Palestinian Islamic Jihad is calling for a third intifada on the heels of the riots in Acre—now in their third night. Please take careful note of the text in bold.
On a third successive night of rioting in Akko, Arabs threw stones at dozens of Jewish youths who formed a crowd in one of the city’s eastern neighborhoods. A man who was walking his dog sustained a mild head injury from a stone flung at him.
Police detained four Jewish protestors and began to disperse the remaining crowd with the help of stun grenades, tear gas, and water hoses. Officers also raided a home from which stones had been flung, detaining the family within. At around 10 pm police reported the incident under control.
Northern District Police stated that altogether 30 people have been arrested in relation to the riots since they first began on Yom Kippur Eve.
The incident commenced at around 9 pm, when dozens of Jewish youths began to crowd two of the neighborhood’s main streets. Police barricaded the eastern entrance to the city, and deployed large SWAT and Border Guard forces armed with anti-protest equipment to the area. Three residents of the city were detained earlier
Friday.
Now read what the terror leaders are asking:
The Islamic Jihad movement called on Friday for Palestinians to take to the streets in solidarity with the Arabs of Akko and Arabs in Israel, in general, “due to the racist aggression and brutality of the occupation and the bullying of the settlers.”
“The extreme Jewish attacks and the crimes of the settlers during recent days are a manifestation of the brutality of the occupation and its racism, in Akko and in other Palestinian villages in occupied Palestine,” said the group’s spokesman Walid Hilam.
He called on Akko’s Arab residents to continue to fight and remain unified in the fact of aggressive behavior and to hold on to their lands in the face of an alleged Zionist plot to relocate them, as occurred in 1948.
This is not your father’s intifada. This is not the Arafat-led intifada of 2000. It is not the rock-throwing intifada of the 1980s. This is a different time, and Jews are feeling very, very differently about Arab mobs. All you have to do is look at what happened in Acre the past three nights. What I have seen from these events is that Jewish Israelis will no longer stand by passively while Arab mobs riot in their neighborhoods. What you will see, if this thing spreads, is more crowds of young Jewish men matching club for club and stone for stone with young Arab men. And while this is not a good thing for either Arabs or Jews, it’s pretty clear that the Arabs will be the losers if this rioting does not stop.
There’s simply no margin of error left. After years of being bombed and rocketed by terrorists, after months of watching Arab Israelis misuse their identification cards to murder Israelis even in the heart of Jerusalem, Israeli Jews are responding to violence with violence.
I am not condoning this. I am simply reporting it, and writing what I think.
And I think that Israeli Arabs had better not listen to the terrorists. A third intifada will be disastrous for them.
Yes, Meryl, but the Palestinians are fighting brutal Israel occupiers (let’s not go into where they’re doing it) and so whatever they do…well, we may not actually endorse blowing up school buses but we have to understand what would drive people to such savage and vicious actions.
On the other hand, nothing the Israelis can possibly do is justified. Besides, this just shows there are no equities in the Arab-Israel conflict. Jews are throwing stone, Arabs are bombing restaurants and launching missiles at towns…see, just the sad cycle of violence that besets this war-torn land.
The first duty of government is to protect the lives of its people against attack. When people feel that government is unwilling or unable to do that, they start taking the law into their own hands. The results are never pretty.