If you don't want to die, don't go into war zones.

Just a thought.

Israeli soldiers operating in the West Bank, which has seen a major uptick in Palestinian terrorism recently (photo: IDF/X)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is an essay written by Joshua Hoffman and Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

An American-Turkish activist who was shot dead in the West Bank last week had “with high probability” been hit by IDF troops’ mistaken gunfire, the army recently said, expressing regret for the killing.

According to the IDF: “The incident occurred during a violent gathering of dozens of Palestinian suspects, who burned tires and threw stones at forces.”

In other words, this was not some well-intentioned peaceful protest. It was obviously a riot, and gone are the days when Jews (Israelis, do I mean?) are just expected to sit there and take stones being thrown at them without any sort of self-defense.

What’s more, riots like these immediately bring back to memory the first and second intifadas in the late 1980s and early 2000s, violent Palestinian uprisings that resulted in more than a thousand mostly civilian Israeli deaths. When you hear so-called “activists” like the American-Turkish one advocating to “globalize the intifada,” make no mistake what they mean.

Because of the ongoing conflict, the relationship of Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with Israel is governed primarily by the terms of the Law of Armed Conflict. As such, any acts or policies of alleged discrimination by Israel against the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be viewed through the lens of the Law of Armed Conflict.

As long as Israel’s actions and policies — based not on racial animus, but on well-recognized national security needs — comply with applicable international law, they are lawful.

In fact, Israeli security chiefs issued a “stern warning” to the cabinet this week that Israel “must do everything to avoid another front in the West Bank” amid an increase in terrorist activity originating there, Hebrew media reported Monday. According to a report on Israel’s Channel 12 news, the Shin Bet security service is especially concerned about the potential resurgence of suicide bombings.

This is what the Palestinians mean when they use the term “resistance.” They are not, for instance, the Black Americans of the 1960s who primarily protested through nonviolent direct action tactics like sit-ins, boycotts, freedom rides, marches, and voter registration drives, aiming to achieve civil rights by putting pressure on the government through large-scale demonstrations and public exposure of racial injustice.

Palestinian “resistance” is obscenely primitive and antisemitic. It is rooted not in coexistence and equal rights, but in attempts at replacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. For decades, the Palestinians have decided that it is preferable to use the West Bank and Gaza as Jihadist launching pads indiscriminately against the Jewish state, rather than developing these territories into their own respectable state, society, economy, and institutions.

Meanwhile, much of the mainstream media makes it seem as if “Israeli policies” are the reasons for this mayhem — because, you know, blaming the Jews for things that have nothing to do with us has long been a feature of various civilizations.

The reality is that Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded world-renowned terrorist Yasser Arafat as the Palestinians’ leader in the early 2000s, went on to use power and influence to control the two major Palestinian economic boards and built a West Bank economic empire worth more than $300 million.¹

All this while the Palestinian Authority refuses to use its considerable international aid to relocate more than 100,000 Palestinians from Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to residential locations in the territories, preferring to leave them confined under extremely unpleasant conditions.

The international community’s refusal or incompetence in not holding Abbas and the Palestinian Authority accountable for nepotism and corruption drove Gazan Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas, the terror group which promised them “reform.”

In 2007, Abbas lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas in a civil war that saw the terror group kill some 350 Abbas-aligned staff and security. The two Palestinian blocs, each commanding the following of around one-third of Palestinians today, have not held an election since, both blaming “the occupation” for their own failure to produce a state, even if a non-sovereign one.

Here is how Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it:

“The model of Palestinian leadership compares to neighboring Arab countries Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Since independence, these countries have lived in one of two states: Autocracy or civil war. Since the rise of Islamism in the 1980s, civil wars have been won by Islamist militias, all of them backed and bank-rolled by the Islamist regime of Iran, which uses them as tools in its bid to dominate the region.”

“Militias are Islamists whose ideology — as outlined by Sunni Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and endorsed by Shia Iranian Ruhollah Khomeini — considers the conflict with Israel not as one over national interests but as a zero-sum game that started with the rise of Islam, over 1,400 years ago. For Israel and the Palestinians, the only possible solution in the foreseeable future is more of the same: A makeshift arrangement of Palestinian self-governance meshed with Israeli policing and periodic flare-ups.”²

Hence the American-Turkish activist’s unfortunate death.

Of course, we can play the fake sympathy card and call this death “tragic” and proclaim that we “mourn every loss of life.” Or we can call it like it is: If you don’t want to die, avoid war zones — especially on the antagonist’s side.

The media’s hysteria over this single American death — which was because of bad luck, bad planning, bad decisions, bad actions, and her taking the Caliphate-seeking Islamists’ side in a titanic civilizational battle — shows that making sound decisions was not her forte. It would seem that she made some bad decisions as well.

This media hysteria stands in stark contrast to its utter indifference over the three Israelis shot dead in a terror attack at the Jordanian border just the day before — an event-outrage gap that blatantly signals moral ruin and shows that much mainstream media are racist and consider American deaths more newsworthy than the deaths of others.

It is also further proof, as if any were needed, that most foreign correspondents covering the region just do not care about Jewish deaths and suffering. That is overt antisemitism. They will not let facts get in the way of them writing the fictional story implanted in their Lilliputian minds when they were at high school and university.

Had any of these so-called journalists gotten out of their hotel bar, they would know that Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel, is awash with Palestinian Jihadism. Such terrorists crossing the border into Israel to murder Jews ought to have been a huge concern and a huge story for reporters claiming to worry about the risk of major regional contagion and conflagration.

The media, however, only ascribes such risks to Israeli actions, or actions by Jewish settlers in the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. Frequent Arab violence against Jews, which is exceeded only by Arab violence other Arabs, and has been the cause of the conflict for a century, remains something that reporters do not see as inflammatory at all.

Finally, there is one piece of moral sanity in this whole thing, and that is the IDF. Rather than lying outright like Hamas does whenever it opens its mouth, the IDF has said it is likely its forces had mistakenly killed in the fog-of-war and that it would investigate. No denials, no lies, just an initial assessment of having made a mistake with further investigations to come.

While the U.S. government, the corrupt United Nations, and the international media walked off a moral cliff in not assessing what had happened fairly, it was the IDF that accepted responsibility, told no lies, and conducted a probe.

That is the difference between Israel and its foes in various guises.

---

1. “Palestinian kleptocracy: West accepts corruption, people suffer the consequences.” The Hill.

2. “Why There Is No Palestinian State.” Future of Jewish.