“Are you talking about the pending Supreme Court decision on the return of a few houses to their owners after the leasing contracts expired?”
“Well, I mean the expulsion of Arab residents from east Jerusalem by Jewish settlers.”
“I understand. So when the inhabitants are Arabs and the owners Jews, the law is irrelevant? Good thing that the long and loudly disputed Liebig 34 property in Berlin that was recently forcibly returned to its legal owners had been occupied by radical leftists and not by Arabs, otherwise these nutcases would still be there.”
This was the beginning of my dialogue with a German TV anchor who asked to interview me for a program on the recent “escalation between Palestinians and Israel.”
Back to Sheikh Jarrah. Me: “Did the rightful eviction of Liebig 34 imply a change of status quo in Berlin?”
“No, of course not. But this is not the same.”
“This you need to explain to me. Both cases are about properties whose leasing contracts expired. After 10 years in the case of Liebig and 50 years in the case of Sheikh Jarrah. You don’t expect the owners to disregard their legal right, just because they are Jews and the inhabitants are Arabs? Looking at the coverage about Sheikh Jarrah and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general, I understand why you think this way. But it’s quite disconnected from reality.”
“Come on, let’s stay constructive, pointing fingers against German media coverage doesn’t get us any further. I’d really prefer for you to speak about possible solutions instead.”
“Sure. I’m with you. Pointing fingers is out. Solutions are in. Sheikh Jarrah is a symbol for Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. Sheikh Jarrah is the trigger for the current escalation. All that Hamas want for their people is peace and freedom. Better?”
“Now you’re becoming sarcastic, Mrs. Sucharewicz.”
“Mea maxima culpa. After decades of similar conversations with good-willed Middle East experts like yourself, I sometimes give in to sarcasm. But you’re right, let’s stick to the facts.”
Trigger behind the trigger
Neither the property dispute of Sheikh Jarrah nor the presence of Israeli police on the Temple Mount toward the end of Ramadan triggered this escalation. Both events were sold by Palestinian propaganda as signs of ethnic cleansing and attempts to take over al-Aqsa.
Anyone even remotely familiar with the history, security situation and systematic incitement by Hamas & Co. cannot but laugh at such absurd allegations.
My interviewer isn’t laughing. He is upset about the hopeless situation and wants answers for Israel’s behavior.
So I explain: In the 1920 San Remo Conference, the League of Nations foresaw east Jerusalem as part of the future Jewish state. In 1948, five Arab States attacked the newly established State of Israel. Israel defeated them, but Jordan occupied east Jerusalem. In the Six Day War Israel freed east Jerusalem and later annexed it. Ever since, there is unlimited freedom of religion on the Temple Mount – contrary to the period under Jordan occupation: Jordanians expelled the Jews who had been a majority in east Jerusalem at the time, destroyed synagogues and Jewish cemeteries and passed laws forbidding Christian institutions to buy property there. East Jerusalem is one of the disputed topics on the agenda in future negotiations. In terms of international law, the adequate description hence is “disputed territory” and not “occupied territory.”
So why were there Israeli police on the Temple Mount?
Because of mass-circulated calls by Palestinian leadership calling for the violent “liberation of al-Aqsa.” Fake news about Sheikh Jarrah was used to fuel an escalation. Incited to commit attacks against Jewish civilians and security personnel, groups of Palestinians amassed rockets, fireworks and stones within the mosque. After the Friday prayer thousands attacked the police who defended themselves with stun grenades and rubber bullets.
On social media, Palestinian propaganda turned this into “Israel occupies al-Aqsa.” The rest is history. It’s not a secret that this escalation was instigated by Iran. A few days earlier. Ayatollah Khamenei praised “the pure blood of resistance martyrs” who “have managed to multiply Palestinian Jihad’s internal power by hundreds of times.” On its official Facebook page, Fatah spread the well-known Islamist death cult: “Gaza hands over its sons to eternal paradise as martyrs for the liberation of Jerusalem.” While Palestinian leaders kept encouraging protesters to sacrifice their lives for Jerusalem.
Fake news and fundamentalism
The foundation for this highly emotional Palestinian revolt is the wide-spread fundamentalism of Islamist Hamas, enriched by the internal rivalry between the latter and Fatah. They currently try to outdo each other’s radicalism to gain popularity.
Over 3,000 Iran-sponsored rockets have already been fired against Israeli family houses, schools and kindergartens. Hundreds landed within the Gaza Strip, killing their own civilians, many children among them. Two of the Israeli rocket victims include an Arab-Israeli father and his young daughter. Three days ago, Hamas rockets killed a six-year old Israeli boy, severely injuring his mother.
In rarely clear statements, the German political leadership, including three Chancellor candidates Armin Laschet (CDU), Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) and Olaf Scholz (SPD) expressed their solidarity with Israel and its right for self-defense against the rocket terrorism by Hamas. Some German politicians, however, echoed by the narrative of most of the mainstream media, made appeals to “all parties involved” to stop violence and civilian deaths – a call that cannot be beaten in absurdity.
Who’s laughing? The terrorists in Gaza, who despise the West as much as they despise the Jews; the ayatollahs in Iran who finance the Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket terrorism while successfully blackmailing the West with nuclear armament; and the radical mobs who take the ayatollahs’, Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s violently antisemitic slogans to German streets, protected by the ever-too elastic freedom of assembly.
With their attacks against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Hamas made a mistake for which they are now paying bitterly. After years of daily rocket terrorism against Israel’s South and three wars triggered by this very rocket terrorism, Israel will end this operation only once Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure is destroyed and deterrence reinstalled, yielding several years of calm for Israel’s civilian population.
Moral and motive from a distance
“You want to talk about solutions, about constructive dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, but ignore entirely whom we’re dealing with and what they want; who the Hamas and Islamic Jihad are and what they want. Would you sit down with Anis Amri, the terrorist who committed the 2016 Breitscheidplatz attack in Berlin to search for solutions to his hatred against infidels? With the sadistic torturers of ISIS?
Read the Hamas Charter. Surf through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. You’ll find parallels and nuanced differences. Islamic State beheads homosexuals, Hamas hangs them. Anis Amri rammed a group of visitors at a Christmas market, Hamas rams Israeli youths waiting at bus stations. Al-Qaeda slit the throats of Western journalists in front of live cameras, Hamas, under the radars of international media, slit the throats of an entire Jewish family in their sleep, including that of three-month-old Hadas Fogel.
Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. Berlin is Paris is Tel Aviv. Stabbings are beheadings are rockets. Those who, like this pleasant moderator, equate Hamas’s rocket terrorism against civilians with the self-defense by the Jewish state, the only Western democracy dealing with this kind of terrorism and acute threats at every front, whose extinction is the enemy’s objective instead of a better future for their own people, those who wallow in this wonderfully comfortable moral equidistance need to put up with a decisive question: Are you blind, stupid, antisemitic or all of the above?
The writer is a German-Israeli communication and strategy consultant and a former foreign affairs adviser to Defense Minister Benny Gantz.