Where’s the partner for peace?

The Palestinian Authority that Israel needs to make a peace agreement with is hardly what one would imagine the words “partner for peace” imply.

This picture was briefly posted on the Facebook page of Fatah, the central pillar of the PA for their 50th anniversary.

This is hardly the first time the Facebook page of Fatah has posted something incendiary to their page. In November a wave of terror attacks saw Palestinians and East Jerusalem residents using their vehicles as weapons to kill Israelis. Fatah posted on their Facebook page cartoons calling on Palestinians to do more, using the slogan “hit the gas at 199km/h for Al Aqsa”

The incitement only serves as a reminder of the gruesome events which saw the lives of Israelis taken away for no reason other than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet we all live here in Israel, this is our place, if you start thinking that there’s a wrong place to go to then you’ll stop leaving the house.

This year we lost over 70 soldiers and civilians in one month alone. In terror attacks outside of the conflict with Gaza Israelis witnessed the atrocity which saw four rabbis murdered while at prayer and the cop who tried defend them also lose his life. We saw three kids kidnapped and murdered when all they were trying to do was get home. 2014 saw almost the entire country in range of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. Many of those rockets were fired by Fatah affiliated groups in the Strip. Raising even more questions about whether this is a group that we can make peace with.

Yet these are the people I am always talking about sitting down to make a deal with.

Perhaps for us Israelis the news about Palestinians being killed has reached such a norm that it barely permeates. In the hunt for the murderers of Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel the IDF had killed five Palestinians and arrested over 350 in 10 days and still hadn’t found the actual killers. At that point in time (10 days after the kidnapping) the Prime Minister said the following;

“Occasionally there are victims or injuries on the Palestinian side as a result of the self-defense activities of our forces,”

And that really nails it. Whenever Palestinians die we ignore it on the basis of the fact they must have deserved it. We’re blind to the fact that for all that Israelis suffer at the hands of Palestinians, the Palestinian population is suffering a great deal more. We’re so accepting of the fact that the IDF kills Palestinians so regularly and so accepting of the reasons for it that we’re surprised when we see civil unrest. Then we shrug even that off and say “it’s all just Hamas”.

The murderous statements made by Fatah and the murderous acts by Palestinians don’t exist in a vacuum. Incitement isn’t limited to the Palestinian Authority and killing certainly isn’t something that only Palestinians do.

The ugly truth is that while Palestinian terrorists are murdering our people, it’s our boys in uniform who are killing Palestinians in far greater numbers. The expectation that our “partner for peace” should love Israel is about as realistic as the expectation that Israelis should love Palestine.

But when push comes to shove either we learn to share this land or we lose it entirely.