Another heartbreaking day of news from Israel, as on Thursday, in Tel Aviv, more Israeli civilians were murdered from the hands of terrorists belonging to one group or another.
This happened on Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv’s Broadway.
Too early, for me, to give an exact count between the dead and the injured.... only to say that the pain hurts anyone with a Jewish soul.
Tears and prayers, once again, for the beloved Jewish nation.
Yes, this is a wave, a pattern that by my reckoning is happening every third day; perhaps by happenstance, or part of a plan.
Designed by whom?
Far be it from me to have the answer, except that the people running the country are also inept at figuring out how it starts, and how to make it stop.
I do wonder, though, if playing buddy-buddy with the other side is actually smart and necessary politics, or downright fraternizing with the enemy.
Either way, it’s not doing much good.
Recall that after the slaughter in Bnei Brak, Defense Minister Benny Gantz thanked Abbas for (dubiously) condemning the attack.
I was confused. Why thank him for anything? This is the man who pays his people to slay Israelis. That would be Mahmoud Abbas.
This man is himself a terrorist, no? He took over the business from Arafat. Mahmoud runs the PA, PLO, Fatah, and who knows what else.
Or, maybe, I read it all wrong.
Representing the Israeli government, Benny Gantz was thanking…so graciously thanking, aha, not Mahmoud, but MANSOUR Abbas, the prime mover of the Islamic Movement in Israel.
That should be a question mark.
Because I’m still not sure which Abbas received the gratitude. Mahmoud? Mansour? I know that, somewhere, I read that it was this Abbas, and then the other Abbas.
Is there a difference…I mean a real difference? I can’t tell. Can you? Can they?
The other Abbas, Mansour, my newly arrived American readers may be surprised to learn, is a major part of the coalition that rules Israel.
Are his hands clean?
Yes, Israel is ruled by two heads, Jewish, Naftali Bennett, and Arab, through Mansour’s United Arab List…related to the Islamic Movement and hence the Muslim Brotherhood.
How did this happen? Don’t ask. Though I am sure this is not what Herzl or Jabotinsky had in mind.
Nor even Balfour, for whom Israel was to be a “national home for the Jewish People,” and so it is, save for these political glitches that has a government at odds with itself.
In any case, why thank either Abbas? Aren’t they from the same tree? Each of them is in it for himself and his own people, which means not for the Jews.
Neither Abbas is weeping bitter tears over this latest atrocity. That is for the Israelis, again, and for those of us who weep with them.
I understand the sensitivities involved. Israel is a democracy for all. All minorities are to be respected.
But not when they come to kill you.
There is something unseemly when, from one terrorist atrocity to the next, Jewish leaders bow to them on bended knee.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com