Yesterday, while all eyes were on a small café in Sydney (a long way from Rickmansworth), the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) casually mentioned that they’d foiled a plot to have a 31 year old Arab woman dressed up as a pregnant Jewish woman and enter Israel on false health grounds in order to blow Israelis up.
Between October and November of this year, security forces arrested a woman and four men, including Yasmin Shaaban of Jenin, and four residents of Atil, a neighborhood in Tul Karem.
Shaaban, a 31 year old woman, was appointed to be the bomber. She was going to dress up like a pregnant Jewish woman to get past security searches.
The plan was to get her an entry permit into Israel for medical reasons, and to use the permit to smuggle both herself and the bomb in.
As of this morning it’s been reported almost nowhere internationally (see google news screen shot, Israeli and Jewish focused news only).
So the #HowAPWouldReport headline of “Israeli Security Services Abort Prayed For Palestinian Baby Boom” which was brilliantly coined by Dave Bender on Facebook, isn’t even valid: they just don’t think it’s a story.
The current story on the top of the Associated Press’s list is “Israeli forces kill palestinian in west bank”: no need to give any further context in a headline of course, this is the AP. They did have an article up yesterday “A look at Israeli settler population growth”: perhaps they slipped the “baby boom” story in there? That one’s worthy of a full Fisking if anyone has the time. You can’t make this stuff up.
It’s long been my contention that if, as the world loves to do, we’re going to measure comparative body counts, we have to count all the unsuccessful attempts by the Palestinians to kill us, not just their vile triumphs.
And the next time someone asks you why we need a separation barrier and why we need to conduct security operations in disputed territory and why we can’t just withdraw and have “peace”, remember this and the many, many, many other plots to kill us you never heard about.
And meanwhile, as the juggxrnaught of social media feelgoodery rumbles on down the road of #IllRideWithYou am I going to be looking with some suspicion at the baby bumps of women around me?
And one more thing: yesterday my friend, Kay Wilson, the survivor of an absolutely horrific machete terror attack on her and her friend in a forest near Jerusalem wrote this:
The Sydney siege is over. But terror does not conclude just because an event has come to an end. The exposure to a prolonged threat of death is a life-changing, experience that changes a persons soul; forever. The psychological damage is deep, insidious, life-long, yet it is unseen and forgotten to the world around. Terrorism is what I faced on a personal level. Terrorism and the threat of death is what Israelis face every single day of our existence.
When we know that people around us are so desperate to kill us and our children that they will pretend to be pregnant, please forgive us if we’re unwilling to lower our guard and fully accept nonsense like #IllRideWithYou.
I’ll write more about Kay soon as the anniversary of her attempted murder and the murder of her friend is coming up. You can read her reaction to another terror attack here.
