The
EU Observer reports:
EU states, in an internal report drafted last year, have said the outbreak of Palestinian knife and car-ramming attacks against Israelis in Jerusalem is due, in large part, to Israel’s occupation.
The report, drafted and endorsed in December 2015 by all the EU countries that have embassies in Jerusalem and Ramallah, said the Temple Mount developments were the “proximate cause” for the upsurge in violence that began after summer last year.
But it said the “heart of the matter” was “the Israeli occupation since 1967 and a long-standing policy of political, economic and social marginalisation of Palestinians in Jerusalem”.
Both the "proximate cause" and the "heart of the matter" are utter rubbish.
There had been no changes whatsoever on the Temple Mount and no plans at all for any changes.
The Jerusalem municipality has been
pouring money into the Arab sectors of the town - housing, schools and infrastructure - for years.
However, the idea that Jews are responsible for Arabs deciding to murder Jews is just too attractive for supposedly sophisticated Europeans to pass up. After all, any "objective" inquiry must ask the Arabs why they are discontented, and they will always get a long list of perceived injustices that justify murdering Jews.
The fatal assumption is that this list has a basis in truth.
If you look at history, however, you can see many excuses given for Arab violence by similar committees.
In 1921 in Jaffa, "Arab men bearing clubs, knives, swords, and some pistols broke into Jewish buildings and murdered their inhabitants, while women followed to loot. They attacked Jewish pedestrians and destroyed Jewish homes and stores. They beat and killed Jews in their homes, including children, and in some cases split open the victims' skulls."
The Haycraft Commission of Inquiry report on the riots said "The
fundamental cause of the Jaffa riots and the subsequent acts of violence was
a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration, and with their conception of Zionist policy as derived from Jewish exponents."
British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel Samuel declared shortly afterwards that Jewish immigration to the region would be allowed "only to the extent that it did not burden the economy." In other words, Jews had to pay the price for being murdered.
In 1929, Arabs again massacred Jewish men, women and children throughout Israel in the most gruesome ways. The Shaw Commission went beyond the Haycraft Commission in
blaming Jews for both the "fundamental" and (some of) the "immediate" causes:
The fundamental cause, without which in our opinion disturbances either would not occurred or would not have been little more than a local riot, is the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future. ... The feeling as it exists today is based on the twofold fear of the Arabs that by Jewish immigration and land purchases they may be deprived of their livelihood and in time pass under the political domination of the Jews.
In our opinion the immediate causes of the outbreak were:-
-The long series of incidents connected with the Wailing Wall... These must be regarded as a whole, but the incident among them which in our view contributed most to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration at the Wailing Wall on 15 August 1929.
Again, the recommendations were to penalize the Jews by limiting both immigration and land purchases, eventually resulting in the disastrous White Paper that sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands of European Jews who had no place to go to save their lives - thanks to Europeans accepting Arab excuses for murdering Jews.
When seen in this context, the secret EU report is part of a century-long European tendency to blame the Jewish victim for having the audacity of wanting to live in a Jewish state. The common denominator is the Arab demand to keep Jews away from having any political power. The Arabs will use any convenient event to justify the outbreak of violence - but the net conclusion by these pompous Europeans in their reports is that Jews must give away all of their political rights, their land and ultimately their right to self-determnation in order to appease the Arabs.
There is no desire by these commissions to go beyond taking Arab complaints at face value. There is no desire to learn from history and see that there is a consistent pattern that is much more expansive than the identified pseudo-root causes.
Above all, there is no desire to tie the Arab demands for Jewish second-class citizenship with the Islamic demand that Jews be always considered humiliated, second-class citizens. "Dhimmis."
Islamic supremacist ideology, combined with traditional Palestinian Christian antisemitism, is the fundamental cause for Arabs wanting to massacre proud, unapologetic Jews, whether it is by sword, dagger, gun or rocket. It is the "heart of the matter." Blaming the "occupation" or "settlements" or the Jewish desire to visit holy places or the placement of a movable partition in the Western Wall on Yom Kippur in 1928 are simply excuses created by Arabs in the service of taking away Jewish human rights. And the Europeans are more than happy to accept their myriad excuses for terror at face value.
All the proof you need to know that "occupation" is not the "heart of the matter" is to read the many pre-1967 British reports recommending that the Jews knuckle under to Arab demands. It didn't appease the Arabs then and it wouldn't appease them now, because the Western world simply does not want to look at the real root cause of Islamic supremacism.
That willful blindness not only affects the Jewish state, but the entire world.
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