80 Days to Go
Do People Who Lynch Jews Deserve UN Recognition?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

There are now 80 days to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly and the vote on recognizing Palestinian statehood. Are the Palestinians ready for that should it be granted? Perhaps not.

On Sunday of this week Nir Nachshon, a driver for a moving company here was on his way home to Ma’ale Adumim from Jerusalem when he ran into traffic in the area of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In an effort to get around the traffic he consulted his GPS system and, to his regret, when following the shortcut ended up in the East Jerusalem village of Issawiya, less than 4 miles from where I am drafting this piece.

As he entered the village someone saw his car and screamed, in Arabic, “Jew, Jew,” and then the trouble began. Speaking to reporters from his hospital bed at Hadassah Hospital – Ein Kerem, after the incident he said “they started throwing rocks and cement blocks right into the car. I realized I was going to die and I started thinking this isn’t the way I want to die.”

When asked about the incident, Nachshon said that just as he made the turn he realized he was in the wrong place but didn’t realize how big an issue it would become. As he said: ”This is Jerusalem, this is home.”

The initial assailant kept calling out the words “Jew, Jew” and each time more people came out of the alleyways to throw whatever they could lay their hands on directly at the car.

Fortunately, some righteous person, Darwish Darwish, a local Palestinian Arab, saw what was happening and understood that Nachshon’s life was in danger. He then plucked Nachshon from the car and took him to his house. He wiped the blood that was now streaming down Nachshon’s face with a wet towel and then told Nachshon that it was not safe for him to remain there. Darwish, a muchtar of the village, had his sons take Nachshon out a back door into a car and drive him to the outskirts of the village where he was turned over to Israeli authorities and taken to the hospital.

In an act of incredible humanity, Darwish later went to Ma’ale Adumim to visit Nachshon and apologize for what happened. He said “I condemn this act; I ask for your forgiveness and invite you to return to the village.”

So the story ends on a happy note but could have ended quite differently save for the actions of one righteous person who saw the enemy and realized “they are us.”

No doubt some people will say Nachshon should not have been in the village at all. But does that address the question? Is making a wrong turn in Jerusalem something that should put our lives in danger? If the anger of the mob living in such close proximity to the rest of us is such that it can boil over in an instant and threaten our lives, can we accept that?

For sure it would be wrong to label an entire people with negative adjectives based on the actions of a few. But this is not the first time that something like this has happened and it probably will not be the last either. The problem goes deep into the educational system where Palestinian Arabs are taught from the earliest years that all of Israel is land that has been stolen from them, that the struggle to retake the land will end only when victory is assured and the we, Jews who have lived here for 3,500 years, have no rightful claim to the land.

I have argued before that the concept of two states for two peoples living side by side in security and safety is something I can support. But events of this type prove that moving forward on this track unilaterally is not in the best interests of either party and a UN vote in September in favor of recognition would be a major problem for Israel. People who attempt to lynch Jews for simply driving into their neighborhoods are, ipso facto, not ready for statehood and self-government.