The problem of violence against women has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. But when it comes to Palestinian Arab violence against Jewish women in Israel, interest seems to wane.
This past week, the Palestinian terrorist war on Jewish women claimed its third victim from a single family, when Lucy Dee died from injuries suffered in the recent attack that killed her two daughters, Maia, 20, and Rina, 15.
Mrs. Dee and her daughters were driving on a highway. They were not occupying or oppressing anybody. They were minding their own business, peacefully and legally. They might have been on the left wing of the political spectrum; they might have been on the right. I do not know, and that doesn’t matter. For Palestinian terrorists, all that mattered was that the Dees were Jews; that was a capital offense.
According to Israeli police investigators, the terrorists were in a car traveling on the same road. They pulled alongside the Dees. The shooter, who was in the back seat, would have been close enough to see that the passengers were two young, defenseless women. He opened fire on them. That caused their car to crash.
I am repeating these details, as difficult as they are to write and to read, because it’s important to recognize something about the psychology of Palestinian Arab terrorists.
A terrorist who plants a bomb in a movie theater never sees his victims at all. A sniper who shoots people from a distance doesn’t have to look into the eyes of the people he is trying to murder. But in an attack such as the one I have described, the killer was within a few feet of his targets—twice. And twice he opened fire on them.
To commit such brutal violence, a terrorist has to possess a profoundly cruel and barbaric mentality. It’s not that terrorists who plant bombs are any less barbaric. But there’s something about such an up-close act of violence that illustrates the attacker’s viciousness in a way that more “anonymous” types of murder can disguise.
Historians have described many episodes from the not-so-distant past in which other killers of Jews likewise committed murder at very close range. The proximity of the victim did not cause them the slightest hesitation.
Now let’s consider the broader implications of the massacre of the Dees. If a Palestinian Arab state was established next to Israel—as the U.S. State Department and J Street are constantly demanding—this is what Israelis would face: an entire sovereign country representing the mentality of the Dees’ murderer.
How do we know that a state of “Palestine” would act in the spirit of such killers? Because the Palestinian Authority regime itself constantly says so. The official P.A. news media relentlessly praises terrorists and holds them up to Palestinian society as heroes.
When the shooter of the Dees is finally captured and jailed, he will receive a lifetime of monetary payments from the P.A. If the shooter is killed while resisting arrest, his family will receive the payments. In fact, with Lucy Dee succumbing to her wounds, the level of the payments has just risen since the terrorists are paid according to how many Jews they murdered.
The P.A.’s policy of paying terrorists is a statement about the values that Palestinian Arab society holds dear, which a state of “Palestine” would embody.
So, the next time you hear that glib phrase, “two-state solution,” think about Mrs. Lucy Dee, and her daughters Maia and Rina. Think about the savagery of their murderer. And imagine what it would be like for Israel to return to its old nine-miles-wide border and face an entire sovereign state of such killers and their cheerleaders as its next-door neighbors.