On Monday, the Washington Post carried this story about a group of seven friends from Jenin who had formed a theater troupe under the direction of an Israeli director in the early post-Oslo days. Only two of them didn’t eventually become terrorists, and most are now dead.
The story has two especially galling aspects (beyond the fact that not a single one of the terrorists’ victims is identified by name). First, one friend who stayed out of trouble, and now works as a stone mason, feels the need to apologize for not being a terrorist:
“I’m not different than them,” Kaneri said, watching his 3-year-old daughter play with a kitten next to him on a living room sofa. “Resistance comes in many forms. Everybody chose to resist in his own way. Not everybody who resists becomes a martyr. It’s not like the only condition is to carry a gun. Maybe helping your family is part of the resistance.
“I am the man of the house,” he added. “I support the wife of my martyred brother, the wife of my wanted brother and their five kids, my mother, my younger brother, my wife, my two children. I built this house and moved them here. Don’t you think that’s part of the resistance?”
Second, the Israeli son of the director of the theater group is actually proud that he worked with the future terrorists:
“Some people ask me if my mother failed,” Mer Khamis said on recent night, sitting at the kitchen table of his house in the Israeli port city of Haifa. “They say, ‘She wanted to make actors of them and they became terrorists.’ “From my perspective, it’s a success that people stood up and fought for their rights,” said Mer Khamis, who said he recently lost his contract to work in Israeli theaters because of his pro-Palestinian sympathies. “Arna told them to fight for their rights.”
This is the sort of comment that makes one wonder whether post-Olso “peace” projects funded by European and American governments and philanthropists ultimately actually served to encourage Palestinian terrorism, by putting idealistic young Palestinians primarily in touch with Israelis whose ideological outlook was closer to Yasser Arafat’s than to Yitzchak Rabin’s.
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