While you are probably nailing down summer camps or family trips, there is another view of how kids should spend their time. JNS, a news service focusing on worldwide Jewry and Israel, reports: “The Palestinian terrorist organization Islamic Jihad held a summer camp in order to groom what a spokesman called a ‘strong resisting generation’ of Palestinians to fight Israel.”
The photos of children being groomed into terrorists can be found here. Those photos come from a Palestinian news outlet. You see, they take pride in their “accomplishments.”
It is remarkable that some on the American left and in practically all of Europe think that all Israel must do is “trade land for peace.” That arrangement lead to two wars involving the land they didn’t even insist be tied to peace. And it sure wasn’t.
In a timely piece, Peter Berkowitz says that to understand why there isn’t peace in our time, it is important to gain “a proper understanding of what each side has done to advance the cause of peace and what each side has done to thwart peace.” He goes on to cite President Obama’s recent visit:
[He] modified the opinion he expressed in Cairo four years earlier that Israel’s existence was primarily justified as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust. That opinion bolsters the Palestinian narrative holding that Israel is a colonialist enterprise, a foreign imposition on Arab lands, an act of European atonement at Arab expense for European crimes against the Jews. Instead, Obama emphasized that Israel’s identity as the nation state of the Jewish people is grounded in an ancestral connection to the land that extends back thousands of years as well as in the right Jews share with other peoples of the world to be free and self-governing. . . . [In] Jerusalem the president abandoned the idea that the parties must fulfill preconditions before entering negotiations. To be sure, confidence-building measures undertaken by both sides would be most welcome. But negotiations, when begun with the proper expectations, can in themselves serve as a powerful confidence-building measure.
It is worth noting that he did not scold Israel for failure to make peace offers. It has on multiple occasions. He did not scold Israel over the Goldstone report. Its author has recanted his baseless accusations. In other words, all the president really wants is for Israel to do what it has been trying to do since 1967: Offer land for peace.
So what is the problem? Berkowitz concludes:
Israeli settlements are a challenge. But they are not an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of peace. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of Israelis who live beyond the Green line live on just 6 percent of the land beyond the Green line. And in 2005, Israel effected a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Bigger challenges stem from the upheavals in the Arab world —upheavals which have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians — and the enmity within the Palestinian ranks between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority that governs Palestinians in the West Bank and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and enjoys considerable support in the West Bank. The instability and violence all around them induces caution among Israelis. Finally, perhaps the biggest challenge arises from widespread Palestinian incitement of hatred of Israel. This incitement is routinely promulgated by Palestinian schools and mosques; Palestinian Authority- and Hamas-run newspapers, TV, and radio; and Palestinian political leaders, including Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, particularly when he speaks in Arabic.
And by summer camps.
On the day that those jihadi camps are shut down, the incitement stops and the missiles from Gaza stop, there will be peace. Not before.