Looking north from the top of the Golan Heights, it’s green, green, green and then just past the Syrian border - brown and dead.
Drive throughout Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and you will see nothing but empty desert, dilapidated Bedouin shacks, and then green, thriving kibbutzim.
This is of course the story of Israel. The story of making a desert bloom. But it’s also a metaphor for embracing life as opposed to a cult of death that now plays out in the news media with the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.
With Israel trading over 1,000 prisoners, many with blood and death on their hands, in exchange for one young soldier, it defies the logic of a fair trade. The scales overwhelmingly slam down on the side of the Palestinians. Yet, if there is a message to be gained, it’s this…
While young Gilad was being embraced by family and celebrated for being alive, the Palestinians were promoting their ideology of suicide bombing, spreading it to school children.
As Jpost reports, Wafa al-Biss told dozens of children who came to her home in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday she hoped they would follow her example.
Biss was traveling to Beersheba''s Soroka hospital for medical treatment in 2005 when Israeli soldiers at the Erez border crossing noticed she was walking strangely. They found 10 kilograms (22 lbs) of explosives had been sewn into her underwear.
She had been planning to blow herself up. But her device malfunctioned and did not detonate saving her and untold others.
Free now due to the prisoner exchange and alive to share her suicidal aspirations to little kids, the sick, brainwashed response from the children was cheers and flag waving as they chanted, "We will give souls and blood to redeem the prisoners. We will give souls and blood for you, Palestine."
Biss was just one of 477 Palestinians freed Tuesday in the first stage of an exchange with Hamas that ended Schalit''s five years of captivity. Another 550 Palestinians will be freed in the second stage later this year.
With this unbalanced exchange, how many more diseased seeds of death will be spread throughout the land? How many more children will be infused with this cult of death?
Throughout the Palestinian areas, as Giulio Meotti, the author of “A New Shoah”, points out in this piece from National Review…
The streets are plastered with posters glorifying terrorists and suicide bombers. Children trade “martyr cards” the way Western children trade baseball cards. Necklaces with pictures of terrorists, many released today by Israel, are very popular. Signs on the walls of Palestinian kindergartens currently proclaim their pupils as “the martyrs of tomorrow.” Elementary-school principals commend their students for wanting to “tear their [Zionists’] bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.” Unlike terrorists in other parts of the world, the Palestinian movement aspires to immortality and its violence is always “sacred.” That’s why the freed terrorists will return to kill the Jews.
The lesson for Israel and the world is that Gilad Shalit was celebrated for being alive. Israel rejoiced for saving it.
Yet, the darker theme underlying it will be by rewarding and appeasing this ideology of death, it will result in breeding a poison that will come back to haunt the living. Abe Novick is a writer and communications consultant and can be reached at abe@abenovick.com.