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Palestinian Leaders Have Created a Culture of Death
(Wall Street Journal) Tzipi Hotovely - The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to "spill blood." This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this "jihad" as the pinnacle of their aspirations. Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media - as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims - is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians. The unending stream of blood-drenched caricatures and video clips that circulate virally through Palestinian social media is a telling indication of how profoundly the worship of violence is entrenched in Palestinian society. Israeli children grow up on songs of peace. Palestinian children are taught to hate. Changing the Palestinian death-culture is no less important for the Palestinians than for Israel. The writer is deputy foreign minister of Israel.