The ordinariness of day-in, day-out terror

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War
02 January 11

The Israel Security Agency published figures Thursday reporting on terror attacks against Israel during 2010. 798 attacks defined as acts of terror were reported in the year just ended. This amounts to more than two acts of terror every day of the year. The report counts 9 people, unarmed and innocent victims, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists.

Reminding us that terror happens not in a vacuum but because there are terrorists, the Hamas regime in Gaza issued its own press release yesterday boldly, courageously claiming credit for seven of those Israeli deaths (see this Palestinian news agency report). Their self-congratulation, as far as we can see, has gone entirely unreported.

No unusually dramatic acts of terror happened this week - just more of the ongoing too-familiar toll of bombings, shootings and the calculated sowing of fear. These events did not rate highly enough on the scale of significance or newsworthiness to be reported where you live or even where we do. But for the victims directly impacted by them, this week's acts of terror were a private nightmare. Week after week, year after year, for as long as the astonishing revival of the Jewish homeland in the last decades of the nineteenth century has been underway, the steady drumbeat of terror has been the background to the attempts by people of goodwill to achieve co-existence and peaceful relations.

Among this past week's attacks:

(Read full "The ordinariness of day-in, day-out terror")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.