Another Bloody Ramadan in Israel as “Partner for Peace” Incites Murder

This past Thursday, two Israeli men, Tomer Morad (28) and Eytam Magini (27), friends since childhood who were both planning to get married in the very near future, were together at a bar in order to celebrate Eytam’s recent engagement to his girlfriend, Ayala Arad. At that same bar was also Barak Lufan. Barak was a 35-year-old father of three: a husband, father and an Olympian. Like Tomer and Eytam, Barak had big plans and big dreams—including, I am certain, as a father of three myself, dreams of seeing his daughters’ Bat Mitzvahs, graduations, and weddings.

Horrifically, instead of weddings or other celebrations, the families and friends of Tomer, Eytam and Barak attended their funerals this past week. The funerals of these bright young men with their respective bright futures as a software engineer, mechanical engineer and Olympic kayaking coach happened because of another young man: Ra’ad Fathi Hazem, a 29-year-old from Jenin. Hazem was raised in a society known for worshiping those who murder Jews and offering government incentive compensation (“pay to slay”) plans. It’s also a society that boasts generations of hateful, ahistorical propaganda suggesting that Jewish sovereignty and self-determination in the land of Israel is no different from British control over India.

When Hazem walked up to the crowded sidewalk bar where Tomer, Eytam and Barak and dozens of others were enjoying a night out with friends, he coldly shot over a dozen rounds at the people eating and drinking fewer than two meters in front of him, wounding at least a dozen people, and murdering three young men—two of whom were about to get married, and one of whom was a father of three.

Hazem’s father, a senior “security officer” with the PA, did not mourn the news that his son was apparently so sociopathic, so lacking in normal human empathy, that he could stand behind dozens of unarmed people and gun them down. He did not even appear to mourn the news that a few hours later his son died in a gunfight with Israeli police. Instead, he appeared to celebrate the news of his son’s cold blooded murder of three and attempted murder of a dozen more people. He gave an interview the morning following his son’s murderous attack in which he said: “You will see the victory soon … God, liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque from the occupiers …”

In Jenin, Hazem’s home town, and in numerous other Palestinian Arab towns and cities, the news of Hazem’s murderous rampage inspired people to pass out candies while singing the murderer’s praises and dancing in the street. A father proudly celebrating his son both murdering and dying is depraved. A society that throws parties over the news that random innocent people were murdered is sick.

This depravity did not just happen overnight. This sick reaction to the mass murder of people enjoying a night out at a bar, walking their son in his stroller or eating pizza did not come out of nowhere. A common feature of brutal totalitarianism and murderous Jew-hatred is that both have rewritten or revised history without regard for the facts, and both have incited deadly hate based on that revisionist history.

We are presently seeing the danger of this strategy with Putin and his revisionist history and use of propaganda to incite the Russian people to support his ruthless invasion of Ukraine. And we have seen that same strategy for generations among Israel’s totalitarian enemies. Whether in the past with the Arab League dictatorships in Egypt and Syria, or the de facto Godfather of Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews, Nazi collaborator Haj Amin el-Husseini (who, in order to incite violence against Jews, regularly used the lie about the Jews and al-Aqsa repeated recently by Ra’ad’s father) or with el-Husseini’s ideological heirs in Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS or Fatah.

All of these organizations, including the so-called “moderate” Fatah, headed by Israel’s “partner for peace” Mahmoud Abbas (the “president for life” of the PA), teach their people to idolize truly heinous Jew murderers.

They have also all essentially invented a history of the region and of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is completely removed from reality. It is a fake history in which the Jewish people have no connection to the land of Israel, and where the Palestinian Arabs were somehow a separate and distinct people before the 20th century. In this same falsified history, Palestinian Arabs become the direct descendants of Jebusites or Edomites (or any other long extinct people who were in the land of Israel before the Jewish people had their ethnogenesis there). This is despite the fact that before the 20the century, there is no record of Arabs in the Levant making such a claim or denying the basic historical fact that Arabs in the Levant are largely there by dint of the Arab Empire’s 7th-century C.E. conquest, colonization, and Arabization of the region.

As if all this were not enough, for decades the de facto government of the Palestinian Arabs, the PA, has made Jew-murder more profitable on average than being an engineer, and at least six times more profitable than being a high school teacher. As just one example, the terrorists behind the 2001 Sbarro Pizza bombing, which murdered 15 people, including seven children, have already received over $1,000,000 from the Palestinian Authority (an entity that exists only due to international aid money).

To further exacerbate and add to the depravity and incitement to murder Jews, the PA also directly corrupts the Ramadan holiday to incite violence. Ramadan should be a time for all Muslims, including those living in the Holy Land, to fulfill the main and noble purpose of Ramadan, which is to grow spiritually and become closer to G-d. It should also be about fulfilling and enjoying the secondary purposes and benefits of Ramadan, which are to help those in need and spend more time with loved ones.

Sadly, as it is with history, governance and everything else it has touched, the PA exploits Ramadan, using it to corrupt and to incite violence.

In the month leading up to Ramadan this year, the PA intensified its false claims about the purported threats to al-Aqsa. And on the first day of Ramadan, the senior advisor to Mahmoud Abbas for religious affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, called for Palestinian Arabs to engage in violent Jihad against Israelis.

It is no accident that since the PA began its latest Ramadan rhetoric and incitement that there have been dozens of attempted and successful attempts to mass murder Jews throughout Israel. Terrorist attacks resulting in dozens of wounded, two murdered Ukrainian guest workers, and 12 murdered Israeli Arabs, Druse, and Jews, including the three young men who were murdered last Thursday at a bar in Tel Aviv.

It is no accident that since the PA began its latest Ramadan rhetoric and incitement that there have been dozens of attempted and successful attempts to mass murder Jews throughout Israel.

For generations, the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, starting with Haj Amin el-Husseini at least as far back as 1920, have pushed the toxic combination of lionizing Jew-murder and the denial of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Since Israel tragically agreed to the importation of the PLO into the land of Israel via the Oslo Accords and the creation of the PA, that toxic combination has received billions in international aid funding to support a “pay for slay” policy, as well as a religious and propaganda infrastructure designed to incite terrorism. This, in turn, has turned much of Palestinian Arab society into people whose fathers and mothers voice pride at their children engaging in cold-blooded murder and whose neighbors throw parties to celebrate those murders.

It’s long past time for both Israel and the so-called “international community,” or at least those that are democracies, and purport to oppose the murder of people eating in restaurants, sleeping in their beds, or stopping for gas to admit that the PA is a villain in this equation. It’s time to admit that the PA is not a “partner for peace” and to stop throwing aid money at this kleptocracy until it stops teaching hate, inciting violence, and paying people to murder Jews.