Following every Palestinian terrorist attack against Israelis, the Israeli media focus on the reasons behind the attack and they all have one answer: incitement. They say young Palestinians are incited against Israel and Jews by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, social media, sheikhs in mosques, and of course, the Palestinian education system.
There is incitement. However, the Israeli media never deal with the important underlying issues: Why is there incitement and what is behind it? The answer from the so-called experts is antisemitism and built-in Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jews. There are elements of antisemitism in Palestinian culture; they do exist and there is no point in ignoring them.
Many Palestinian friends have told me that when they were young and they misbehaved, a parent would say to them, “If you don’t behave, I will call the Jew to take you”. The word “Jew” is often interchangeable with the word “Israeli” in Palestinian discourse and in the media. But I don’t believe that a young man takes a gun or a knife to go and kill Israelis or Jews does so because of inbred antisemitism. This young man takes an action that he knows will end up with him being killed and having his family turned homeless, and perhaps members of his family even sent to Israeli prison for many years. What motivates a person to take such a dramatic action with such dire consequences?
Some analysts point to the promise of 72 virgins as the motivating element that drives someone to commit murder and suicide. That might be an explanation for some. The afterlife was mentioned in the suicide phone call message of Muhannad Muhammad Suleiman Al-Mazara’a, 20, a resident of Eizariya who wounded six people in Ma’aleh Adumim. But that explanation also does not seriously answer why some young man, employed, with relative freedom of movement, would knowingly kill and be killed.
Israel has caused the motivations for Palestinians to want to kill Israelis
The answers to that question are multiple and with each case, different answers can be found. What is clear is that labeling all of these cases as occurring because of incitement is a clear dismissal of any responsibility of Israel for what instigates the motivations for these young Palestinians to seek to kill Israelis. The placing of the blame on incitement is a clear strategy of successive Israeli governments to remove legitimate Palestinian claims from the public sphere, and in our tragic reality called Israel 2023, the strategy has worked.
The removal of the Palestinian issue from our public discourse and awareness is found both in the faults of the Palestinians for their divided and corrupt leadership. The Palestinians are also at fault for allowing Israel to own the narrative of the failed peace process by placing all of the blame on the Palestinian leadership for continuing to reject every reasonable Israeli offer during negotiations.
This is a false narrative and anyone who knows the truth about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations can easily produce facts which reject the myth that the Palestinians completely rejected peace with Israel. The Palestinians have failed to produce an effective strategy that does demonstrate a clear determination to live in peace next to Israel and not in place of Israel. But that is only a small part of the much bigger picture.
The Palestinian issue was removed from the Israeli political discourse with the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The strategic error of Yasser Arafat not to end the Second Intifada while he still had relative control of the streets led to his loss of control and eventually his participation in arming the struggle against Israel.
AFTER ARAFAT’S death, Mahmoud Abbas came into power with a clear rejection of the armed struggle and the militarization of the Intifada, and a commitment to rebuild Palestinian security forces that would fight against terrorism, and especially against Hamas. But the Israeli unilateral Disengagement from Gaza, with Ariel Sharon’s refusal to engage with Abbas on the Disengagement, led to the victory of the Hamas narrative that it was the “resistance” that forced Israel to run away from Gaza.
Rather than give the moderate Palestinian leader Abbas a victory in the return of Gaza to Palestinian control, Sharon’s actions led directly to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections in 2006.
By 2008, Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, had brought Palestine to the point of being ready for statehood according to the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the International Monetary Fund and other international agencies. But then Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected and once again, just as in 1996, he was committed to freezing the process and preventing the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. In 2014-2015, I conducted a secret back channel between then-opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog and Palestinian Authority President Abbas.
The channel began its work prior to the collapse of the government and the call for new elections, but continued until reaching two principal agreements three weeks before the 2015 elections. They reached an agreement on all core issues and another agreement for a security protocol. Abbas was prepared to hold a public meeting with Herzog to announce the agreement. Herzog responded that I should tell Abbas not to mention a word about the agreement to anyone.
Herzog’s political strategists told him that the public did not want to hear about Palestinians, and if he spoke about Palestinians, he would lose the elections. I told him that the Israeli public would not vote for a copy of Netanyahu when they could have the real thing. The only issue that had the potential of setting Herzog up for a victory against Netanyahu was if he could clearly demonstrate that peace with the Palestinians was possible. He did not listen to me and instead listened to his paid strategic advisers and lost the elections.
Since then, the main Israeli discourse has been “Bibi yes or Bibi no.” Even the alternative government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid refused to deal with the Palestinian issue. And now, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets to protect Israeli democracy, the leaders of the protest movement refuse to put up-front and in-center the core issue of what we must do to ensure that Israel is a genuine democracy – and that is to end Israel’s control over millions of Palestinians.
Israel is a de facto binational unequal state. The Netanyahu government is marching Israel straight into becoming a de jure new form of apartheid – one state with two different unequal regimes of government.
The Palestinian issue is out of our sight but Palestinians continue to live the unbearable reality of occupation, Israeli domination, control of their economy and living with no hope. The reality of young individuals trying to kill Israelis will increase and eventually become more organized, more supported and more deadly. It is not because of incitement. It is because for increasing numbers of Palestinians, the question of what is left to live for becomes increasingly relevant. That is what Israeli society needs to understand.
The writer is a political and social entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to peace between Israel and its neighbors. He is a founding member of the “Kol Ezraheiha – Kol Muwanteneiha” (All of the Citizens) political party in Israel. He is now directing The Holy Land Bond and is the Middle East Director for ICO – International Communities Organization.