Netanyahu: Don’t blame terror attacks against Israelis on the settlements
What is at play here is the terrorists deep desire to destroy Israel, Netanyahu said.
By TOVAH LAZAROFFNetanyahu: 'An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us'
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the international community not to blame Palestinian terror attacks against Israel on settlement building or its actions in the West Bank.“Just like the French are not guilty, we are not guilty of the terrorism that has been directed at us,” Netanyahu wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday night.“The terrorists are the ones who are guilty of terrorism, not ‘the territories’ and not ‘the settlements’ and not anything else,” he wrote.What is at play here is the terrorists deep desire to destroy Israel, Netanyahu said.Scene of attack in ParisThis desire “sustains the conflict and drives the murderous attacks against us,” Netanyahu said.“The terrorists that have attacked us have exactly the same murderous intention as those in Paris,” said the premier.He drew a direct link between the six consecutive terror attacks in France on Friday night that killed at least 129 people and the Palestinian terror attack in the South Hebron Hills hours earlier in which Ya'akov Litman and his son Natanel were killed by gunmen who shot at their van, lightly wounding five other family members.“Terror is terror, and what is behind this is radical Islam and the desire to destroy,” said Netanyahu as he urged the international community to move beyond the blame-the-victim attitude it displays toward Israel.“It is time that the world will wake up and unite in order to defeat terrorism," the prime minister said. "It is time that countries throughout the world condemn the terrorism against us, just as they condemn terrorism anywhere else.”Hollande: Paris attacks "act of war", ISIS behind themHe similarly called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to condemn Friday’s terror attack against the Litman family, such as he spoke up on Saturday against the killings in France.
It was his second statement of the day on the matter. During a Jerusalem press conference several hours earlier, Netanyahu said, “You can’t fight terrorism selectively.”“You can’t say these are the good terrorists and these are the bad terrorists. All terrorists are bad.”