Palestinians hurl stones at troops during protests

Mike L. 

Demonstrators clash with troops in fourth day of violence in the West Bank; police arrest 3 youths in J'lem for stone throwing.

Palestinian protesters on Friday clashed with IDF soldiers in various locations in the West Bank, marking the fourth straight day of upheaval following the deaths of two Palestinian youths during clashes and a detainee earlier in the week.

Army Radio reported stone throwing incidents in the village of Kalkilya, Nablus, and in Sinjil in Ramallah. In Hebron, Palestinian protesters threw stones at a military post. IDF troops used teargas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.

First, it should be noted that there is nothing particularly brave about Palestinian-Arab teens stoning Jewish troops.  They know that the IDF is seriously hindered by humanitarian Israeli rules of engagement and that whatever Israel does the international media and the progressive-left will blame them for anything that even resembles a negative outcome.  They know that at the end of the day they will get a cookie and a pat on the head.

Second, these riots have absolutely nothing to do with anything that even resembles social justice or "resistance to occupation."  As mentioned in a previous post, Arab teenagers have been stoning Jews for centuries and the fact that they continue to do so accounts for the check points and the security barrier and all these things that the left labels "occupation."

The fact is, it is not Arabs who are occupied by Jews, but the tiny Jewish minority which remains under siege by the vast Arab majority of which the Palestinian-Arabs represent front-line troops.   400 million Arabs have 6 million Jews with their backs to the Mediterranean.   After 1948 they chased virtually all the Jews out of the Arab-Muslim Middle East and now they are seeking to further tighten the grip by appropriating even the tiny bit of land that the Jewish people can claim as our own.

Thus the Jews remain under siege and it must be understood that there is no moral equivalency here.  Progressive-left anti-Zionists and Israel Haters describe the Jews of the Middle East as a nefarious and militaristic force oppressing the poor, oppressed "indigenous" population.  Centrist western liberals, however, tend to go in for the moral equivalency canard.  In its negative aspect it takes the form of "a pox on both your houses."  In its positive aspect it takes the form of "can't we all just get along?"

From an historical perspective, however, the Jews of the Middle East are a tiny, minority population that has been subject to Arab-Muslim imperialism thirteen of the last fourteen centuries under the condition of persecution that we call "dhimmitude."  What we are seeing now within the long Arab war against the Jews is nothing less than the ongoing attempt to rob Jewish people of autonomy and self-defense for the purpose of returning those Jews to their previous condition.

When I see my moderate liberal friends hold up the scales on the Arab-Israel conflict in such a way as to suggest moral equivalency, I know that we've already lost the argument.  The reason for this is because they do not know the history of dhimmitude and are not open to discussing it.  And if you want to discuss the current moment, you cannot do so with reference to political Islam, because they do not want to hear about that, either.  They associate it with the reviled right-wing and Obama has done everything that he can do (which is considerable) to remove political Islam from our political consciousnesses.

As I mentioned in a comment earlier to Dan, what we need to do is expand the focus of the conversation, both historically and in terms of our understanding of the present combatants.  If the anti-Israel people tend to use very sharp focuses in their presentation of "lethal narratives," then we need to expand the focus.  The Arabs must account for the long centuries of dhimmitude and the international left needs to understand that the Jews of the Middle East are a tiny minority under a genocidal siege.