The Ghouls Of Palestine

By: Steven Plaut

Published: June 16th, 2004

tell a friend

It was a week that began with barbarism and ended with boundless stupidity.

First, a Palestinian terrorist murdered an entire family. David Hatuel lost his pregnant wife and their four daughters, aged 2-11, when they were murdered at point-blank range on the Kisufim entrance road into Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. Then, at a memorial service, PLO terrorists opened fire on the mourners. Just when it seemed the Palestinians could not possibly exhibit behavior more barbaric than that, out came masses of the savages to defile and degrade the remains of Israeli soldiers murdered by a large bomb, using body parts of the dead for sport and then hiding the remains to prevent the families of the dead soldiers from giving them a decent burial.

The murdered soldiers were in an armored personnel carrier that was hit by a large mine, composed of explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip through the many smuggling tunnels operating from Egypt. These are the same tunnels that the dimwitted ‘anarchists’ from Western universities come to protect. (The now notorious Rachel Corrie, a radical student from
Washington State, died when she challenged an Israeli military bulldozer operating against the tunnels to a game of Chicken.)

When the mine went off, it set off the ammunition inside the APC, and six soldiers were literally blown to pieces. Their pieces were scattered about the burning remains of the vehicle. The Palestinian ghouls from the houses nearby rushed to the scene to grab human organs as playthings and souvenirs.

The next day, Israeli forces entered the area to recover the remains. The Palestinians again opened fire. A second APC hit a mine and another five soldiers were murdered. Finally, two more soldiers were murdered by Palestinian snipers attempting to recover these bodies. Israel responded by bulldozing a few dozen homes of the ghouls who had participated in the
atrocity involving the stolen body parts, triggering the usual breathless expressions of righteous outrage from the usual quarters. A group of leftists even petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to order a halt to the demolition of houses. After all, destroying the house of a ghoul is so insensitive.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media, under the near total hegemony of the Left, are proclaiming that 150,000 people showed up for the rally last Saturday night that called for unilateral Israeli self-annihilation. This in a square that can at most hold 60,000. (The 150,000 whopper is actually small potatoes for the the Israeli media, which in 1982 fabricated the even more ludicrous figure of 400,000 for a rally against the incursion into Lebanon.)

The participants were those Israelis who still insist that detachment from reality is the best path toward achieving peace. The fact that ‘Oslo thinking’ and the approach promoted by the Left have produced nothing but carnage for that past 12 years is absolutely no reason to abandon them. The banner of the rally was “The Majority Decides” — but of course that was not meant to refer to the 60 percent majority who voted against any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the recent Likud referendum. Perhaps it meant the majority of Israeli journalists.

Almost perfectly timed to coincide with the leftist rally for capitulation, Yasir Arafat gave a ‘Naqba Day’ address in which he openly urged Palestinians to engage in mass terror against the Jews. “Find what strength you have to terrorize your enemy and the enemy of God,” he said. This is the creature — and along with him the ghouls who played hide-and-seek with Israeli body parts — with whom the rally participants wish to ‘discuss peace’ and to whom they wish to make new appeasement as goodwill gestures.

But hold on to your shtreimels, because there are even greater political surprises now emerging. In recent months the Israeli Left has all but abandoned the slogan of “Land for Peace,” since it is evident to all earthlings outside the U.S. State Department and the Israeli Labor Party that Israel cannot buy peace by appeasing the Arabs with land. Instead, the new slogan of the Israeli Left is “Land for Nothing.” You think I’m joshing? I wish I were!

Consider the letter in Haaretz (May 16) from Amiram Goldblum, a professor of pharmacy at Hebrew University. Goldblum is one of the founders of and true believers in Peace Now, the protest movement responsible for the kind of thinking that has led to 1,400 Israelis murdered
and tens of thousands wounded and traumatized in the years since Oslo. In his letter Goldblum insists that “Land for Peace” is passe, because it implies that, until the PLO is prepared to make peace, Israel should hold on to the “occupied” lands.

Instead, Goldblum suggests that Israel withdraw unilaterally from all the “occupied lands” whether the PLO wants peace or not, just because it is the nice thing to do. After Israel returns to its pre-1967 lines (‘Auschwitz borders,’ as the late Abba Eban called them), Israeli leaders, writes Goldblum, can then ask the PLO for talks — I guess to discuss whether any
Jews should be permitted to remain in the illegal settlement of Tel Aviv or the occupied territory known as Haifa.

Of all the emotional moments over the past few days, I found the most moving to have been a simple old archive tape, broadcast on the TV news, of a mother singing to her son.

Among those murdered in the second attack on the APC in Gaza last week was one Lior Vishinski. He had been trained in tunnel warfare, that horrific fighting of the sort that left many a Vietnam veteran an emotional vegetable. Lior’s job was to stop the smuggling of explosives into Gaza from Egypt, and ironically he himself fell victim to a large mine composed of just
such smuggled explosives.

Lior was the son of two actors from Israel’s bohemian Tel Aviv theater set. The divorced parents are hardly right-wingers and are not Orthodox. Indeed, like the leftist father of Nick Berg, the Jew from Philadelphia murdered in Iraq, Lior’s own father tastelessly attempted to
exploit the death of his son to make political capital and promote the political agenda of the Left.

Be that as it may, the evening after Lior was murdered, Israel’s Channel Two broadcast an old tape from its archive. In it was Lior, several years younger, sitting on a stage next to his beautiful mother. She was singing to him a song. It was a lovely religious song, even though she is evidently not observant. Smiling at her son, she sang the stanza, apparently to an old
Yiddish melody, with words from the daily prayer book: “There are some things whose amount has no defined quantity, and these include acts of compassion, where a man eats from the fruits in this world yet enjoys the full ‘principal’ in the next world.”

She sang the verse over and over, smiling and watching her son. Who was murdered last week by Palestinian savages.

Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steven_plaut@yahoo.com

tell a friend

About the Author: Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.

The Ghouls Of Palestine

You might also be interested in: