In recent months, terror attacks by Arabs throughout Judea and Samaria have increased. The regional security hotlines report dozens of incidents of Arabs throwing rocks at Israeli citizens driving on the roads, throwing Molotov cocktails, arson attempts near Israeli towns and various types of terrorist attacks.
These are attacks by Palestinian Arabs against innocent Jewish Israeli citizens and the objective is to kill.
Unfortunately, they succeeded in murdering two Jews over the past few weeks. At one of the funerals that I attended, I had to offer my condolences to a young wife and a one-year-old baby, who lost their dear father and husband to the bullets of terrorists.
We are accustomed to the Jewish nation’s historical battle for its right to exist and for justice. It has been over 100 years that the Jewish nation has been paying in blood for its return to its homeland, the land of the Bible. This is all very painful, of course, but there is something more painful: Witnessing the world’s deafening silence. Every foreign ministry or ambassador who are quick to condemn Israel for the legal construction of half a house suddenly go mute when we suffer terrorist attacks on a daily basis. I wonder if the silence from these countries and their diplomatic representatives is not antisemitism.
Radical left-wing organizations are in the midst of a poisonous campaign against Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, a campaign that receives significant funding from the European Union. The blatant misinformation distributed by these organizations to the foreign ministries and governments of the West paints a distorted picture of violence against Arabs perpetrated by settlers in Judea and Samaria. However, there are in fact dozens of Arab-perpetrated acts of terror every single day.
These attacks are not committed by delinquent teenagers. There is something behind them, directing, encouraging, and feeding the fire: The Palestinian Authority (PA). Its elementary school textbooks and kindergarten classes teach children about murdering Jews. It pays monthly salaries to terrorists who have murdered Jews and its members preach from inside mosques about violence against Jewish settlers, urging people to go out and hurt us.
The international silence in the face of this reality serves as fuel propelling the next terror attack against us. Diplomatic officers travel in and out of the Mukataa (the official PA West Bank headquarters), Ramallah - we see their convoys here in the Binyamin Region. We see the encouragement and support that these convoys provide to the chairman of the PA and its members. Understand the absurdity of the situation: These are the very same representatives whose countries condemn Israel for building legal homes in Jewish towns. Those turning a blind eye in the face of Arab terror are quick to attack Israel for legitimate construction and development in our own borders and historical homeland.
Many governments, including the American government, transfer vast sums of money to the PA without verifying where the money is going. Do the citizens of those countries know that their taxes are also paying for scholarships for Jew-murderers? Do Western citizens know that the unsupervised funding they transfer finds its way to projects that infringe upon basic human rights, damage the environment and pollute the air we all breathe? Most of all, do they know that their money finances a body, the PA, that unabashedly encourages terror attacks and murdering Jews?
The silence of the international community makes them an accomplice to these crimes and is deafening. It is shaking the stability of this region, empowering radical forces that threaten the free world and, most severely, is costing us, the residents of Judea and Samaria, and the citizens of Israel, our lives.
The writer is head of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council.