Thursday, September 23, 2010
A Counter-BDS Program from Succot
(Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) Neo-Nazis who are leading the war of
economic terrorism against Israel. Then I discovered in the Haftara
portion for the first day of Succot that there already is a ready-made
counter-BDS program, one we had not noticed:
So here is a contemporary commentary on the attempt by the
anti-Semites to boycott Israel and what should be done with them:
"And they will dwell therein (the Jews living in Jerusalem) and there
will not be any boycott (cherem) any longer, for Jerusalem will be
safely inhabited. While this shall be the plague with which the Lord
smites all the nations who besiege Jerusalem: their flesh will waste
away while they still stand on their feet; their eyes will waste away
in their sockets, and their tongue will waste away in their mouths."
Zechariah 14: 11-12
2. The Succot of 2009 predicted in the Succot of 2002
Tishrei 17, 5763, 23 September 02 11:49
by Steven Plaut
It was a bright, sunny day in the summer of 2009.
It was in that period when the monthly death toll from Oslo passed its
1100 mark. The four remaining Knesset Members of the Israeli Labor
Party were calling for more goodwill gestures by Israel and
concessions to the PLO. Meretz and Peace Now were demanding that
Israel seriously consider the latest peace offer from the Palestinians
to convert Israel into a web site. Meanwhile, the Americans were
demanding that Israel exercise self-restraint after the latest bus
bombings. The State Department had just floated a new diplomatic
compromise proposal that would involve running the border separating
Israel from Palestine down Shenkin Street in Tel Aviv.
And it was right after the 1000th Israeli bus was blown to pieces by a
Palestinian suicide bomber. The bomber of that 1000th bus had come
from the West Bank town of Tul Karem, as the standard videotape of his
bravado broadcast on Palestine Television showed.
Only three hours after the 1000th bus exploded, 14 well-placed car
bombs in Tul Karem exploded in unison. There were dozens of
casualties. The death toll from these car bombs reached 49, nearly
half of whom were not wanted terrorists.
Later that day, a mysterious message was passed on to the BBC's
Palestine news desk operating out of Jaffa. The message claimed a
group calling itself the 'Triple T,' shorthand for the 'Terrorize the
Terrorists' organization, had placed the car bombs there.
The news of the car bombings aroused immediate fury from everywhere
around the world. The Americans denounced this horrific terrorism as
serving as an obstacle to striking a peace deal between Israel and the
PLO, one that was just around the corner. The Israeli government
insisted it had no knowledge of the perpetrators of the bombings, but
did not rule out that they were PLO car bombs meant for Israel that
had simply exploded prematurely, and in any case promised to run its
own investigation. The PLO and its affiliates in Palestine issued
their usual shrieking oaths of vengeance.
For ten days, a tense tranquility prevailed. On the 11th day, a
Palestinian suicide bomber tried to blow himself up on a Haifa bus,
but fortunately the fuse fizzled and the bomb did not go off. Under
questioning by the police, it turned out that the would-be bomber came
from Nablus. Three hours later central Nablus was shaken by a series
of huge explosions. Large bombs that had been planted in garbage
containers destroyed the entire market area. The carnage was almost as
large as the earlier bombings of Tul Karem.
And once again, the mysterious Triple T organization took credit for
the blasts. The State Department demanded that Israel take action and
find the terrorists responsible for the blasts in Tul Karem and Nablus
or face sanctions.
In the coming weeks, hundreds of incidents of sniping and shooting at
Jews were recorded in the West Bank and Gaza, but -strangely - none of
these occurred in Tul Karem or Nablus themselves. In those two towns,
the Hamas organized protest marches to demand that Tel Aviv be blown
to bits in revenge, but no acts of terrorism were initiated from their
environs.
Two weeks after the Nablus bombings, the Hamas organized its largest
mass rally ever in fields outside of Gaza City. In the midst of the
rally, when the Sheikh who leads the Hamas began to speak, the entire
field in which the rally was being held exploded in a ball of flame.
The fireball was so large that it was visible from space, as
photographed by a passing satellite. Body parts were found as far as
half a mile away. The scene was horrific. The entire Gaza leadership
of the Hamas sitting on the podium was annihilated, and hundreds of
rank and file Hamas members were badly injured.
And again the shadowy Triple T organization took credit. The Israeli
cabinet sent out police patrols to locate the perpetrators of these
outrages. The Knesset denounced the 3T terrorists and expressed
sympathy or the families of the Palestinian injured.
After the Gaza explosion, once again a tense period of tranquility
lasting several months transpired. When the Palestinian shootings and
snipings reignited later that spring, they were noticeably less
intense than previously. But, more significantly, after many cases of
snipings at Jews, bombs would almost immediately go off in the
Palestinian villages closest to the scene of the shootings or in those
from which the snipers had emerged.
By the following summer, the rate of Palestinian snipings had dwindled
to a trickle. Far more important was the fact that during the entire
summer not a single Israeli bus was attacked.
While the bombings of Palestinians by the Triple T appeared to have
slowed, they did not stop altogether. Various Palestinian figures were
blown to pieces when they started their cars or answered their cell
phones. Curiously, these included many of the Palestinians who served
as spokesmen for the Tanzim and other terror organizations, people
whom the world was accustomed to watching on TV denouncing the Jews.
The assassination of the spokeswoman for the Tanzim was particularly
gruesome.
The Americans were still livid at the 3T violations of Palestinian
human rights. Israel's government insisted it was doing everything it
could to discover the identities of the Triple T terrorists and to
apprehend their leaders and members. The Triple T appeared to be too
slick and well organized to be easily tracked down.
The level of Palestinian violence in 2010 was far lower than it had
been the previous summer. It had not dropped to zero, and the bombings
of Palestinian markets, cars, and offices after Palestinian-initiated
violent incidents continued. When gunmen opened fire on the Jerusalem
neighborhood of Gilo, the nearby town of Beit Jala was almost leveled
in the largest explosion yet claimed by Triple T. It took weeks to
clear the rubble.
Meanwhile, other important political changes were taking place.
Statisticians noted that while the Palestinian death toll from the
Triple T blasts was tragic, and indeed had passed the 410 mark, it
appeared that if one were to extrapolate the Jewish death toll from
the previous summer, and compare what its trend had been to the
numbers actually killed in the past year by Palestinian terrorists,
for every Palestinian death 12 Jewish deaths had been prevented!! And
even that number was based on the full year; in the last quarter of
the year by itself the ratio of saved to killed was 60 to 1.
But not all was tranquil. From the Israeli Arab city of Umm al-Fahm
there emerged a team of suicide bombers who exploded themselves in
downtown Afula, killing many passersby. Three weeks later the Islamic
fundamentalist movement held a mass rally in the Umm al-Fahm stadium,
under banners declaring that the Jews were threatening the al-Aqsa
Mosque, and showing their solidarity with the Palestinian victims of
Triple T.
The film crews caught the explosion on live camera. The grounds of the
entire stadium had been mined and turned into a huge fireball. The
injured lay everywhere and 18 were dead.
For the next 29 months, there did not occur a single bus bombing and
the number of shooting incidents over this entire period in the entire
West Bank and Gaza Strip was reduced to a handful. After the last
Triple T explosion, a large emigration had begun from Umm al-Fahm and
from the West Bank. It was estimated that in many West Bank towns as
much as a third of the population had simply left and moved elsewhere,
overseas. From Tul Karem the numbers were closer to two thirds. Some
Israeli Arab towns and villages within the Green Line lost as much as
a third of their populations as well.
All of the Israeli Arab Knesset Members from the PLO-surrogate parties
and from the communist party had resigned from the parliament
following the Umm al-Fahm massacre. For the next two years, there were
no Arab members of the Knesset.
But three years after the first Triple T explosion, a group of Israeli
Arab intellectuals established the Arab Zionist Party. Its basic
platform was denunciation of all Palestinian claims to sovereignty,
denunciation of all violence, loyalty to the state of Israel, and
encouraging of Israeli Arabs to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.
In its first election contest, the party won 3 seats. In its second
contest four years later, it won 13 seats, making it the third largest
party in the Knesset, following the Ichud Leumi and the National
Religious Party (led by the Prime Minister). The AZP initiated a
series of proposals for affirmative action preferences that benefit
Jews, to compensate them for their historic victimization by Arabs
over decades.
Changes were also visible across the Green Line. In some Palestinian
villages, local vigilante squads rounded up wanted terrorists and
delivered them to Israeli army and police stations, occasionally
lynching them beforehand. Large posters showing the pilots who had
bombed Bin Laden's underground hiding place to smithereens appeared on
Palestinian billboards as local heroes. In some places, posters of the
two Ghandis - Mohatma and Rehavam, could be seen under the slogan "Our
Martyrs". Palestinian schools underwent a remarkable change in
curriculum. They now emphasized the moral right of Israel to exist and
instructed all Palestinians who were uncomfortable living under the
democratic rule of the Jewish majority to move to Detroit or to Kuwait
or to New Zealand.
A new Palestinian militia arose based in Bethlehem, dedicated to
collaborating with the Israeli police and to patrolling the
Palestinian streets and arresting anyone promoting violence against
Jews. The militia later fielded candidates for mayors of West Bank
towns and won about two thirds of all those contested.
Teams of Palestinians prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and on leaving
their prayers they rushed to the gates to invite Jews to join them in
praying for peace on the Temple Mount. Groups of Palestinians asked to
come to Jewish homes on Jewish holidays to pay their respects and to
bring gifts. Among the Palestinians, there was a religious
transformation. New pacifist and quietist sects of Moslem Sufis gained
popularity. Small numbers of Palestinians converted to Buddhism.
Thousands of Palestinians volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps and
other volunteer organizations promoting non-violence overseas. Others
volunteered to fight in squadrons of American and British military
units tracking down Islamist terrorists in other countries. Many
Palestinians named their children Schwartzkopf, in honor of the
general who had attacked Iraq.
Israel also underwent a political transformation. Israeli universities
became the centers for the new movement of Post-Post-Zionism, and
groups of rowdy students tarred and feathered campus professors who
had once supported Oslo. The Jewish History and Bible departments at
the universities had to move to larger facilities. Synagogues
throughout the country were filled to overflowing. The brand new
Museum of Folly, documenting the Oslo years, was now the most popular
stop for tourists and Israeli schoolchildren in Jerusalem.
While thousands of Palestinians petitioned to be annexed by Israel and
made full citizens subject to military conscription, the government of
Israel decided to put off the question for now. Meanwhile the
out-migration of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza continued,
with expatriates selling their homes to some of the 1.5 million Jewish
immigrants that had flooded into the country in the past 3 years.
Delegations of Jordanian Arabs from the northwestern areas of Jordan,
opposite Beit Shean, submitted petitions to the Israeli government to
be annexed. Several even offered to convert to Judaism if their homes
could be annexed. Israeli flags were raised along the Jordanian side
of the Jordan River. The BBC and CNN started showing the Bashan region
of Jordan on their maps as Occupied Israeli territory. Along the
eastern bank of the Jordan River, choirs of Arab school children
chanted, "How Good are Your Tents Oh Jacob", like Bil'am in the Bible.
The Israeli economy was booming. A new wing was added to the Museum of
Folly to describe the decades of Israeli socialism long since ended,
documented for disbelieving school children. A wave of new Hebrew
literature, film and drama started the world-wide "Israel Wave".
Almost the entire Jewish population of California moved to Israel in
order to enjoy the living standards so much higher there. The bankrupt
publishers of Haaretz newspaper sold out to new owners, and the new
editors made little attempt to hide their admiration for the 3T
guerillas. Tikkun Magazine changed its name to Triple T (ikkun), to
show its solidarity with the underground. All of France was paralyzed
in the annual Honor the Jews parades, organized in large part by
Palestinian emigres. The rest of the EU countries sent contingents.
Interpol is still hunting the shadowy Triple T organization. Its
criminal members were never apprehended.
The nations of the world now send delegations to Jerusalem to join in
the Succot celebrations, as the Prophet predicted.