Why America Must Stand with Israel Right Now
Marco Rubio 8 October 2015
https://medium.com/@marcorubio/now-more-than-ever-america-must-stand-with-israel-1f735e5f4c29

Over the past month, Palestinians have staged a series of riots and
terrorist attacks targeting Israelis. Last week, a Palestinian terrorist
stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem and injured two others, including
a two-year old boy. Several days earlier, a terrorist ambushed an Israeli
family driving through the West Bank, murdering two parents in front of
their four children, ages four months to nine years. Those attacks were only
the start. On Wednesday alone, Palestinians reportedly staged over 100 rock
attacks, 35 fire bombings, and another series of stabbings.

This terrorism follows weeks of growing violence against Israel, from
firebomb attacks on Israeli security forces at the Temple Mount to
Palestinian rock throwers, who stoned a Jewish driver in Jerusalem, forcing
him off the road and killing him. Reminiscent of the days when Yasser Arafat
talked peace in English and jihad in Arabic, Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas — a man President Obama regularly hails as a peacemaker — is
inciting the bloodshed. “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in
Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah,” he recently declared
on Palestinian television. “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre . . . [Israelis] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy
feet.”

Abbas has used such anti-Semitic language to promote lies that Jews are
defiling the Al-Aqsa mosque area and attempting to alter the status quo, in
an attempt to take it over. He followed this incitement by declaring at the
United Nations last week that he was no longer bound by peace agreements
with Israel. The very next day, Fatah claimed responsibility for the brutal
terrorist attack in the West Bank — an attack which killed an American
citizen.

And what has been the Obama administration’s response to weeks of official
Palestinian incitement, anti-Semitism, and violence? President Obama refuses
to criticize Abbas or demand that he stop the incitement and violence.
Instead, the administration plays the moral equivalence game. “All sides,”
it says, must “restore calm,” as if Israel is somehow to blame for being the
victim of terrorism. Secretary of State Kerry this week cautioned “everybody
to be calm, not to escalate the situation.” For her part, Hillary Clinton
has been silent. This is not surprising given that as Secretary of State she
led many of the Obama administration’s attacks on Israel.

Indeed, the indifference that President Obama and Hillary Clinton display
toward incitement and violence against Jews fits a long-running pattern of
callousness and neglect toward the Jewish state. In June 2009, President
Obama reportedly told American Jewish leaders that he wanted to put daylight
between America and Israel. He went on to demand a full settlement freeze to
restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — an extraordinary precondition
that even Abbas himself never made.

The president’s demand destroyed any hope of moving forward on peace, asking
too much of Israel and giving Abbas no incentive to negotiate. The
Palestinians refused to enter negotiations until the last month of the
freeze, but Hillary Clinton reserved her anger for a 45-minute rant aimed at
Prime Minister Netanyahu. Over the next five years, this pattern persisted —
administration officials largely absolved the Palestinians of responsibility
for incitement and terror while threatening to reassess relations with
Israel and calling the leader of a close ally a “chicken — .”

By distancing the United States from Israel, President Obama has created an
atmosphere that rewards the provocative behavior of the Palestinian
Authority. Absolving the guilty, blaming the innocent, and ignoring
Palestinian incitement is putting lives at risk. It is long past time for
President Obama and Hillary Clinton to call on President Abbas — clearly and
publicly — to work to stop the anti-Semitism and terror. And it is also long
past time for President Obama and Hillary Clinton to pledge — clearly and
publicly — to block the Palestinian campaign to bypass peace with Israel by
unilaterally declaring statehood.

Israelis are under attack as they seek to do nothing more than go about
their daily lives. It’s time for the United States to make clear that we
stand with Israel and reject President Abbas’s ugly tactics, which are
leaving Israel without a partner for peace and only leaving his people with
a future that is more uncertain, less peaceful, and less prosperous. With
the Middle East in flames, the best way to stabilize our role in the region
is to restore our ties with Israel as the Israeli people once again are
under attack.