Myles B. Kantor
Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2003

Let it not be said that Arab terrorists oppose new ideas, for they have proven most open-minded in murdering Jews.

Last month I toured Israel with the Mayanot Institute as part of the Birthright Israel program. On Aug. 12, terrorists bombed a bus stop near the West Bank settlement of Ariel and a grocery store in the central Israeli town of Rosh Ha'ayin. On Aug. 19, Muslim preacher Raed Abdel-Hamed Mesk blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus and murdered 21 people, including five Americans.

These atrocities didn’t surprise me; the surprise would have been no atrocities. Blood flows in Israel the way wine flows in Chile.

My stay in Israel also coincided with the anniversary of the 1929 Arab massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron. On the flight home I read Tom Segev’s account of it in “One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate.”

Hebron’s Muslim majority didn’t treat Jews well prior to 1929. “Arabs harassed Jews on a daily basis, cursing them on the streets and even on occasion waylaying and beating them,” Segev writes.

Arab mobs began vandalizing Jewish property on Friday, Aug. 23, 1929, and soon graduated to murdering Jews. An early victim was yeshiva student Shmuel Halevi Rosenberg, who “attempted to leave the building and found himself facing a group of Arabs. He tried to retreat back into the yeshiva, but it was too late: the Arabs grabbed him and stabbed him to death.”

On Saturday morning, a Polish tourist in Hebron at a Jewish home looked outside a window “and saw several cars packed with Arabs bearing sticks, swords, knives, and daggers driving in the direction of Jerusalem. As the vehicles passed the house, the Arabs spied the Jews and drew their fingers across their throats to signify slaughter.” The slaughter took forms such as:

… sixty-eight-year-old Rabbi Meir Kastel and seventy-year-old Rabbi Zvi Drabkin, along with five young men, had been castrated. Baker Noah Imerman had been burned to death with a kerosene stove. The mob had killed pharmacist Ben-Zion Gershon, a cripple who had served Jews and Arabs for forty years; they had raped and killed his daughter as well. Yitzhak Abujzhdid and Dovnikov had been strangled with a rope. Yitzhak Abu Hannah, seventy years old, had been tied to a door and tortured until he died. Two-year-old Menachem Segal had had his head torn off…There are photographs of hands and fingers that had been cut off, perhaps for their rings and bracelets.

“Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they,” wrote the Jewish sage Maimonides of the Arabs in 1172. Arabs no longer tyrannize Jews in Israel, but the hatred and molestation remain. Mass murderers like Raed Abdel-Hamed Mesk try to finish with bombs what the German National Socialists pursued with gas.

Unlike during Hebron and the Holocaust, though, a Jewish state now exists, with one of the world’s best militaries. So why doesn’t the Israeli government end this new attempt at genocide?

Defenders of Ariel Sharon’s administration will cite military responses to bombings such as that of Aug. 19, but this is defensive tokenism: Send some tanks, kill a few terrorist organizers, leave the terrorist framework intact. Then there’s another bombing, followed by another superficial operation.

To state matters bluntly, Israel is a pitiful giant: full of wherewithal without the will to use it. A government dedicated to national defense doesn’t release hundreds of terrorists as part of a “road map to peace” – which extends the Oslo Accords’ installation of Yasir Arafat’s terrorist dictatorship – and doesn’t let its citizens be massacred again and again.

Defend yourself, Israel, because no one else will. Defend yourself, because only then will there be some kind of peace.

Contact Myles Kantor at MylesColumn@aol.com

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