Just three days after Palestinian terrorists carried out the synagogue massacre in Har Nof, the Daily Beast published a story about…Jewish incitement in Hebron.
The title of the piece – Inside Hebron, Israel’s Heart of Darkness – reveals its true agenda. It is Israel and its citizens whose heart is dark, even when Palestinians are attacking innocent worshipers with meat cleavers. The implication, of course, is that no Palestinian violence is truly unprovoked, even if you need to go back years to find the provocation.
And in the case of Hebron, that means going back 20 years, to the crime of Baruch Goldstein:
At the rear end of the park is a wall or divider maybe six or seven feet high and about twice that wide. You go behind it, and you see a plain tombstone. It holds the body of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 walked into the Mosque of Ibrahim just down the road, wearing his army uniform and carrying a machine gun, and murdered 29 Muslims and wounded another 125 before being overwhelmed and killed by worshippers his bullets had missed. He had lived in Qiryat Arba.
The inscription says in part: “The revered Dr. Baruch Kapel Goldstein… Son of Israel. He gave his soul for the sake of the people of Israel, The Torah, and the Land. His hands are clean and his heart good… He was assassinated for the Sanctity of God.” If you remember the end of Schindler’s List, you’ll recall that the now-elderly Jews saved by Oskar Schindler filed past his tombstone and placed small stones on it, signs of mourning and respect. When I visited Goldstein’s grave, about 40 small stones rested on the slab. Mourning and respect.
There is no indication of how long those “40 small stones” had been there or how many people were responsible for this show of “mourning and respect.”
There is also no mention of the two Palestinian schools in Hebron named after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian terrorist responsible for hijacking a bus and killing 37 civilians, including 12 children in 1978. That, apparently, is not an indication of mourning or respect for the terrorist.
Perhaps the real reason for the omission is revealed near the very end of the article:
Memories are long. As Avner Gvaryahu of Breaking the Silence (a group of ex-soldiers who give public accounts of actions they were ordered to take to enforce the occupation) put it to our group: “If for the Israelis 1929 happened two weeks ago, for the Palestinians, Goldstein happened yesterday.”
Turns out, the article was based on a tour by Breaking the Silence, a political organization that presents itself as a human rights group. If that’s the case, the writer should have pointed this out at the start of the piece, not the very end.
But what does one make of the claim that “Goldstein happened yesterday” for the Palestinians when in actual fact, the Synagogue Massacre in Har Nof really happened to Israelis three days earlier? It is impossible to read it as anything other than a justification, after the fact, for the Palestinian violence.
A few days later, the Daily Beast published another piece justifying Palestinian violence. In this case, it was the attempted assassination of Yehuda Glick, an advocate for the right of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.
The piece takes a sympathetic look at the plight of the assassin’s family, whose home was to be demolished on order of the Israeli government. But the article goes much farther than expressing empathy for the demolition order. It allows the family to presents the terrorist, Muataz Hijazi, as essentially a victim of Israel.
Hijazi’s father explains that his son’s problems with the law began with a run-in with Israeli soldiers when he was 16.
The teenager was shaken by the incident, and his father remembers having to console him for hours that day.
If Ibrahim’s account is true, the harassment continued, culminating in the young man’s arrest at the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000. Muataz had used his knowledge of electrical wiring (he was trained as an electrical technician) to cause small electrical fires in West Jerusalem buildings, using smoke, his father says, to “scare the people inside.”
Israel didn’t see it this way, and convicted him of seven counts of arson committed in 17 days in 2000. According to the online version of the Israeli daily with the highest circulation, Yedioth Ahronoth, he was also a member of Islamic Jihad.
Although the writer is careful to state, “if Ibrahim’s account is true…” which indicates it may not be, it is not the journalist’s role to publish unconfirmed propaganda from unreliable sources alongside real evidence. It is as though the opinions of the terrorist’s family hold equal weight to the decision brought down by an Israeli judge.
The father goes on to claim that what really set the son on the path towards the attempted murder of Glick was the extended solitary confinement he experienced in Israeli prison. The writer concludes that it was “not implausible,” then states, in his own voice:
Perhaps conditions stemming related [sic] to the confinement, mixed with years of frustrating dealings with Israeli soldiers and police, and religious fervor led to the attempted assassination of Yehuda Glick.
Or perhaps it was a case of effective Palestinian incitement, though that isn’t listed as one of the possible causes. Both the brutal massacre in Har Nof and the attempt to kill Yehuda Glick were cases of unprovoked violence carried out by Palestinians. But that’s not how readers of the Daily Beast are being led to see them.
Apparently, there is no case of unprovoked Palestinian violence. There is always some way to trace it back to Israel.
