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Netanyahu Reacts to Israeli Teens' Kidnapping
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
June 17, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
When four Israeli teenagers went missing
June 13 in the West Bank town of Hebron, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
blamed Hamas currently seeking to reconcile with Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah-based
Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu ordered the Israeli army to arrest hundreds to Hamas members to seek the
whereabouts of the three teens. Netanyahu hopes to isolate Hamas as Abbas begins the process of joining the two
Palestinian factions for the first time since June 12, 2007 when Hamas seized
the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu holds
Abbas responsible for the teens’ disappearance, though there are many radical
groups that could claim responsibility.
“The resistance will not stand idly by in the face of the enemy’s
criminal deeds,” said armed resistance groups in Gaza, excluding the Islamic
Jihad. Cracking down in the West
Bank, Netanyahu hopes to put pressure on Abbas to get back the teens.
Announcing a unity pact April 23, Israeli authorities have all but
scuttled the U.S.-brokered peace efforts begun in July 2013 by Secretary of
State John Kerry. U.S. officials
hoped that Kerry could pull off what no other administration could accomplish in
Israel’s over 65-year history.
Since Abbas signaled his intent to join forces with Hamas, Netanyahu has been
pessimistic about continued peace talks.
Radicals in Gaza and the West Bank praised the kidnappings as “any effort
of Palestinian resistance” to avenge what they sees as Israel’s “criminal”
activity in the West Bank.
Palestinians view Israeli construction in the West Bank or East Jerusalem as
criminal encroachment on Palestinian land for an eventual independent state. Israel views the West Bank as part of its spoils from the 1967 Six-Day War. Were it not to the Six-Day-War, the
West Bank would still be part of Jordan.
Rounding up some 200 Hamas members, Netanyahu hopes to send a loud
message to Abbas to pull his sources and find out who holds the Israeli teens. Acknowledging the teen kidnapping as legitimate resistance prompted strong condemnations
from the European Union. Condemning
“in the strongest terms the abduction of three Israeli students,” the EU called
for the teens’ immediate release.
“It is frankly, despicable that children’s lives should be put in danger this
way,” said EU Israeli ambassador Lars Faaborg-Andersen. Israeli’s Security Cabinet planned
to pull out all the stops applying pressure on Abbas to return the teens. Abbas and Gaza-based Hamas leader
Ismail Haniyeh were furious at Israel for failing to swap all Hamas prisoners,
especially 55-year-old Marwan Barghouti, a high ranking Hamas official currently
in Israeli custody.
Netanyahu knows the history well dating back to Israel’s 1948 war on
independence. When Yasser Arafat
came on the scene forming the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964, it
was designed to work with other Arab states surreptitiously to eventually
destroy Israel on the battlefield.
It took Arafat three years to coordinate with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syrian
Haffez al-Assad, Jordan King Bin Talal Hussein and other Arab leaders to launch
their final assault to push Israel into the Mediterranean. When the dust settled June 10, 1967,
Egypt lost the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan the West Bank and Syria
the Golan Heights, all now claimed as Palestinian sovereign land. Before the Six Day War, Palestinians
had not one inch of the sovereign territory they now claim. Past acts of barbarism and terrorism
have been justified as “resistance” by Palestinian groups.
Heaping pressure on Abbas in Ramallah should push the PLO to get the
teenagers returned, perhaps to swap for Barghouti. While 52-year-old Haniyeh prevails
in Gaza and 78-year-old Abbas in the West Bank, Palestinians would like to line
up behind Barghouti. After Sept.
11, things changed drastically for U.S. foreign policy dealing with
Palestinians. Former President George W. Bush, a hero in Israel for his bold stance against terrorism,
changed U.S. policy to no longer deal with any group that practices terrorism,
no matter what the justification.
Generations of U.S. leadership accepted Palestinian terrorism as legitimate
protests. Only after the
World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by Bin Laden did Bush draw the line on
Palestinian terrorism, finally condemned by the EU.
Netnayahu’s instinct to
heap pressure on Abbas to get to the bottom of the recent kidnappings should
eventually bear fruit. Admitting
that they back child or teen kidnapping as legitimate “resistance,” Abbas—and
his joint unity experiment with Hamas—finds himself losing credibility with the
U.S. and EU. Before Abbas scuttles
any future hope of a Palestinian state, he must forcefully denounce Hamas or
other radical Palestinian groups that practice terrorism as “resistance.” “The international community . . . must call on President Abbas
to end his pact with Hamas,” said Netanyahu, raising today’s real conundrum to
any peace process. Netanyahu and
his 56-year-old conservative Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman must find a way
to accept Hamas as a part of Palestinian unity.
No Palestinian official has stepped up to condemn terrorism as form of
“resistance.”
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