Purim, and the patronizing paternalism of Presidents, Prime Ministers & “Progressives”

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
06 March '11

I’ve been organising our community Purim party for many years now and that means that from early January until Purim itself, our house gradually fills up with more and more painted scenery and enormous papier mache figures, sequins on every surface and glitter in the food. The excitement of the building preparations for the festival is, however, tempered with the apprehension of experience. Who can forget those awful post Oslo years when so many Purim celebrations were blighted by vicious terror attacks?

In 1996 over sixty people died in the eight days preceding Purim. I’d just finished constructing an enormous multi-coloured circus tent in our communal dining room when the news came over the radio of the bombing at the Dizengoff Centre in Tel Aviv in which 13 people were killed. The day before, 19 had died in a bus bombing in Jerusalem and the week before that one person had died in a bombing in Ashkelon, one in an attack in the French Hill area of the capital and 26 people had been killed in another bus bombing on the same line in Jerusalem.

In proportional terms, that would have been the equivalent to over 600 people murdered by terrorists in one week in Britain. On an American scale, it would have meant over 3,000 dead. Between the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993 and the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, two hundred and sixty-nine people were killed in Israel by Palestinian terrorists. For Britain, that’s the equivalent of almost three thousand people and for Americans, over 13,500. Would either British or American governments have continued to engage in peace talks with an enemy which was taking such a toll on their civilian populations? Would their voters, their media or their politicians have allowed them to do so?

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