ZOA Urges Israel and U.S. to Take Specific Actions Against Arab Terror
Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:
ZOA mourns the deaths of five more innocent Israelis and Ukrainians yesterday, who were murdered by a brutal Palestinian Arab Fatah terrorist in B’nei Brak, Israel. The Fatah terrorist – previously convicted for his prior terror and illegal arms dealing activities – rampaged through the streets of the religious community in B’nei Brak, shooting innocent civilians with an M-16 military assault rifle. Yesterday’s five innocent victims were: Rabbi Avishai Yehezkel, 29, a yeshivah teacher and father of a two-year-old son (whom Rabbi Yehezkel shielded with his body) and husband whose widowed wife is pregnant with the young couple’s second child; Rabbi Yaakov Shalom, 36, a husband and a father of five children; Amir Khouri, a heroic Arab Christian Israeli policeman who bravely killed the terrorist before Amir died of his wounds; and two Ukrainian citizens, Victor Sorokopot and Dimitri Mitrik who previously thought they were safer in Israel than in Ukraine. May there names and the lives they lived forever be a blessing.
As always, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party Fatah and Hamas grotesquely rejoiced about these horrendous murders of innocent Jews and others. Palestinian Arabs gave out candies in Gaza, Shechem and Jenin, near the perpetrator’s village in the “West Bank” (the recent de-Judaized name for Judea/Samaria).
We are again heartbroken. Arab terrorists have now murdered eleven innocent souls (Jews, Druze and an Arab Christian) and wounded other innocents in just the past week. (See “ZOA Mourns Jews & Druze Murdered by Islamist Terrorists; and Condemns Sec’y Blinken for Promoting Policies Encouraging Anti-Jewish Terror,” Mar. 28, 2022.)
It has been over 100 years of the same Arab Islamist terror, since Arabs brutally stabbed and hacked to death 57 Jews in Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1920 and 1921.
If U.S. government officials are serious about their words of condolence and their offers to assist the Israeli government, then the Biden administration needs to massively overhaul its harmful policies (touted by Blinken just this week).
Specifically, the Biden administration must:
- Stop calling for a Palestinian Arab state on Israel’s lawful land, which would surely be an Iranian-proxy Hamas-Fatah terror state that enables increased terror against innocent Israelis.
- Discontinue the half a billion dollars that the Biden administration gave to Palestinian Arab “projects” this year, which frees up hundreds of millions of dollars for the Palestinian Authority to continue financing its “pay to slay” bounties, rewarding Arab terrorists for murdering innocent Jews and others.
- Stop U.S. officials’ – such as Thomas Nides’ – discriminatory, outrageous condemnations and pressures to prohibit indigenous Jews from lawfully building homes in Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria. Instead, start condemning the massive lawless Arab building on Jewish land, which encourages further Arab lawlessness.
- Stop condemning and undermining lawful Israeli court orders and actions.
- Stop offering million-dollar grants to phony human rights groups to malign Israel.
- End Ambassador Thomas Nides’ unconscionable boycott of Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria.
- Stop promoting entry into Israel of Gazans, many of whom are affiliated with and acting for Hamas.
- And abort the disastrous Iran deal negotiations for a deal that is even worse than the 2005 deal. The U.S. is planning to give Iran $90 billion of immediate sanctions relief (which will enrich Hamas and Hezbollah) and to remove sanctions on the IRGC terrorists.
There is also much work for Israel’s government to do. Among other steps, Israel needs to: seize the massive caches of illegal arms possessed by Arab terrorists; ignore the outrageous threats of the Islamist, anti-Israel Ra’am party in the government; stop destroying yeshivas and Jewish homes in Judea/Samaria – and instead address Jewish security and massive illegal Arab building; expel convicted Arab terrorists instead of allowing them to be released into the population and then murder more innocent Jews and others; reverse the plan to give 20,000 work permits to Gazans to enter Israel; end the unlawful Bedouin take-over of large swaths of the Negev; and build Jewish homes in E-1 and other strategic areas that the current Israeli government refused to proceed with, to appease the Biden administration’s unconscionable demands.
Appeasement only brings more terror.