Israel didn’t want quiet, even for a moment. The agitators’ motives varied but they shared the same goal: fanning, igniting and blowing things up. History has already taught us that when Israel wants quiet, it’s almost always wonderfully maintained. When it wants an escalation, just wait and see it come. Who hadn’t been warning against the current wave? Who hadn’t seen it coming? And on the other hand, who didn’t do a thing to head it off and instead just stirred things up?
Now we will again bewail our bitter fate, the rockets and terrorist attacks, our neighbors’ violence and our sacred victims who died in vain. Israel could have prevented all this, and this time it could have been done rather easily.
When Israel doesn’t want quiet, it knows exactly what to do. Four or five anonymous aerial bombings of Iranian targets in Syria, a jab and yet another at Syrian sovereignty and Iranian power, in the total knowledge that at some point Iran and Syria will no longer be able to restrain themselves.
When Israel doesn’t want quiet, it unleashes troopers in police uniform in an extremely holy place for Muslims during their holy month. When Israel doesn’t want quiet, it dispatches its police to barbarically beat the faithful, putting hundreds of people in restraints on the carpets of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to humiliate them on camera, for the Arab world to see.
There isn’t a single Muslim, or any human being for that matter, who could have remained unmoved by the shocking scenes at the mosque. Of course, it’s possible to spread stories about how people “holed themselves up” in the mosque, but the truth is that many young people want to spend Friday nights during Ramadan inside the holy mosque. That’s their right, certainly in the last place on earth in which Palestinians still have remnants of sovereignty.
Beating them in such a way isn’t wanting quiet, but rather death. Killing an Israeli medical student from the Bedouin town of Hura at a gate to the mosque compound and later providing a ridiculous version of the circumstances and not disclosing even a shadow of the truth is also a means of provocation. Not wanting quiet is permitting hundreds of rioting settlers to invade a Palestinian town time after time, permitting them to engage in arson and destruction and assault at their whim, within sight of Israel Defense Forces soldiers who never thought to do their duty and protect the Palestinians. Not bringing any of the rioters to justice is also a way of preventing quiet at any price.
A country that doesn’t want quiet slowly bleeds those under its occupation. There has barely been a week in recent months without unbearable Palestinian fatalities and then everyone acts surprised, wondering what these human animals are doing to us, carrying out a car ramming attack in Tel Aviv and a shooting in the Jordan Valley.
Not wanting quiet is dispatching crazy numbers of troops after each terrorist attack to the Palestinian refugee camps and towns and turning the residents’ lives upside down for an extended time, demolishing the homes of terrorists’ families and arresting thousands of people. Detaining 1,000 people for long months without trial is also a proven way to achieve a lack of quiet, which Israel has also accomplished.
Imprisoning the Gaza Strip forever, bombing Syria without limits and cruelly subjugating the Palestinians. What else does warmongering require?
The motives change but the goal always remains. Now it’s the extreme right that is bloodthirsty in the government and that is in ecstasy every time Palestinian blood is spilled, hoping in the process to achieve Gog and Magog, followed by the hoped-for second Nakba.
And along with them there is the pro-Bibi right that wants to crush the protest movement, which could only be wiped out by another round of bloodletting. And later we could always say it was the Arabs.