Jewish “settlers” put on the same level as rocket launchers and suicide bombers.
Jewish rabbis treated like Islamic imams fomenting terrorism.
Attacks damaging Palestinian Arab property considered morally equivalent to the beheadings of Jewish children.
Tire slashing, car window breaking, suspected cutting down of olive trees compared to slaughtering of sleeping Israeli families.
This will be the moral and political consequence of the current Israeli hysteria over the graffitis.
But there is something even deeper and psychologically revealing: the “price tag” obsession offers the chance of Israel’s redeeming of its own bad conscience: the desperate psychological need to find equivalency between “their” extremists” and “our extremists”.
This is the meaning of “two states solution”: that there is no difference between citizens and terrorists, between a bereaved Jewish mother and Dalal Mughrabi.
But in the egregious Israeli moral equivalence, there is also graffiti and graffiti. When Arabs from the village of Awarta in the Shechem district sprayed graffiti praising the murderers of the Fogel family of Itamar, nobody in Israel, not Mrs. Livni nor the Israeli media, called it “terrorism”.
In the last few days, the IDF uncovered large caches of rifles and other lethal weapons in the PA terror cells of Judea and Samaria. According to data from the Israel Security Agency, in 2013 there were 1,271 terrorist attacks, as compared with 578 in 2012.
But nobody knows about this out of Israel. No daily headlines in Paris, Rome, Stockholm, London, Berlin or Amsterdam have been dedicated to these events. Because the Israeli establishment was targeting the Jewish scapegoat, the bad guys who vandalize.
Now it seems to every clueless reader that in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem there is a peaceful and nice Arab population targeted by nasty Jewish terrorists. It began to be portrayed that way a long time ago. It began with a strike, then a stone, then an iron bar, then a projectile, then a knife, then an ax, then a petrol bomb, then a shooting, then a suicide bombing, then the Fogels’ throats.
Sorry, Udi, Ruth, Yoav, Elad and three-month-old Hadas Fogel: you were a good story for just one day. You died in vain. Now graffitis outweigh you.