by Melanie Phillips
A repeated tactic by Palestinian Arabs and other Islamists is to accuse their victims of behaviour of which the victims are wholly innocent but of which the Palestinian Arabs and Islamists are guilty. Thus the Israelis, the victims of Palestinian genocidal terrorism, are accused of genocide for seeking to defend themselves. There are many other examples in similar vein.
This type of projection is rooted in the belief that, since Islam is perfection and the non-Islamic world is the province of the devil, Muslims can do no wrong against non-Muslims — who are then accused of committing the crimes perpetrated against them by Muslims. It is an inversion of reality that closely mirrors the way in which the former Soviet Union fried the brain in order to render its internal enemies helpless to resist its terror.
It is a strategy of war, used by Islamists in the psychological warfare they deploy against their victims. And now it is being used by the Biden administration and the British government against Israel.
This week, the British government imposed financial and travel restrictions against four Israeli residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, claimed that they were “extremist settlers” who were involved in “some of the most egregious abuses of human rights,” having carried out violent attacks on Palestinians in the “West Bank” by threatening them “often at gunpoint” and “forcing them off land that is rightfully theirs”.
The Foreign Office said that Israel’s “failure to act” had led to “an environment of near total impunity for settler extremists”, with violence in the West Bank reaching record levels in 2023.
The British are marching in lockstep with the Biden administration, which earlier this month also sanctioned four Israeli residents of these territories — one of whom is on the UK’s list — claiming that “extremist settler violence” had reached “intolerable levels”.
This is all an extraordinary and malign distortion and loss of proportion. As I wrote here, there is indeed a problem with violent Israeli “hilltop youth,” mainly aged between 14 and 19, but who are estimated to number only a few hundred among more than half a million Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria.
All such attacks are wrong and the Israelis should deal with these “hilltop youth” firmly — which they do, when they are indeed guilty of aggressive acts. But what Cameron and the Biden administration conspicuously fail to acknowledge is that in many of these violent encounters, the Israelis are responding to violence against them by the Palestinian Arabs.
Indeed, it is utterly astonishing that Cameron and the Americans defame the Israeli residents of the territories — the vast majority of whom live entirely peaceful and law-abiding lives — while making no mention whatsoever of the multiple attacks perpetrated by the Palestinian Arabs against these Israelis every day, vastly out-numbering attacks by the Israelis.
Cameron and the Americans say “settler” attacks last year reached record numbers. But there have been around 300 terrorist attacks against Israelis since October 7 alone.
Cameron and the Americans make no mention of the Arab attacks on Israeli “settlers,” involving shootings, rock-throwing and car ramming, which go on every day. They make no mention of the “settlers” Lucy Dee and her two daughters, Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, who were murdered last April by Palestinian terrorists who shot them in their car at point-blank range. They make no mention of the “settlers” Hallel Yaniv, 21, and his brother Yagel, 19, who were murdered by Palestinian terrorists a year ago when they were stuck in a traffic jam. They make no mention of the “settlers” Asher Menachem Paley, 8, and Yaakov Israel Paley, 6, who were standing at a bus stop with their father when a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into them, killing them along with 20-year-old rabbinical student Alter Shlomo Lederman who had been married for two months.
Israelis are being regularly attacked and murdered by terrorists from a Palestinian population in the “West Bank” of whom more than 80 per cent support the Hamas atrocities. Yet Cameron and his chums in the US State Department have ignored all that. Instead, they have presented the Israelis as committing “egregious human rights abuses” against the Palestinians — thus deploying the Palestinian tactic of inverting victims and aggressors.
Funeral of Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, 21 and19, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorist, Huwara, February 2023
This is not surprising given the information upon which the Americans and British have been drawing — the twisted claims made by the UN, “human rights” NGOs and the entire “humanitarian” hate industry, which is deployed to destroy Israel’s reputation through distortion and defamation but which the US and UK foreign policy establishments invest with the sanctity of disinterested conscience. As a result, Cameron and his chums have been played for suckers.
In an important piece in Tablet, Liel Liebowitz writes about Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, a three-star general who currently serves as the US security coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority (USSC). The USSC, says Liebowitz, is well-known for its regular, sometimes daily briefings and reports about “extremist settlers,” which it provides to members of Congress, policy hands and Israel-related advocacy groups, as well as to foreign countries’ forces in Israel.
Liebowitz writes:
According to sources in and out of the US government familiar with Fenzel’s reports and advocacy, nearly every claim presented by the USSC as fact seems to have been lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations, including the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) and the far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which accuses Israel of apartheid and receives vast support from European governments and from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In the past 12 months, 13 Israelis were murdered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and 17 in the West Bank — not counting those slaughtered on October 7, 2023— while doing nothing more provocative than driving home or stopping for gas. The number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israelis under such conditions over the same time period is zero.
But the story the administration has been telling anyone who will listen is very different. By scrubbing any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank from his reports, Fenzel has eliminated the clear retaliatory motive for the vast majority of attacks by Israelis against West Bank Palestinians. Thinly laundered reports from expressly anti-Israel organizations, designed to support an illusion of innocent Palestinians being violently attacked by bloodthirsty Israelis, paint a picture of an Israeli equivalent to the Palestinian atrocities of October 7, lending itself an easy “both-sides” posture meant to ease the way to creating a new Palestinian state in both the West Bank and Gaza. With an executive order now in place, the Biden administration has all the tools it needs to crack down on any form of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, and on anyone, in Israel or stateside, who supports it.
In other words, in order to impose a Palestinian terror state upon the Israelis Cameron and the Biden administration are casting the Israelis as “egregious” human rights offenders while airbrushing genocidal Palestinian violence out of the picture altogether.
In the Israeli paper Israel Hayom, Nadav Shragai points out the extreme loss of proportion in the imposition of sanctions on a handful of Israeli “settlers”, even though Washington is fully aware that Israel deals with such violent extremists with extreme severity. He writes:
It is this same line of thinking that led the Americans to demanding and obtaining an Israeli commitment, that the thousands of M16 assault rifles that have been purchased from manufacturers in the US, will not be handed over to the rapid response squads in the settlements. The reason for this: the concern that these weapons, whose function is to protect the Jewish residents, might end up being used to attack Palestinians.
And these are no more than the patent symptoms of a deep-rooted obsession: the US knows full well that it is the Jewish residents who are under threat, and that the rapid response squads have a purely defensive function. It also knows that the chance of the rapid response squad members actually going and attacking Palestinians is next to nonexistent.
The Americans are also distinctly familiar with the Palestinian side, which only a few months ago, at their request, Israel supplied with armoured cars and machine guns. They know that the members of the PASF (Palestinian Authority Security Forces) are heavily involved in acts of terrorism. The incident at the weekend involving a Palestinian officer firing on an IDF soldier near the community of Shavei Shomron, and the recent shooting at Kibbutz Meirav on the Gilboa mountain range, are mere symptoms of this.
The US is also either turning a blind eye to or ignoring the worrying signs of growing proximity between the PA and Hamas, the connecting link between them being Fatah — the beating heart of the PA. The Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades operate in joint cells together with terrorists from Hamas and the PIJ. Both the IDF and Israel’s Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, have come face to face with this phenomenon on numerous occasions over the course of the last year.
As antisemitism in the diaspora and the deranged demonisation of Israel roar out of control in Britain and America, members of the US Congress and members of parliament in Britain should be raising as a matter of urgency the way in which both the US State Department and the British Foreign Office appear to be doing the genocidists’ work for them by inverting victim and aggressor — in order to force into existence a terror state that would turn the October 7 pogrom into the equivalent of Krystallnacht as a harbinger of the slaughter to come.
In an important piece in Tablet, Liel Liebowitz writes about Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, a three-star general who currently serves as the US security coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority (USSC). The USSC, says Liebowitz, is well-known for its regular, sometimes daily briefings and reports about “extremist settlers,” which it provides to members of Congress, policy hands and Israel-related advocacy groups, as well as to foreign countries’ forces in Israel.
Liebowitz writes:
According to sources in and out of the US government familiar with Fenzel’s reports and advocacy, nearly every claim presented by the USSC as fact seems to have been lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations, including the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) and the far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which accuses Israel of apartheid and receives vast support from European governments and from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In the past 12 months, 13 Israelis were murdered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and 17 in the West Bank — not counting those slaughtered on October 7, 2023— while doing nothing more provocative than driving home or stopping for gas. The number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israelis under such conditions over the same time period is zero.
But the story the administration has been telling anyone who will listen is very different. By scrubbing any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank from his reports, Fenzel has eliminated the clear retaliatory motive for the vast majority of attacks by Israelis against West Bank Palestinians. Thinly laundered reports from expressly anti-Israel organizations, designed to support an illusion of innocent Palestinians being violently attacked by bloodthirsty Israelis, paint a picture of an Israeli equivalent to the Palestinian atrocities of October 7, lending itself an easy “both-sides” posture meant to ease the way to creating a new Palestinian state in both the West Bank and Gaza. With an executive order now in place, the Biden administration has all the tools it needs to crack down on any form of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, and on anyone, in Israel or stateside, who supports it.
In other words, in order to impose a Palestinian terror state upon the Israelis Cameron and the Biden administration are casting the Israelis as “egregious” human rights offenders while airbrushing genocidal Palestinian violence out of the picture altogether.
In the Israeli paper Israel Hayom, Nadav Shragai points out the extreme loss of proportion in the imposition of sanctions on a handful of Israeli “settlers”, even though Washington is fully aware that Israel deals with such violent extremists with extreme severity. He writes:
It is this same line of thinking that led the Americans to demanding and obtaining an Israeli commitment, that the thousands of M16 assault rifles that have been purchased from manufacturers in the US, will not be handed over to the rapid response squads in the settlements. The reason for this: the concern that these weapons, whose function is to protect the Jewish residents, might end up being used to attack Palestinians.
And these are no more than the patent symptoms of a deep-rooted obsession: the US knows full well that it is the Jewish residents who are under threat, and that the rapid response squads have a purely defensive function. It also knows that the chance of the rapid response squad members actually going and attacking Palestinians is next to nonexistent.
The Americans are also distinctly familiar with the Palestinian side, which only a few months ago, at their request, Israel supplied with armoured cars and machine guns. They know that the members of the PASF (Palestinian Authority Security Forces) are heavily involved in acts of terrorism. The incident at the weekend involving a Palestinian officer firing on an IDF soldier near the community of Shavei Shomron, and the recent shooting at Kibbutz Meirav on the Gilboa mountain range, are mere symptoms of this.
The US is also either turning a blind eye to or ignoring the worrying signs of growing proximity between the PA and Hamas, the connecting link between them being Fatah — the beating heart of the PA. The Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades operate in joint cells together with terrorists from Hamas and the PIJ. Both the IDF and Israel’s Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, have come face to face with this phenomenon on numerous occasions over the course of the last year.
As antisemitism in the diaspora and the deranged demonisation of Israel roar out of control in Britain and America, members of the US Congress and members of parliament in Britain should be raising as a matter of urgency the way in which both the US State Department and the British Foreign Office appear to be doing the genocidists’ work for them by inverting victim and aggressor — in order to force into existence a terror state that would turn the October 7 pogrom into the equivalent of Krystallnacht as a harbinger of the slaughter to come.
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