The Biden administration has come under fire for being “tone deaf” in its reaction to a slew of terror attacks in Israel over the past week which have seen 11 people killed and dozens more injured.
Former Israeli envoy to the United Nations, Danny Danon, wrote on Twitter: “While U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was speaking about “settler violence” we received another sad and painful reminder of the radical Islamic terrorism that threatens us daily.”
Danon was referring to a shooting attack carried out on Sunday night in the southern Israeli city of Hadera by two Arab Israeli terrorists who swore allegiance to the Islamic State terror group that killed two Border Police officers and injured 12 others. The attack followed a stabbing and car ramming attack a few days earlier, also carried out by an Arab Israeli Islamic State supporter, that killed four Israelis in the city of Beersheba.
Blinken, who was in Israel for a summit with top diplomats from Arab countries when the second attack occurred, seemed to draw a moral equivalency between Palestinian terrorism and “settler violence” in remarks made at a press briefing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
A day after the summit, five more people were killed in a shooting attack in the central Israeli city of Bnei Brak, marking the third terror attack within a week and bringing the death toll to eleven. On Thursday, another Israeli was seriously wounded after a Palestinian stabbed him on a bus with a screwdriver.
CEO of the International Legal Forum and human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky slammed the Biden administration for being “tone deaf” in putting settler violence on par with murder.
Arsen Ostrovsky: The Biden administration must demand an end to the Palestinian Authority’s so-called pay-for-slay policy of rewarding terrorists and their families which leads “directly led to the kind of unhinged mass slaughter.” (Image supplied)
“The singling out of purported ‘settler violence’, at the same time as Palestinian and Islamic terrorists were carrying out a spate of massacres across Israel, suggests that some in the Administration, notwithstanding their intentions, are tone deaf to the realities on the ground and seeking to deflect from the real issues at hand – the ongoing and relentless Palestinian terror and incitement,” Ostrovsky told Breitbart.
Ostrovsky acknowledged the Biden administration’s condemnation of the attacks, but added it would be of “greater imperative” if the U.S. would call out the Palestinian leadership for its “systematic infrastructure of incitement.”
He also called on the Biden administration to demand an end to the Palestinian Authority’s so-called pay-for-slay policy of rewarding terrorists and their families, which he said, “directly led to the kind of unhinged mass slaughter, we saw in Bnei Brak and across the country in the past week.”
In his remarks on Sunday, Blinken delivered a laundry list of Palestinian transgressions interspersed with Israeli ones.
We will work to “prevent actions on all sides that could raise tensions, including settlement expansion, settler violence, incitement to violence, demolitions, payments to individuals convicted of terrorism, evictions of families from homes they’ve lived in for decades,” Blinken said, warning against an uptick in violence ahead of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan when tensions traditionally heat up.
Regarding “settlement expansion,” Israel’s decision to build homes for Jewish Israelis in the West Bank has long been a point of contention for Democratic administrations. Israel “Settler violence” refers to a recent rise in vandalism and acts of violence, such as throwing stones at passing Palestinian cars, by a fringe group of Israeli extremists in the West Bank. The Biden administration was accused by senior Israeli officials of being “obsessed” with settler violence when Blinken insisted that equal time was devoted to discussing settlements as the Iranian nuclear threat during a meeting with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
In his remarks on Sunday, Blinken also made mention of Israel’s policy of demolishing the family homes of Palestinian terrorists, which the Biden administration has called “punitive” but which Israel says has proved to be a deterrent against future attacks.
A report on the Second Intifada, in which hundreds of Israelis were killed in a wave of Palestinian terror attacks, found that house demolitions “caused an immediate, significant decrease” in the number of attacks.
Blinken also equated the PA’s “pay-for-slay” program rewarding terrorists with a monthly stipend to the “evictions of families” from their homes, an apparent reference to a recent decision — that was subsequently overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court — to evict Palestinians, who had never paid rent nor owned the title deeds to their propoerties, from their homes in the flashpoint east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Israeli security forces and emergency personnel gather at the scene of a shooting attack on March 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak. Attacks in different locations near the Israeli city of Tel Aviv killed at least four people, emergency responders said. (JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
The incident turned into a symbolic event of international proportions and played a large part in Hamas’ decision to kick off the 11-day conflict last May and launch thousands of rockets at Israel.
According to Ostrovsky, Blinken’s call on Israel to calm the situation was misplaced and the onus should be on the PA to subdue terrorism and curb incitement.
“Perhaps instead of reflexively calling on Israel to take steps to ‘de-escalate’ or ‘calm’ the situation on the ground, especially before the upcoming religious holidays of Ramadan, Easter and Passover, the international community, led by the United States, should unequivocally call on the Palestinian leadership to reign in the terrorists committing this wave of terror and end the relentless and systematic Palestinian infrastructure indoctrinating hate and inciting violence, that only enables, abets and empowers such mass slaughter we are witnessing,” he said.