Gaza terrorists fire rockets
Gaza terrorists fire rocketsAlbert Sadikov/Flash 90

As Palestinian Islamic Jihad fires hundreds of rockets at Israeli schools and kibbutzim, some on the American Jewish left were firing verbal arrows at Israel, accusing the Jewish state of being the aggressor. Incredible!


Anybody who has followed the news in recent days knows that on May 2, an imprisoned leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group starved himself to death as a public relations stunt.


Later that day, PIJ fired 104 rockets at Israeli towns. Apparently PIJ’s position is that Israel has an obligation to prevent Palestinian Arab mass murderers from committing suicide.


Israel responded to the 104 rockets by targeting and eliminating three PIJ leaders. That’s what any normal country would do in self-defense. It’s exactly what American forces did to Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan last summer, and what they did to ISIS leader Ibrahim al-Hashmi al-Qurayshi in Syria, a few months before that.


The latest sequence of events in Israel and Gaza created a political headache for those critics of Israel who reflexively blame Israel for everything. Take J Street, for example. The J Streeters know it would sound irrational to blame Israel for not rescuing the PIJ mass murderer from committing suicide. But they don’t want to admit that the Palestinian Arabs started the violence by firing the 104 rockets.


So, what did J Street do? Simple—it revised history by whiting-out the 104 rockets!


According to J Street’s May 10 press release, “This latest escalation began early Tuesday with the targeted killing [by Israel] of three Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders…”


In J Street’s upside-down world, the 104 rockets that preceded the Israeli action are nowhere to be found. The violence “began” when Israel defended itself. Remarkable!


The J Street press release continued with the usual “both sides” rhetoric that we have come to expect from critics of Israel. The Palestinian Arabs are never called the aggressors. It’s just “the latest escalation in Israeli-Palestinian violence,” “another round of terrible violence,” and “this surge in violence.”

And, of course, J Street is urging the Biden Administration “to do everything in its power to reduce tensions, promote de-escalation, and prevent further suffering and loss for Israelis and Palestinians.” Translation: pressure Israel to stop defending itself.

Sadly, other groups on the American Jewish left are taking similarly extreme positions.


Americans for Peace Now has likewise refused to acknowledge that the Palestinian Islamic Jihadists are the aggressors. Its press release depicted the situation as just a “perpetual cycle of violence.” APN declared that it is “heartbroken” for both the “families in Israel and in Gaza who are living in fear of the next air raid or rocket strike.”

If this were the 1940s, do you suppose APN would have been heartbroken for “the families in England and in Germany who were living in fear of the next air raid or rocket strike” … ? Or would they acknowledge that Nazi Germany was the aggressor? It’s scary that we must ask the question.


The other major group on the American Jewish left, Partners for Progressive Israel (PPI), has not issued a formal statement about Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s latest jihad. But PPI has been circulating this statement by an Israeli radical: “Killing doesn’t change an equation…It won’t end until we talk.”


Israel, of course, has been “talking” for 75 years. It has been begging the Palestinian Arabs to talk peace. It has been giving them land, releasing terrorists from prison, and making countless other concessions in its desperate attempts to get them to “talk.”


The Arabs have responded to Israel’s pleas by firing rockets, again and again and again—including those rockets that mysteriously vanished from J Street’s revisionist version of history.

Stephen M. Flatowis an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”