Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas must be feeling pretty pleased with himself. In
anticipation of his upcoming meeting at the White House, he needed
something that would take the heat off PA rejection of U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry's "framework for peace."
His prayers to Allah
were answered, when two events unfolded that gave him the opportunity to
condemn Israel from above the fray.
The first occurred on
Monday morning at the Allenby (or King Hussein) Bridge between the West
Bank and Jordan. Though details of the event are not entirely clear,
what has emerged so far is that 38-year-old Raed Zeiter, a Palestinian
judge residing and working in Amman, was killed by Israeli soldiers at
the border crossing.
According to witnesses,
Zeiter charged at the soldiers with a metal pole, while shouting
"Allahu akbar" ("God is great") and attempting to grab one of their
weapons. When a soldier shot him in the leg, Zeiter lunged at and
started strangling him. This prompted additional shooting, which led to
Zeiter's death.
Though Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement of "regret" (if the
incident happened the way the Israel Defense Forces recounted, there is
nothing to apologize for) and "…sympathies to the people and government
of Jordan" -- as well as agreeing "to a Jordanian request to establish a
joint Israeli-Jordanian team to complete the investigation" -- both
Jordanians and Palestinians went berserk.
Claiming that Zeiter
was not only a judge, but a law-abiding married man with two children
(one of whom is in a coma, no less), protesters in Jordan and the PA
accused the IDF of committing cold-blooded murder.
The PA leadership,
giddy at this turn of events, immediately demanded an international
investigation. This is in spite of the fact that if any joint
Israeli-Jordanian examination reveals wrongdoing on the part of the
soldiers, the IDF will court-martial and hold them legally -- and
morally -- accountable.
Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour said, "The Israeli government's excuses do not justify that treacherous act."
The lower house of the
Jordanian parliament announced, "What happened proved that Israel is a
racist country that does not want peace."
In addition, it not
only demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador in Amman and the
recall of the Jordanian ambassador in Israel, but passed a unanimous
resolution demanding the release of Ahmed Daqamseh from jail.
Daqamseh was a soldier
in the Jordanian army who opened fire on a group of Israeli
middle-school girls on a class trip to the "Island of Peace," a joint
Israeli-Jordanian tourist site in Naharayim, near the Jordanian border
and under Jordanian rule.
The upshot of the
massacre, which took place on March 13, 1997, was that seven girls were
dead and six others seriously wounded. Daqamseh was tried by a Jordanian
military court and sentenced to life in prison. Rather than expressing
remorse, he maintains to this day that his actions were not criminal,
but rather the fulfillment of his national and religious duty.
Many Jordanian
officials and members of the public consider Daqamseh a hero and have
been lobbying for his release. Monday's killing of Zeiter is fanning the
flames of this campaign. His funeral on Tuesday in Nablus allowed Abbas
to gloat from the sidelines.
The second occurrence
that made Abbas' week was the flare-up in the Gaza Strip. On Tuesday,
while Zeiter's corpse was being paraded around and hailed as a martyr,
the IDF killed three members of the Iranian-backed terrorist group,
Islamic Jihad, in Gaza. These targeted killings were undertaken after
the terrorists fired a mortar bomb at Israeli troops.
To "retaliate," Islamic
Jihad began to bombard southern Israel with dozens of Qassam and Grad
rockets, sending civilians preparing for the Purim holiday into
shelters.
The IDF response was
quick and precise. Twenty-nine terror bases in Gaza were hit from the
air, with no human casualties. Fear that Netanyahu meant business when
he said, "If there is no quiet … for the residents of Israel, there will
be … lots of noise in Gaza. And that's putting it mildly," Islamic
Jihad agreed on Thursday evening to "calm things down." Still, several
missiles have been launched from Gaza since then.
Abbas couldn't have
written a better script for himself. Now he can fly to Washington with a
new set of "moderate" credentials and a replenished supply of
anti-Israel ammunition.
Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
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