Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16) told left-wing Israeli media Haaretz that he will be boycotting Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of Congress next week. He offered “I’ve been very outspoken regarding the treatment of Palestinians. The United States is important in ensuring accountability and uplifting the human rights of Palestinians.”
It is a remarkable statement in light of Palestinian polls showing the prevailing attitude pushing for violence rather than peace.
In June 2023, Palestinians said the two most positive Palestinian events since the “Nakba,” the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 were the creation of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the first and second Intifadas. A majority support another intifada and 57% support or strongly support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
Not only is Bowman ignoring Palestinian thirst for Jewish blood, he is choosing to boycott a left-wing leader Israeli leader, who speaks to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas frequently. Such action sets back the cause of peace and empowers the Islamic Republic of Iran.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL REP. BOWMAN “Israeli President Isaac Herzog is in favor of peace and dialogue with Palestinians. A decision to boycott him is not just an insult to the Jewish State and to a future of peace with Palestinians but is a vote to empower the dangerous genocidal regime in Iran.”
There has been an uptick in the number of homicides happening in Israel recently, and it deserves a detailed review which the mainstream media is too lazy to examine and too biased to report clearly.
In 2021, the last year for which homicide information is available by the World Bank, Israel’s homicide rate was 1.94 per 100,000, which increased from 1.42 in 2020, a 36% jump. The 1.42 in 2020 figure placed it amongst its neighbors’ average of 1.39 in Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus and Jordan (no data was available for Lebanon in 2021).
Israel’s jump in 2021 to 1.94 homicides per 100,000 was similar to the murder rate in Montenegro (2.39), Albania (2.31), Armenia (2.18), Canada (2.06), Estonia (1.96), Morocco (1.93), Azerbaijan (1.91), Ghana (1.83) and Algeria (1.57). The United States homicide rate in 2021 was 6.80 per 100,000, or 3.5 times as much as Israel.
The rise in the murder rate shows particular trends.
Breakdown By Sex
The murder rate of males jumped to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2021 from 2.3 the prior year, while the murder rate for women jumped to 0.6 from 0.5 per 100,000, according to the World Bank.
The Israel Observatory on Femicide noted the erratic nature of the data: 21 women murdered in 2020, 16 in 2021 and then 24 in 2022, a 50% jump. The average age of the female victim jumped to 45.6 years old in 2021 due to a spike in matricide cases, where people killed their mothers.
Breakdown By Ethnicity
For 2021, the murdered women were 44% Jewish, 31% Israeli Arab and 19% Druze. In almost every case, the murderer had the same ethnic background as the victim. As in 2021, half of the women murdered in 2022 were Arab and killed by Arabs, mostly family members or former partners.
Overall, there were 126 Arabs murdered in 2021 (110 males and 16 females), almost all killed by fellow Arabs. While various organizations track violence in the Israeli Arab sector Abraham Initiatives, the data isn’t as available for Israeli Jews. Using the 1.94 homicides per 100,000 in an Israeli population of 9.364 million in 2021 would imply a total homicide figure of 182, of which 56 were Jewish. This assumes that the 17 Israelis killed by Arab terrorism in 2021 are not included in the homicide statistics.
While data from different sources are somewhat inconsistent, there is a sharp pattern.
The difference in the rate of murderers between Jews and Arabs is astounding if one considers that Jews make up 76% of the population and Arabs account for 21%. It means that an average Israeli Arab is 8.1x more likely to commit a murder than an Israeli Jew.
The 0.79 homicides per 100,000 amongst Israeli Jews is similar to the homicide rate in Greece (0.85), Germany (0.83), Croatia (0.81), Denmark (0.80), Portugal (0.80), Hungary (0.77), Australia (0.74) and Austria (0.73).
The homicide rate in Israel has taken a worrying trend upwards since 2021, now approaching the rate of Turkey when it used to be closer to Cyprus in 2015. The jump has principally come from Israeli Arabs killing other Arabs in gang violence amongst male victims, and “honor killings” and matricide among female victims. At the same time, the homicide rate of Israeli Jews remains much closer to those in Western Europe.
On July 2, 2023, the Israeli government approved the establishment of a new town in northern Israel. Located near the Sea of Galilee and Mount Arbel, the town is to be called “Ramat Arbel”, designed to house roughly 500 families.
Mount Arbel overlooking the top of the Sea of Galilee
The popular political-terrorist group Hamas was apoplectic.
Its spokesperson said that Israel’s plan to “establish a colonial Jewish settlement in occupied Galilee represented a serious escalation in the occupation’s policy of Judaization and colonial settlement.” It added that Israel “is waging an open war against the Palestinian existence” and seeks to “advance the agenda of complete displacement, on which Zionism was founded.”
The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River
The terrorist group Hamas is very popular among Palestinian Arabs, and has 58% of the seats in the current Palestinian parliament. According to a June 2023 poll, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would win the presidency with 56% of the vote, trouncing the current President Mahmoud Abbas, who would net only 33% of the vote.
Palestinians are not upset about Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice lines (E49/ “West Bank”), they are livid that Jews live anywhere in Israel.
That is the plain truth and root cause of the conflict.
ACTION ITEMS
CONTACT Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) “The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The US must therefore remain steadfast in: supporting Israel; ensuring that UNRWA textbooks include the long history and sanctity of the land for Jews, while teaching coexistence; denying the Palestinian Authority any funding while it continues its “martyr payments” and incitement to violence; and backing Israel’s and Egypt’s ongoing blockade of Gaza until Hamas formally accepts Israel’s existence.”
Other member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
The New York Times wrote an article about deaths by drowning on July 8, 2023. It made sure to follow its particular progressive editorial bent while quoting statistics from the Center for Disease Control.
The Times wrote that CDC research “shows that Black children between ages 5 and 9 are 2.6 times more likely to drown in swimming pools than white children, and those between ages 10 and 14 are 3.6 times more likely to drown. Disparities are also present in most age groups for Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native children.” Those CDC facts fit well within the Times orientation of a racially discriminatory society that hurts minorities.
Yet the Times failed to quote another statistics from the CDC that “Nearly 80% of people who die from drowning are male,” meaning males are four times more likely to drown than females.
Picture from CDC website about drownings
We should all want to prevent everyone from drowning. That the NY Times should pen an article to exclude the disproportionate number of male drownings highlights a deeply ingrained and noxious bias that has taken over the paper.
Boat packed with as many as 750 fleeing migrants capsizes off Greece in June 2023
Since 2014, the United Nations International Organization of Migrants estimates that 56,912 migrants and refugees are dead or missing. This year is set to be perhaps the deadliest on record, as thousands of people flee their homes due to war or poverty.
The United Nations and media spend a scant moment mourning these poor souls. Men, women and children who reluctantly ran to far-away lands in pursuit of peace were quickly forgotten. No actions are taken to prevent the frequent tragedies.
The United Nations has other priorities:
For synthetic “refugees” over real refugees; and
For people who seek to murder over defenseless souls
The UN has dressed up Palestinian Arabs who have been living in the same land for generations, as a special class of “UNRWA Refugees”. It pardons their jihadi violence against Israeli Jews as a matter of routine and concocted resolutions.
The media closes its eyes and minds to the facts that Palestinian Arabs are not refugees who do not deserve a special UN agency accompanied by a promise of invading a UN member state. Politicians suspend belief that they favor a two state solution while simultaneously advocating that the Jewish State shouldn’t be Jewish and forced to take in millions of Arabs from a few miles away.
The UN held a week-long conference on counterterrorism in June, and subsequently informed Israel that only the rest of the world can combat the global scourge. Israel must accept jihadi violence as penance for its existence.
The UN Security Council is now scheduled to meet to invert reality in discussing Israel’s successful raid to eliminate terrorists in Jenin but will not convene to dismantle UNRWA camps in Gaza and the West Bank which serve as the incubators for Muslim extremists.
It is terribly sad that politicians, the United Nations and media do not attend to peaceful people in actual dire need. It is a horrific state of reality, that the world supports jihadi extremists living next to Israel in their quest to kill Jews and the only Jewish State.
Once again Israel is being forced to combat terrorists who have committed and plan to commit murderous attacks on civilians. Once more, the locus for the attacks is coming from United Nations’ “refugee” camps. Once again, the majority of the terrorists are Arabs whom the UN has told have rights to move into grandparents’ homes in Israel.
UNRWA Wards By The Numbers
For the year ending December 2021, according to UNRWA, there were 6,539,844 Palestinian wards who accept services from the agency, of which 5,807,653 (89%) were “refugees” and another 732,191 (11%) were other people whom the UN thought deserved particular support. Of the 6.5m, 863,708 (13.2%) are above age 60, suggesting perhaps only 2.6% of the total, or 175,000 are actual refugees from 1948 who lost homes a few miles away in Israel, after they launched a war to destroy the Jewish state.
The total number of UNRWA Refugees jumped by about 2.5% by year end 2022 to 6.7 million, while the number of actual refugees continues to decline. The total for West Bank wards was around 1.12 million (16.7%) and in Gaza it was 1.76 million (26.3%), which means that around 43% of all UNRWA wards already live in the area of 1948 Palestine, just a few miles from where ancestors had lived.
The majority of UNRWA wards live in Jordan, about 2.55 million (38% of the total wards), and have Jordanian citizenship. Jordan had been part of the original Palestine Mandate in 1922, and then attacked Israel in 1948 and illegally annexed the eastern portion of Israel which became known as the “West Bank” in 1950. After expelling all Jews from the region, Jordan granted all non-Jews in the area citizenship in 1954. Jordan abandoned its claim on the “West Bank” in 1988, and began pulling its citizenship from Arabs in the region.
The balance of UNRWA wards live in Lebanon (557,300) and Syria (674,500).
UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
UNRWA Camps in the West Bank
Roughly 25% of UNRWA’s West Bank wards live in official UNRWA “camps”. There are 19 camps currently including:
The Jenin Camp was established in 1953 and houses about 23,000 people at the western end of Jenin in the northern West Bank. It encompasses about 0.42 km which yields a population density of roughly 33,333 per sq km. For comparison, Manhattan’s population density is about 28,000 per sq km.
UNRWA’s Jenin Terrorists
UNRWA’s camp in Jenin has long served as the launching point for terrorists as well as a safe haven for murderers.
2002 Massacre
On March 27, 2002, roughly 250 people sat down for a festive holiday seder meal for Passover in the Park Hotel in Netanya along the Mediterranean Sea. A 25-year old member of Hamas from the nearby West Bank city of Tulkarm walked into the hotel and blew himself up, killing 30 and injuring 140. Hamas praised the attack and said Israelis “have to expect those attacks from everywhere, from every Palestinian group.” The Palestinian Authority named a soccer tournament after the terrorist the next year.
In response to the attack, part of a wave of Palestinian terrorism that killed 135 Israeli civilians in that month, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield a few days later. From April 1-11, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered the Jenin Camp which was home base of many of the killers. Rather than bomb the area from the air which might have resulted in the injury of Arab civilians, the IDF deployed infantry into the narrow streets. Palestinian militants set boobytraps which killed and maimed over a dozens soldiers, so the IDF brought in armored bulldozers to clear them out. The militants surrendered on April 11 and the IDF cleared out of the area the following week, but not before losing 23 soldiers.
Center of Jenin Camp in April 2002, cleared of wanted militants, land mines and boobytraps
June and July, 2023 IDF Incursions for Jenin Camp Terrorists
The Jenin Camp has long been a stronghold of the political-terrorist group Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In September 2021, a new group called the Jenin Brigades was formed, soon accompanied by the Lion’s Den. The terrorists groups committed in excess of 50 attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, many attacks staged under the umbrella of UNRWA.
On June 19, the IDF came to arrest two UNRWA ward terrorists. As the Jenin Brigades open fire on the IDF, the Israelis responded with live fire. Eight Palestinian gunmen were killed, most of them confirmed terrorists. UNRWA confirmed that the majority were wards under its care.
As the IDF left the camp, the terrorists detonated a roadside bomb under an Israeli armored vehicle, wounding eight soldiers. Israel deployed a gunship helicopter to help rescue the soldiers from the hornet’s nest.
After yet additional terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, Israel launched another incursion into the camp on July 3rd. The 48 hour operation once again focused on a small section of the UNRWA camp, where the IDF removed Palestinian terrorists, weapons and weapon-making factories.
UNRWA Ward Terrorists
The high percentage of UNRWA wards who are terrorists goes to the heart of the conflict: it is not about “occupation” or lack of sovereignty, as these people are in Palestine and under Palestinian rule. These terrorists have been told by the United Nations that they are entitled to move into homes where grandparents used to live inside of Israel. They are frustrated by the failure to get their “right of return” which the global body has promised.
Entrance to UNRWA refugee camp as a keyhole with a key on top, demonstrating that the pathway to homes inside Israel is via UNRWA.
The United Nations has incubated a destructive cult mentality which is leading to terrorism and death. It is well past time to shut UNRWA, and the first camps to be shuttered are those under Palestinian rule, the launching pads in Gaza and the West Bank.
The brewing anger of Israeli Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49 / “West Bank”) started in May of 2021 principally from two events: a Palestinian-American terrorist shooting three people and killing one, and the Israeli government failing to enforce its own laws.
Palestinian-American Muntasir Shalabi, age 44, did a drive buy shooting in E49 and killed a teenager and injured two other 19-year old boys on May 2, 2021. He was sheltered by Palestinians for a few days but was ultimately captured and sentenced to life in prison. His home, in the wealthy West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, was demolished in June despite American protests.
The fact that a well-off American citizen would commit such an outrageous act of terrorism in shooting three unarmed young men standing on a road, undermined any narrative that terrorism is a matter of poverty and opportunity as opposed to an evil ideology. Israelis also saw that the new American Biden administration was going to be much more supportive of Palestinians than the Trump administration had been over the prior four years.
Just a week after the terrorist attack, the Israeli government decided to not enforce its own laws and allowed Palestinian Arab squatters to remain in homes in Sheikh Jarrah and continue to not pay their Jewish landlords any rent. The political-terrorist group Hamas launched missiles from Gaza over the threat of the squatters’ evictions, and West Bank Arab support for killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel immediately began to climb.
The message that violence trumps Israeli laws was internalized by both Palestinians and Israelis.
While Gazans always favor killing Israeli Jews, West Bank Arab support started to climb in May 2021 and escalated much further in the fall of 2022.
While West Bank Arabs had always committed terrorist attacks, the Israeli Jews in the area did little in terms of revenge.
Consider the heinous Arab murders of the Fogel family in 2011, in which the parents and three children were stabbed to death – including an infant. The Jewish residents mourned the event but did not commit revenge attacks.
That slowly started to change with young Jews living in hilltop settlements committing “price tag” attacks in which small groups would attack Palestinian Arabs in proportion to those whom Arabs had previously attacked. The extremists would sometimes also attack Israeli soldiers for failing to protect the Jewish communities in E49.
The uptick in vigilante attacks started in 2021 and 2022, as new Palestinian terrorist groups emerged in E49. In September 2021, the Jenin Brigades was formed, the Nablus Brigades in May 2022, and the Lions’ Den in August 2022. These West Bank terrorist groups led a series of mass casualty attacks between March 22 and May 5, 2022 which spread from major Israeli cities of Be’er Sheva, Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv to a smaller border town of Elad and the E49 city of Ariel. Jews on both sides of the 1949 Armistice Line did not feel safe, which helped bring down Naftali Bennett’s short stint as prime minister in June.
Things would get worse between August and October, as the Lions’ Den became a force of terror, and Israeli forces went on the offensive to mitigate the mayhem. E49 Jews stepped up their activity, taking matters in their own hands as well.
The Lions’ Den became very popular in the West Bank and polls showed that Palestinians did not want the Palestinian Authority to rein in the group. In his September 2022 address to the United Nations, PA President Mahmoud Abbas essentially said that the Oslo Accords were dead (21:30) and was abandoning security coordination with Israel. At the end of his talk (45:00), Abbas discussed the “hero martyr Nasser Abu Hamid,” heaping praise on the terrorist convicted of killing seven people, who was the founder of the West Bank terrorist group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
These events helped usher Benjamin Netanyahu back to being Prime Minister with a more right-wing coalition in December. Yet despite the new right-wing government, Arab violence against Jews continued to increase and become more lethal, even as the United Nations looked away and vilified “Settler violence.”
Palestinian terrorist attacks were increasingly fatal in 2023.
The Israeli Jews living in E49 have become exasperated and are starting to engage in massive revenge attacks.
In February 2023, after Palestinian Arabs shot and killed two Jewish men who were driving in their car, hundreds of settlers burned dozens of cars and homes in Nablus. Netanyahu urged them to calm down, that “when blood is boiling and the spirit is hot, don’t take the law into your hands.”
In June 2023, the dynamic repeated after Palestinian terrorists killed four Jews in a restaurant and gas station. Hundreds of settlers went to Turmus Ayya – the hometown of the May 2021 terrorist – and burned dozens of cars and homes.
To be a Jew in the West Bank is to be a target, of both Arab violence and UN condemnation for simply living. The poisonous legacy of the Arab intifadas has infected the mindset of settlers, as they see an Israeli government unable to stop the murders of innocent Jews driving in cars, eating in restaurants, standing on a road or sleeping in their beds. As the provocations become incessant, the attacks of E49 Jews may naturally morph from retaliatory in nature to constant.
Israel reacted to the First Palestinian Intifada of 1987 by helping create Palestinian political institutions as part of the Oslo Accords. It reacted to the poorly named “Second Intifada” / Palestinian Pogroms of 2000-2004 which were directed by Palestinian leadership, by erecting a security barrier near the 1949 Armistice Line with Transjordan.
This uprising is being launched by nearly half a million Jews living in E49/West Bank. It remains to be seen if their actions will remain restricted to reactive attacks, and what actions the Israeli government and PA will be.
First One Through 