The Hebron Massacre

"Oh, if only the Israelis would -

-vacate their settlements
-forfeit land
-ease the blockades
-stop responding to provocations
-commit mass suicide

...then we would have peace in the Middle East!

Really.

The next time you hear your neighborhood ignoramus make these worldly and well-accepted pronouncements, perhaps you can remind them that slaughtering Jews is an Arab sport that goes back well before the establishment of Israel. Let's turn the wayback machine to almost exactly eighty years ago...

Debbie Schlussel has some of the historical background:

It began on Friday afternoon when Arabs attacked Jews with clubs and murdered a yeshiva student. The next morning, joined by local villagers, Arabs swarmed through Hebron screaming “Kill the Jews.” They broke into the home of Eliezer Dan Slonim, where many Jews had gathered for safety. There they wielded knives and axes to murder 22 innocents. In the Anglo-Palestine Bank, where 23 corpses were discovered, blood covered the tile floor. That day, three children under the age of five were murdered. Teenage girls, their mothers and grandmothers were raped and killed. Rabbis and their students were castrated before they were slain. A surviving yeshiva student recounted that he “had seen greater horrors than Dante in hell.”

When the slaughter finally subsided, 67 Jews had been murdered. Three days later, British soldiers evacuated 484 survivors, including 153 children, to Jerusalem. The butchery in Hebron, Zionist and religious officials alleged, was “without equal in the history of the country since the destruction of the Temple.” Sir Walter Shaw, chairman of an exhaustive British royal investigation, concluded that “unspeakable atrocities” had occurred.

Nothing has changed in the Middle East in the last 80 years; only now the existence of a Jewish states gives the Arab apologist an easy target to blame for their uncivilized behavior towards their neighbor. (The sub-headline in the above newspaper reads "Arab Horde Slaughtered Little Children During Mad Orgy in City." Ah, for the days that newspapers actually reported the truth, without the filter of political correctness. These days, after a similar incidence, we see the word "occupation" or some other type of moral equivalence by the end of the first paragraph).

Meanwhile, Hamas is bringing Holocaust-denial to new heights, Fatah won't even talk to Israel unless it stops building settlements (an Obama decree, incidentally, that is a red herring, and all parties involved know it), and most importantly (and most ignored) - both parties implicitly refuse to recognize Israel's right to even exist.

At least eighty years ago, we were honest enough to call the Arab's blood lust for Jews what it was - unadulterated hatred.

Now we enable it, coddle it, make excuses for it, and ignore it. And we wonder why it keeps happening, while at the same time we refuse to recognize the realities of the present, which are a mere continuation of the Arab policies of the past - kill thy neighbor.

Yeah, maybe a settlement freeze will end all that.