An Aug. 23 op-ed at The Herald, in Scotland, (“Is Israel goading the Palestinians into a third intifada”), written by their foreign editor David Pratt, argues that settlers, with support from Jerusalem, are goading Palestinians into launching a third intifada – one, he opines, that would play into Israel’s hands.
Though Pratt doesn’t develop his conspiratorial view by explaining why, precisely, a prolonged campaign of terror targeting Jewish civilians would be seen as a win to Israel’s government, that strange half-baked theory isn’t the most disturbing element of his piece.
The worst part is how he appears to morally justify the 2nd Intifada.
First, here are his introductory paragraphs:
At the time when it appeared it created quite a stir. It was back in March 2002, precisely at the moment when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was going through one of its most convulsive episodes, that former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair wrote a controversial op-ed for the country’s daily newspaper Haaretz.
Up until then, few prominent Israeli officials had ever publicly used such terms to describe the uprising that was gripping the region or the causes that lay behind it.
“The Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation. We Israelis enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities … we established an apartheid regime,” wrote Ben-Yair.
More than two decades have passed since that article first appeared at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, sometimes known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that lasted from September 2000 to February 2005.
Later in the piece, he endorses Ben-Yair’s characterisation of the intifada.
Back in 2002, former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair was right when he wrote that “the Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation.”
Even by the standards we’re used to in the Scottish media, it’s rare – and particularly disturbing – for a journalist to morally defend the four-year war of suicide bombings, and other deadly attacks, targeting Jewish men, women and children at bus stops, cafes and pizza places.
What’s known as the 2nd Intifada was a campaign of murder launched cynically by Yasser Arafat two months after he rejected an Israeli peace proposal that would have created, for the first time in history, a sovereign Palestinian state.
More than 1,000 Israelis were murdered, and thousands more injured, during that time.
So, “national liberation” was actually rejected by Arafat in favor of inciting Palestinians to “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad,” incitement that he promoted in Arabic throughout the Oslo years.
As our colleague Gilead Ini reminded us in on the 20th anniversary of the 2nd Intifada, when Israelis think of that terror wave, they remember the Park Hotel in Netanya, where in 2002 a Palestinian entered a dining hall packed with Jews celebrating Passover and murdered 30 civilians, most of them elderly; the massacre of 21 people, a majority of them teenage girls, waiting to enter a Tel Aviv dance club; and the ruins of the Sbarro pizzeria, an attack which killed 15 and was selected as the target of a suicide bomber because it was packed with Jewish families.
Here’s a clip from an interview with Ahlam Tamimi, who planned the massacre, shortly after her release from prison in 2011:
The moral corruption and malice required to frame Tamimi, and the thousands of other terrorists who enthusiastically participated in the four-year pogrom, as national liberators rather than antisemitic murderers, can’t be overstated.
We reached out to Campaign Against Antisemitism about the Herald piece, and spokesperson for the organisation said, “Intifadas in the past were campaigns of suicide bombings and terrorist violence targeting Jews. To claim otherwise is an affront to the thousands of murdered and maimed innocent children, women and men”.