blamed, considering one of the would-be stabbers, Israa Abed, is a chemical engineering student at the prestigious Israel Institute of Technology, popularly known as the Technion.
Of course, there is the explanation that Palestinians are extremely frustrated because Israel refuses to give them a state. Even if it is true, and Israel is the one refusing a Palestinian state, statistics show that more than 60% of Palestinians reject the two-state solution and hope to regain control over what they call "historical Palestine," which includes the whole of Israel.
This, I propose, is the real source of Palestinian frustration. For more than a hundred years, they failed to regain control over "Palestine." In fact, they have achieved the opposite.
The pretense for the present "wave of terror," as it is called, is the rumor that Israel intends to harm the Al Aqsa Mosque. This well-crafted strategy to rock the hands that hold the knives has consistently proved to be an effective tool to rally Muslims for yet another attempt to free Palestine.
With all the frustrations Israelis feel about the lukewarm response of their government to the present Palestinian attacks, there should be little doubt that Israel simply can't afford to be defeated.
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