Should the PA be Asked to Cancel its Death Sentence for “Settlements”

When you demonize a person, he is no longer a person.The transformation of thousands of Israeli citizens into “settlers”, a term that now connotes a “stealing squatter”, has resulted in the sudden demonization of entire Jewish communities in Israel.

Israel’s ‘peace movement’ scapegoats the “settlers” as THE reason for the the last six months of rioting.

One of those ‘peace activists’, Yitzhak Frankenthal, characterizes the residents of Katif as the “sons of Satan” who cause the death of Israel’s soldiers.

In July, 1990, I covered the visit of a delegation of US citizens from Efrat, Alon Shvut and Tekoa to visit the US consul in Jerusalem.

They posed a question:

“What about the human rights of Jews who live in our communities, from the American point of view”.

The consul’s clear answer: You have no human rights if you live there.

In other words, the US considers them to be less than human. That is what demonization means – less than human.

In October 1993, following the murder of Haim Mizrachi of Beit El, the provisional council of the nascent Palestinian Authority made one of is first declarations: permission to murder any Jew who lives in the area of a future Palestinian state. (That declaration was distributed by the Arab-run JMCC -Jerusalem Media and Communications Center -to the foreign press based at Beit Agron Press Center in Jerusalem).

The US raised no objection to such a declaration. Neither did the Rabin government at the time.

That PA death sentence does not only apply to Jews from Judea, Samaria and Katif.

It also applies to the Jewish neighborhoods added to Jerusalem since 1967 and to the Jewish residents who have taken the place of Arab neighborhoods in west Jerusalem and, for that matter, to any of the Israeli communities that rest on lands of villages where Arabs fled from in 1948.

That is why the official VOICE OF PALESTINE radio praises terror attacks in “Kafer Sabba”, the pre-1948 Arab name for what since 1949 has been Kfar Saba.

The PA settlement map sold at the PLO’s Orient House in Jerusalem delineates these areas of Israeli “settlements” – in all sections of the country.

Yet the way in which the media often reports the killing of “Israeli settlers” seem to be acceptable.

At a time when the Israeli government has asked for the cessation of Arab violence as a condition for the resumption of negotiations, perhaps it would be appropriate for the Israeli government to demand the unconditonal cancellation of the Palestinian Authority death sentence for Jewish “settlers”, even if the world tacitly endorses their death.