Arab-Israeli terrorist Karim Younis, released after 40 years in an Israeli prison for the 1980 kidnapping and murder of an IDF soldier (his arrest took place in 1983), receives a hero’s welcome in his hometown near Haifa. 5 January 2023
by Jonathan S. Tobin
The Biden administration and left-wing groups insist that Israel pave the way to Palestinian sovereignty. But widespread support for anti-Jewish terrorism illustrates why this is not possible.
(JNS) In his first phone call with Israel’s new Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, congratulating him and the rest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on taking office, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered two contradictory messages.
Like his boss, President Joe Biden, over the past two years, Blinken affirmed that the administration was committed to Israel’s security and its alliance with Washington. He also paid lip service to “advancing shared interests”, including Israel’s greater integration into the Middle East and the need to confront the threat of a nuclear Iran, two issues on which Biden’s policies have actually undermined the interests of the Jewish state.
Then he got to the real purpose of the call: “to underscore the United States’ continued commitment to the two-state solution and opposition to measures that threaten its viability”.
This is about more than rejecting the presence of Jews in the heart of their historic homeland in Judea and Samaria, or Jewish rights throughout Jerusalem, including its holy sites such as the Temple Mount. It is a political mindset that further strengthens forces such as Hamas and the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority, groups whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel, not coexistence with it.
This is the same message that Israelis have received from American Jewish groups and leaders, both on the left and in the mainstream, who are reluctantly welcoming the new Netanyahu government. They continue to cling to the illusion that the “two-state solution” is a magic formula that must be protected, even though the last three decades have shown that the Palestinians have no real interest in it.
This stands in sharp contrast to Israeli public opinion, where even most of those who voted for the coalition led by Yair Lapid, defeated by Netanyahu’s right-wing/religious bloc, want nothing to do with the kind of policy favoured by Biden and liberal Jews abroad.
Lapid may have endorsed a two-state solution as a theoretical ideal, but neither he nor his political allies campaigned on the issue, focusing instead on the failed attempt to convince a majority of voters that Netanyahu is a criminal and his coalition a bunch of irresponsible extremists. Apart from far-left parties such as Meretz, which did not win enough votes to gain seats in the Knesset, the “peace process” with the Palestinians is not an issue of interest in Israeli politics. Yet few American Jewish liberals, for whom this issue is an article of faith, seem willing to understand that their Israeli counterparts have largely abandoned their faith in the two-state myth.
Freeing a murderer
Thursday’s release of Karim Younis, Israel’s longest-held security prisoner, is an example of an incident that has made a deep impression on Israeli public opinion, but none on American opinion.
This 65-year-old Israeli Arab, from a village near Haifa, was one of three terrorists who kidnapped and murdered 20-year-old Israeli soldier Avraham Bromberg in 1980, while he was on leave and hitchhiking home.
The three members of the Younis family were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. One of them, Sami, Karim’s cousin, who had instructed his two younger relatives to commit the murder, was released in 2011 as part of the deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been kidnapped and held captive by Hamas in Gaza.
The sentences of Karim and Maher Younis were reduced to 40 years in prison in 2012 by the then Israeli President, Shimon Peres, at the urging of US Secretary of State John Kerry. The move was intended as a goodwill gesture towards the Palestinian Authority and was part of the Obama administration’s many failed attempts to broker a two-state agreement.
An unrepentant and celebrated terrorist
Although Maher is expected to be released within a few weeks, Karim is the terrorist who has spent the longest time in an Israeli prison. Anyone who expected Karim to emerge after 40 years in prison as a changed man, repentant of his heinous crime, or that his release would be ignored by fellow Arabs ashamed of his conduct, knows nothing about Palestinian society.
After his release, he was even defiant, expressing pride in his misdeed and declaring that he would gladly have sacrificed another 40 years for the Palestinian cause. Despite the efforts of the Israeli authorities to make the release as low-key as possible, Karim Younis received a hero’s welcome in his village and was paraded around by his many admirers with a Palestinian flag over his shoulders.
It should be noted that his hometown is not in the disputed territories, but within pre-1967 Israel. Yet he and those who cheered his return spoke as if they too were “occupied”. As Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus pointed out this week, not only was he honoured and financially rewarded by the leadership in Ramallah, but he was also the focus of a recent campaign organised in Palestinian Authority schools in which 40,000 pupils wrote letters welcoming him home and praising him as a role model.
Murdering Jews pays off
As an outrageously biased New York Times article showed last week, Palestinian society is obsessed with honouring the “martyrs” who died trying to kill or injure Israelis and Jews. The article focused on claims that Israeli forces were killing more and more civilians and that 2022 had been the “deadliest year” for Palestinians since 2005. However, efforts to discredit the IDF are undermined by the fact that most of the Palestinian casualties in those clashes are attributed to leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or terrorist groups such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, affiliated with the Fatah party, which runs the Palestinian Authority.
As Honest Reporting notes, 90% of those killed by the IDF were involved in violent incidents, 60% in armed attacks on Israeli civilians and security forces, and the rest in riots. The claim that the IDF deliberately killed innocent Palestinian civilians is worse than bad reporting by an anti-Israel journalist, as CAMERA pointed out in an article on Times correspondent Raja Abdulrahim; it is a blood libel.
Apart from the lies about Israeli actions, a crucial fact that is systematically concealed in most reporting on the conflict is that the factions competing for Palestinian favour understand that the path to political influence lies in playing a role in terrorism and shedding Jewish blood. The problem is not only that the Palestinian Authority (PA) rewards Younis and his ilk with salaries and pensions for killing Jews. The point is that this incentive is so popular that neither the head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, nor any of his potential successors would dare to end it.
The glorification of terror is an integral part of Palestinian culture. It is part of the way in which their national identity is inextricably bound up with the century-long war against Zionism.
Indeed, Palestinian protests are not driven by grievances against Israeli policies or by aspirations to a state of their own. Rather, they are about rejecting the legitimacy of a Jewish state, regardless of where its borders are drawn. For this reason, Abbas and his predecessor Yasser Arafat rejected numerous compromises and peace offers, dating back to the time of the Bill Clinton administration, that would have led to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
This leaves Israel in the anomalous position of being unable to give up security control over Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), even though the Palestinian population is governed by Fatah in most of the territory and by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Since its coup in 2007, the radical Islamist group Hamas has ruled Gaza, which essentially functions as an independent Palestinian state in all but name.
All of this explains why Israeli voters have turned their backs on the parties that supported a two-state solution and have brought to power a coalition that has decided it will no longer tolerate Palestinian terrorism.
As long as Americans fail to recognise the reality of the conflict and the nature of Palestinian politics, the alienation of the two states will continue. Both the administration and liberal Jews must finally understand that the solution they sought was not crushed by so-called Israeli hardliners. It has been destroyed by Palestinian cheers and cash for terrorists.
Editor’s note: the original article attributes the reduction of the sentences to a request by John Kerry, but Kerry took office as US Secretary of State in February 2013, after that decision.
