Opinion
In his autobiography, Chaim Witz (aka KISS star Gene Simmons) recalls how, during his childhood in Israel, his father always kept an Uzi on the kitchen table. His mother was one of only two of her family to survive the Holocaust. Both Witz parents were under no illusions about what could happen when Jews were unarmed.
Eighty years later, young people in Israel thought they were past all that. On October 7, 2023, they even held a massive peace festival near the border with Gaza. Hundreds of them were raped, tortured and murdered by Palestinians.
Israelis have re-learned a harsh lesson about living surrounded by Arabs. They’re not taking chances again.
Naturally, Australia’s taxpayer-funded Marxist collective public broadcaster is clutching its collective pearls.
Spurred by fear and grief, and encouraged by some members of the national government, regular Israelis are taking up arms for personal protection in record numbers.
Many Israelis now won’t leave their homes without a weapon.
Many Israelis in southern Israel didn’t have guns on October 7. They’re now either dead or hostages. On the other hand, at Nir Am Kibbutz, an ex-IDF soldier grabbed his gun, rallied other men, and put up a stout defence. “We started to kill everyone who came to the fence.” Nir Am was spared the slaughter that ravaged Kibbutz Be’eri.
Lesson learned.
Leave it to the ABC to spout Hamas propaganda and wring its hands over the poor widdle Palestinians.
More than 30,000 people have died in Gaza and there’s a rapid escalation of violence in the West Bank, but many in Israel say they are shoring up their own safety.
Note that that figure is entirely based on claims from Hamas, who’ve lied about nearly everything else, and doesn’t distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians. In any case — so what? It’s war. Can these leftist clowns name a single war where civilians didn’t die?
Watch for the leftist sleight-of-hand — and blatant violation of journalistic ethics — next.
Shortly after the attack, Israel’s extreme right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir launched an “emergency operation” to arm as many Israeli citizens as possible by loosening gun ownership laws.
“A weapon saves lives,” Mr Ben-Gvir said at the time. “We saw that during a terrorist incident, those who saved the situation in real-time and saved lives by neutralising the terrorist, were people qualified to carry private firearms with a license.”
Did you pick it up? “Extreme right-wing”. According to whom? What does that even mean, anyway? It’s nothing more than the journalist’s biased opinion — which should have no place in a supposed reporting piece.
In any case, is Ben-Gvir wrong? As Nir Am proved, when Israelis are armed, Arab terrorists don’t get away with their savagery.
But no ABC piece on Israel is complete without the mandatory hand-wringing over “Palestinians”.
But the proliferation of firearms among the state’s Jewish citizens is frightening for some, especially Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 per cent of the country’s population.
“For some”? As Margaret Thatcher famously challenged George Negus: “name them”.
“[Israelis] look on Palestinians as enemies,” says Adi Mansour, a human rights lawyer at Adalah, the leading legal organisation for Israel’s Arab citizens.
Ah, yes: the fellow who previously distinguished himself by waving a Palestinian flag at a protest in Haifa, demanding the early release of a Palestinian who went on a stabbing rampage in Jerusalem, defending a Palestinian “youth organisation” whose members boast of their work in “Intifada”, and swinging into action for Arab students expelled for posting Hamas propaganda.
Obviously, the most unbiased source the ABC could find.
“In (Israeli) society itself (there) is a perception of the enemy within. A perception that within us, in the streets, in the villages and the cities, lives an enemy and that we should always be cautious of.”
Yes, well, Kibbutz Be’eri would be an object lesson in that, now wouldn’t it?
Cue typical glass-jawed Arab self-pity.
“Palestinians are now under the threat of guns continually from [the] people taking up arms under the notion, or under the idea, that Palestinians are a threat.
“In many times, [Palestinians] are perceived as terrorists based on stereotypes and on a wider hostile understanding of Palestinians as the enemy.
Gee, I wonder why? October 7 was just the bloody tip of the Palestinian scimitar.
Israel says there’s also been an increase in planned and actual attacks by Palestinians, both in Israel and the West Bank, since October 7.
An Israeli military spokesperson told Foreign Correspondent there had been more than 700 attempted attacks in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Gaza war.
ABC Australia
Yes, but it’s the Arabs who are the real victims, according to the ABC.