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Israel Hayom article cites PMW material about Hamas threats to Israelis

Ruthie Blum  |
Gaza proves Golda right

by Ruthie Blum

“Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,” then Foreign Minister Golda Meir said in 1957, during an address to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C...

Given the stated aims of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas — the former ruling over the West Bank and the latter over Gaza — it is no wonder that Israel’s attempts [at peace] have failed abysmally. Basing policy on false premises is never a good idea. Repeating such an error again and again is psychotic, suicidal, or both.

Nobody is more aware of this than the Arabs themselves. And the more they can milk it for all it’s worth, the better for them.

But don’t take my word for it. The perpetrators of Israel’s current war against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza always articulate it so precisely. This week is no exception.

For days, Hamas has been broadcasting battle-cry video clips on its Al-Aqsa TV station, produced especially for Operation Pillar of Defense. The purpose of these segments, jointly devised by Hamas and its military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, is twofold: to rally the residents of Gaza around the regime and to threaten Israel into submission.

One such segment includes the following warning to the Israel Defense Forces: "The price will be high, sons of Zion ... Oh occupier, we are coming toward you. Leave our land. All of Palestine is ours. There is nothing here for you but death. There is nothing here for you but to be killed and to leave … In the land that you came to alive, you will end as body parts. That is Allah's promise."

This is but one of many and varied examples — translated by Palestinian Media Watch over the years — of how the Palestinians actually view their conflict with Israel. It has nothing to do with the 1967 borders. Nor does it have to do with “occupation”; Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Neither is it rooted in poor peace planning. It is an assertion of a religious imperative that Israel must be destroyed.

Another clip, part public-service announcement and part horror-film promo, has a narrator calling out menacingly to the IDF, "From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life.”

This goes to show that Golda Meir was only partly right. Peace won’t come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel, but rather when they stop loving death, period.

She was completely on the mark, however, when she said that Israelis might be able one day “to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill theirs.”

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