by Hugh Fitzgerald
Arab terror has been part of reality for Israeli Jews since long before any "occupation"
The Palestinians like to justify their terrorism against Israelis as being prompted by the Jewish state’s control of the “occupied West Bank.” But before Israel came into possession of the West Bank (the name that Jordanians gave to those parts of Judea and Samaria they had seized in the 1948 war) in 1967, when tiny Israel was even tinier than it is today, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, there were hundreds of terror attacks on the Jewish state, from Jordan in the east, from Egypt in the south, and from Syria in the north between 1949 and 1967. Most ended with Israelis being wounded; 55 of those attacks resulted in dead Israelis. The “occupied West Bank” did not exist, but there was plenty of terrorism. A recent posting by a Canadian doctor about a particularly atrocious attack, the Scorpion Pass Massacre in 1954, which was launched from Jordan’s “West Bank,” merits reprinting. The world needs to be reminded of what life was like for Israelis before they acquired, after the Six-Day War, a minimum of strategic depth that they have no intention of relinquishing. The original article can be found here: “Remembering The Scorpion Pass Massacre of 1954,” by Jacob Sivak, Algemeiner, March 7, 2023:
…The attack was carried out in the middle of the day on an Egged bus (Israel’s largest bus company) containing 14 passengers plus a driver. The attackers shot at the bus as it was traveling very slowly around one of the hairpin bends, killing the driver. They then boarded the bus and shot most of the passengers. Eleven riders (ten passengers and the driver) were killed and three passengers were injured. One of the injured a nine year-old boy, Chaim Fuerstenberg, survived in a semi-conscious and paralysed state for 32 years, dying in 1986.
Ephraim Fuerstenberg had been on vacation in Eilat with his wife Hannah and two children, Chaim, nine and Miri, five. Ephraim was killed first, then Hannah, who was raped and then killed. The two children were protected by the body of an Israeli soldier who threw himself on them as the attack began. When Chaim asked his sister if the attackers had gone, he was overheard and one of the assailants came back and shot him.
The tracks left by the assailants indicated that they came from Jordan, but the perpetrators were never identified. A safer more central route to Eilat was built as a result of the attack and today the pass is used for recreational purposes such as bicycle races
While the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and her Arab neighbors ended the active shooting war between them, it didn’t stop cross-border attacks on Israelis from Gaza and the West Bank. Until 1967 and the Six Day War, Gaza was administered by Egypt and the West Bank, including the old city of Jerusalem, was governed by Jordan. For 19 years there was no occupation (and there was no Palestine). The Scorpion Pass Massacre was one of many attacks on Israelis that took place before the occupation. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs lists 55 deadly attacks between 1953 and 1966, refuting the charge that terror attacks by Palestinians are a result of the occupation.
Hundreds of other Arab attacks resulted in wounded, but not dead, Israelis. Were Israel to allow itself to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, in exchange for a peace treaty with a newly-created Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, it would again be in a state of maximum vulnerability, without the slightest strategic depth. The Palestinians have already broken the solemn undertakings they agreed to in the Oslo Accords. Their model of treaty-making is the agreement – a “truce treaty” — that Muhammad made with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D., which was to have lasted for 10 years. But within 18 months, sensing that his forces had grown strong enough, Muhammad broke the treaty and attacked the Meccans. Given that Al-Hudaibiyya is the model for all subsequent treaty-making by Muslims, why should Israel give up its current defensible borders for the sake of a peace treaty that the Palestinians will be certain to break whenever they feel sufficiently strong?
Hugh Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/the-scorpion-pass-massacre-a-brief-history
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