- MELANIE PHILLIPS - APRIL 25, 2023 -
Today is Israel’s Remembrance Day. This is when the nation commemorates all those who have fallen in battle defending it against its attackers, and remembers also all those Israeli civilians who have been murdered by Arab terrorism.
Too few in the west grasp why this terrible toll continues to rise
Since the State of Israel was established in 1948, 24,213 men and women have been killed in military service and 4,255 men, women and children have been murdered in terror attacks. To put these losses in proportion, in 1948 Israel had 806,000 people; today, its population is approaching 10 million. In America, the population during that period has risen from around 130 million to 336 million, and in the UK from 50 million to 67 million.
Today is an emotional day for Israel. This morning, when the siren sounded at 1100, traffic in the streets came to a halt and people stood and bowed their heads. Thousands of Israelis have visited the cemeteries to remember slain family members, recite prayers and join in the nation’s collective mourning and respect.
This annual demonstration of solidarity in grief over the dreadful price paid by Israel’s never-ending struggle to survive always generates high emotion. Today, this has been heightened still further by the terrible divisions laid bare during the last four months of uproar over the government’s judicial reform programme — which today also produced a few protests at these most solemn events.
This evening, Israel will pass seamlessly from a day of extreme sadness to the start of Independence Day, when it celebrates the rebirth of the Jewish national home in Israel. For Israelis, rejoicing over that astonishing achievement is necessarily anchored in the awareness that is never far from the surface — that the price they have paid to be citizens of their own country has been agonisingly steep.
That price is still being paid, as Israelis continue to be regularly attacked and murdered and their young conscript soldiers continue to be sent into harm’s way to defend their country against enemies bent upon its extermination.
Far too many in the west, however, get Israel’s unique predicament precisely the wrong way round. Swallowing wholesale the Palestinian Arabs’ propaganda, these westerners fail to acknowledge the Palestinian Arabs’ medieval and Nazi-style Jew-hatred and their true agenda of exterminating Israel. Regarding them ignorantly and wrongly as the displaced rightful inheritors of the land, the west supports and funds them while demonising and delegitimising Israel, whose unique claim to the land is based firmly on historical fact and international law.
The true nature of the Palestinian Arabs’ agenda is regularly laid bare by the invaluable website Palestinian Media Watch. Unfortunately, few in the west even know of its work. Earlier this month PMW’s director, Itamar Marcus, was interviewed for The Hungarian Conservative by Sáron Sugár, a research fellow at the Budapest-based think tank, the Danube Institute. In order to bring Marcus’s crucial insights to greater public attention on this day of mourning for the slain of Israel, I am reproducing here a lightly edited version of that interview. The passages in bold are my own emphasis.
[Question]: Could you tell us about how and why Palestinian Media Watch was founded? [Marcus]: Palestinian Media Watch was founded soon after the signing of the Oslo Accords to find out what the Palestinian Authority was teaching its people, especially its children, about Jews, Israel, and peace. We very quickly discovered that there were two distinct worlds: the English language world for foreign consumption and the Arabic language world for its own people, and there was no resemblance between the two. Whereas in English and in foreign capitals, the PA presented itself as peace-loving, to its people all the statements in Arabic and the actual activities of the PA pointed to a strategy of hate and terror that aims to continuously weaken Israel, eventually leading to Israel’s destruction. [Question]: At the end of 2022, you published a report titled ‘Teaching Terror to Tots’. The report is dedicated to the memory of Dalya Lemkus, a 26-year-old Israeli woman who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in 2014. The Palestinian Authority-issued children’s magazine, WAED, teaches Palestinian children that her murder was ‘a heroic car ramming’ and that the terrorist who murdered her ‘has the most beautiful smile’. What were some of the most disturbing examples of how WAED indoctrinates children to the hatred of Israeli Jewish people, and what impact do you believe this kind of education has on the attitudes and behaviour of young children exposed to it? [Marcus]: The fundamental purpose of WAED magazine is to raise a generation of children who hate Israelis and Jews, feel obligated to fight and kill Israelis and Jews, and will be willing to kill themselves in the process. WAED’s fundamental messages are that Israelis are foreign colonialist invaders, and therefore, Israel has no right to exist. Israel is coined as the ‘thieving entity’, and Israelis are demonised as the ‘Jewish invaders.’ Fatah proclaims it will destroy Israel by ‘liberating Palestine from the thieving Zionist entity’. Israel’s destruction is packaged in various euphemisms such as: ‘the period of Zionism will eventually pass’ and ‘The Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history,’ after which the Jews will all be expelled. Fatah presents Algeria as the historical precedent: ‘Algeria’s experience assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end.’ The Palestinian ‘absolute right’ to destroy Israel creates the ‘right’ to use terror, which they call the ‘…right to wage an armed struggle to take back its stolen homeland’. This PA/Fatah education will be the driving force for Palestinian hate and terror for another generation. [Question]: At the end of January, a 13-year-old resident of East Jerusalem shot a Jewish father and son in the City of David quarter of Jerusalem. The fact that a teenager carried out a terror attack in Jerusalem and became a ‘martyr’ showed that Palestinian children are taught to hate and kill Israelis in East Jerusalem as well. Is there a chance to reach these Palestinian children to make them learn the reality and the truth before their parents sacrifice them for the Palestinian cause? [Marcus]: The most effective way to reach Palestinian children and undermine the PA’s hate education is to have joint activities between Palestinian and Israeli children. Israel, for years, has tried to promote these kinds of activities, and when they do happen, they are successful. Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority prohibits them for the simple reason that they are not interested in having their children stop hating Israelis. Just the opposite is true. The Palestinian Authority does everything in its power through its education and activities to demonise Israelis and Jews and to guarantee that its children will grow up hating Israelis and Jews. The only way to save Palestinian children is to have the international community influence their education, the media, organise summer camps, and youth activities and teach them the meaning of peace. Of course, this will never happen, which is why the future for these kids is very bleak.