The second kind, Palestinian terror, is criminal in its methods but justified in its cause. There is no connection between the man who committed suicide in Brussels’ Metro and the youth who stabs Israelis at Damascus Gate. A thousand speeches by Benjamin Netanyahu at AIPAC won’t confuse decent people. Palestinian terror is the resort of those who have no choice, a tool of the weak to gain their more-than-justified goals.

It’s true that this kind of terror also hurts innocent people brutally. Its means are similar too. Palestinians attacked planes when Osama Bin Laden was still a business administration student in King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, and Palestinian suicide terrorists preceded ISIS. But all this cannot cover up the difference: ISIS’s goals are insane, the Palestinians’ goals are justified.

What would you say to a Gazan youngster hesitating whether to join the resistance? Is there any point to his life and any chance for his future if he and his colleagues bow their heads submissively before their jailers? Is there anyone, in Israel or the rest of the world, who would remember their existence without the violent resistance that is tagged as terrorism? And their brothers in the West Bank — violence may not have given them any real achievements, but at least it raised their issue and put it on the agenda.

Let’s be honest about it: Had the Palestinians not hijacked airplanes in the early '70s, would anyone in the world know about their disaster? Be interested in their fate? True, nothing has been solved since then, but this is despite their desperate resort to terror, not because of it.

Israel has given the Palestinians and the Arab world a fateful lesson — it understands only force. Only force got Israel to return Sinai, only force led it to the Oslo talks, only by force will the Palestinian problem be solved. This force, in the case of people who have no army or air force, is terror.

The first 20 years of occupation, during which there was little terror, passed pleasantly, so it occurred to nobody to give the Palestinians even a few of their rights. Terror put these rights onto the agenda. Because of the first intifada, they reached Oslo.

The second intifada, which was more savage, brought disaster on them — they lost some of the world’s sympathy and some of the sympathy toward them in Israel. But terror was and remained their only weapon. They have no other. Even if they destroy their entire shabby weapons’ arsenal and swear to walk in the light of Mahatma Gandhi, they have no chance of getting what is theirs without terror.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.710588

Gideon Levy is getting more and more moronic by the day, or should I say by the column. This new column was an all-time low, but then again, he’s used to hitting new lows.

Yeah, supposedly Israel is part of the same “family” of evil states as the Nazis, but he’s careful to say, “But I’m not calling Israel a Nazi state just kind of Nazi”.

He claims the “reaction” to Elor Azaria proves Israel is an evil state. Uh, how? He’s on trial. He didn’t even claim that the public’s reaction is what proves it, but rather the “establishment” and “occupation regime” proves it. That makes no sense.

Then he claims the continuation of the occupation proves Israel is evil. Would someone say the same if the Allies were still occupying Nazi Germany because Nazi Germany refused to surrender?

...In the July 31, 2016, edition of Haaretz, he wrote a piece entitled: Stop Living In Denial, Israel Is An Evil State. Let us examine from whom the evil emanates: The State of Israel or the state of mind of Levy.

“An Evil State.” These are powerful words to use about any country. One might safely apply them to North Korea, for example, where all but party members live and work in slavery, penury, hunger and darkness. Even those at the top of the political class can fall foul of the tubby tyrant, and find themselves being eaten alive by dogs.....Come on. Admit it. North Korea is an evil country, if ever we saw one.

On the other hand, one might with full justification refer to Iran as evil, given that it has been the greatest exporter of terrorism for the longest continuous period of time, in the light of the novelty of the Da’esh phenomenon, and the disappearance of utterly-unlamented Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Iran, you will remember, breaks records with its rate of execution by hanging – not skilfully, but from the jibs of cranes, so that you need to read the Amnesty International website before and not after meals. The sorts of offenses that could see you strung up in Iran, such that one moment you are alive and kicking and the next kicking on your way to a slow and painful (and public) death, include being out-and-about-while-being-Sunni (Iran, you will recall is a piece of Shiite real estate), a homosexual, a juvenile delinquent (by the standards of the Ayatollocracy, at any rate), a listener to foreign broadcasts and other universally-acknowledged abhorrent crimes. (On August 5, 2016, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein , in a break from customary UNHCR Israel-bashing, condemned Iran for: “the application of overly broad and vague criminal charges, coupled with a disdain for the rights of the accused to due process and a fair trial [that had] led to a grave injustice”.) Evil-ish, at least, would you not say?

On the other hand, in Saudi Arabia you could be publicly beheaded in a town square for being Shia, a prostitute or an adulterer. Evil, pure and simple, no?

In Turkey, you might, whilst being an unapproved journalist, or a callow army conscript sent out of a Friday evening to stand guard on a bridge in Istanbul and for that condemned as a revolutionary traitor, survive, but you would then probably have to live (as it were) in prison until the new Sultan (Erdoghan) sees fit to release you – or not, until the day you are hanged, since he is threatening to bring back the death penalty (and to let the European Union also go hang). You would not even belong to a select group in Turkey, but be merely one of many thousands who have been rounded up in the few short weeks since the abortive coup inspired by who knows whom (or you know who). Not evil?

In dozens of countries across Africa and Asia, including the kleptocracy that is Russia, life is severely tenuous, by reason of the absence of the Rule of Law, or the non-existence of a free press able to express views however deprecatory they may be about the state. They, too, score significantly on the evil-ometer.

In the USA, you could be locked up longer than Nelson Mandela for being convicted as a spy for an allied country (Israel), if you were Jewish (and called Pollard), and the Separation of Powers (that should lie at the heart of every democracy) were trampled on by Secretary of State for Defence, Caspar W. Weinberger, in his wholly improper 46 page submission to the trial judge on March 3, 1987, the day before sentencing. Hellishly evil.