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Encouraging Palestinian Terror
(Commentary) Jonathan S. Tobin - Attacks on Jewish cars and pedestrians with rocks and firebombs are so routine as to be considered not particularly newsworthy. Any Israeli effort to push back against terrorism is seen as being somehow the fault of the Jews, while Palestinians committing crimes are seen as innocent youths performing what the New York Times described as a "rite of passage." But would those Western observers who sympathize with or rationalize these attacks on Jews consider such attacks on their cars in the U.S. and Europe to be anything but attempted murder? The supposed justification for the Palestinians using rocks and firebombs is that they don't have tanks and jet aircraft to shoot at Jews "in order to press for independence." But if "independence" were the goal of the Palestinian national movement, it could have achieved that 15 years ago when the Israelis offered the Palestinian Authority a state and sovereignty in almost all the West Bank, a share of Jerusalem and Gaza. The goal of rock throwing, which has indeed become something of a national sport for Palestinians, is to injure and kill individual Jews. Like suicide bombings or rocket attacks on Israeli cities, the point is to shed Jewish blood. Palestinian nationalism is still inextricably linked to a belief that the presence of Jewish sovereignty over any part of the country, whether across the 1967 line or inside them, is unacceptable.