Lying To Their People: School Bus? What School Bus?

People who live outside of Israel, Jewish and not, ask all the time, "Why can't you all just get along?" or words to that effect. Sometimes they simply short cut straight to "You (meaning Israel) need to do something to make peace." In diplomatese, it is frequently pronounced as "Israel needs to take bold steps to advance the peace process."

You'll notice that almost no one asks what the Palestinians need to do to "make peace."

Peace is like dancing -- it takes two.

One does not make peace with a governing body which educates its people to slaughter you. The United States did not run after al Qaeda following 9/11, crying "peace, peace!" but instead bombed Afghanistan into the Stone Age. Speaking of disproportional force....

The British did not rush to the conference table, with warm invitations to the IRA to join them for tea after the Irish "freedom fighters" bombed London. Instead, they invaded Ulster, imposed martial law, arrested people without cause, detained and tortured anyone they felt like, and threw up an Apartheid Wall to separate Catholic citizens of the same country from the Protestant pro-British milieu.

Yet these world powers, among others, have been strangely silent over the barrage of missiles and rockets hurled by the Palestinians at Israeli civilians these last couple of weeks.

And the icing on the cake came from the Palestinian Authority, who told its population that the perfidious Jews are making a big deal out of nothing in order to attack the righteous Palestinian people [insert sarcasm here]:

"Israel is a country that was founded on aggression and colonialism, and it lives on the continuation of bloodshed, war and violence. The racist Israeli apartheid state is incapable of turning to peace and coexistence between nations... This aggression is currently focused on Gaza, under the pretext of a shell being fired at an Israeli bus. The [school] bus wasn't that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people."

"Pretext?" Hardly.

A Palestinian fires an anti-tank missile, which has to be sighted on its target, which is a clearly labeled school bus which had just discharged a group of students, and fires it -- this is a deliberate targeting of children, and beyond being criminal, is morally indefensible.

And the PA knows it -- which is why this particular rant omitted any mention that it was a school bus or any mention of the child critically wounded in the attack.

It's hard for Palestinian officials to sputter indignantly at the camera, while seeking the moral high ground, about "Palestinian schools being attacked [because rockets were launched from them]" when you yourself are targeting Israeli school kids in school buses.

This same pronouncement was also wholly devoid of any mention of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks on civilian towns and cities, which drove over one million Israelis into bomb shelters for the better part of a week. Since the week-long barrage was what the Israeli military was responding to before the attack on the school bus, the omission of this critical fact is an enormous lie of omission.

Carpet bombing and then re-occupying all of the Gaza Strip would be an appropriate response, a la Coalition Forces in Iraq, or the British invasion of Ulster. After all, if it's permissible for the Great World Powers to bomb indiscriminately and occupy countries tens of thousands of miles from them, I'm sure they'd understand our taking similar steps. Right.

But the Israeli government, unlike the Palestinians and the neighboring war-mongers-in-chief, isn't looking for a war.

We may end up with one. Judging by the steady build up of weaponry by Hezbollah and Hamas, its only a matter of time.

But it is moments like this that the world press needs to cover, instead of ignore: one cannot make peace with a leadership which consistently lies to its own people about the state of the conflict, playing the "victim card" when they themselves are historically the aggressors. This creates a scenario where, because of generations of lies, the leadership cannot compromise, cannot make peace, and cannot educate its people to compromise in favor of peace.

This is why we can't make peace with the Palestinians. There really is no peace partner on the Palestinian side. There is no real desire for peace, but simply a desire to negotiate or war for the greater advantage. The Palestinians have been taught nothing by their corrupt leadership but hatred of the "other," to extol murder, to glorify war, and to seek revenge for an invented victimhood. Peace could be at hand, but the Palestinian mafia governing its people rejects it every time for maximalist demands and strident calls for killing Jews and destroying Israel.