Arab Terrorism Against Jews is Nothing New

Supporters of terror often blame the victims. For instance, if there was no "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel, Palestinian terrorists would not blow-up cafes, buses or hotel restaurants. Thus, in the mind of the terrorist, the victim becomes the maker of his own fate.

How, then do you explain Arab riots against Jews during the days of the British Mandate. There was no occupied West Bank or Gaza. There were no military checkpoints; just Jews leaving in the their homeland.

And, as Sarah Honig reminds us, there was murder and mayhem on more than one occasion. In "Another Tack: The May Day massacre of 1921," Honig discusses the unprovoked murder of Jews by Arabs on that day.

She begins:

There's no telling where the final ideological resting place of intellectually restless Yosef Haim Brenner - one of the Second Aliya luminaries and founding giants of modern Hebrew literature - would have been had he not been slain before reaching his 40th birthday. He might have evolved into a nationalist like initially-leftist Moshe Shamir, or followed his socialist leanings to the farthest radical fringe. Speculations are moot. Brenner was a full deck of cards from which any hand could have been dealt. Nothing was irrevocably predetermined when Arab marauders took his life on May 2, 1921.

As Brenner's tragic fate undeniably illustrates, to our enemies a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. Our enemies are equal-opportunity assassins. They spill Jewish blood without discrimination, without first bothering to verify the political orientations of prospective victims.

There is no doubt that British soldiers played into the hands of Arab rioters that day. They stood by while mobs attacked defenseless Jews. But when Jewish forces arrived to protect their fellows, the British dis-armed them.

It goes against our ingrained wishful thinking to acknowledge that enduring Arab animosity has nothing to do with the desperation which the Jewish state's birth supposedly fomented among so-called Palestinians, with the occupation which supposedly represses them or even with the supposed aspiration to found a Palestinian state which the Jews supposedly foil. In 1921 there were no traces of the above pretexts - so prevalent in the manipulative Arab narrative, so popular among progressive sorts here and almost universally accepted as gospel abroad.

I wish the above was not true, but it is. Read the full article, Another Tack: The May Day massacre of 1921.