As America approached its national holiday this year, Israel and world Jewry were plunged into mourning for three students who were abducted and murdered by members of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Thirty-eight years ago, on July 4, 1976, jubilation greeted the news that an Israeli commando raid had freed 102 fellow citizens held hostage by Palestinian terrorists at an airport in Entebbe, Uganda. These different outcomes for the same kind of villainy directed at Jewish targets prompts us to ask which side is winning this unilateral war.
People attend the funeral of the three Israeli teens who were abducted and killed in the West Bank, during their joint funeral in the Israeli city of Modi'in, 01 July 2014. European Pressphoto Agency
Some would say that Arab violence against Jews is no villainy at all, but merely an alternate form of national politics. Representatives of the American government seeking peace in the Middle East have been shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders as though dealing with equivalent societies with an equal investment in territorial compromise. In the arts, the Metropolitan Opera in New York this season plans to present a work that gives sympathetic voice to Palestinian terrorists who in 1985 shoved a disabled American off a cruise ship and into the ocean because he was a Jew. Reflecting the abjuration of evil, the opera is called "The Death of Klinghoffer" instead of "The Murder of Klinghoffer."
Now that Jewish suspects have been apprehended in the Jerusalem murder of 16-year-old Arab Mohammed Abu Khudair, there are those who would cite the parallel between this heinous crime and the recent murders of Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Frenkel as proof of moral and political equivalence between the two societies. One anticipates that in the coming days the standard outlets for such views will offer standard justifications for Arab rioting and condemnations of Jewish extremism as part of the same alleged cycle of violence.
But are the situations comparable?
Arab rioters did not wait for the identification or apprehension of suspects in the killing of Mohammed Abu Khudair to begin destroying Jewish life and property. One of their first targets was Jerusalem's new light-rail system that connects Jewish and Arab sectors of the city. In their own communities, murderers of Israelis enjoy support, encouragement, adulation. News of the abduction of three Israeli boys had no sooner hit the Internet on June 13 than Arab celebrants were handing out candies and posting three-fingered salutes, called Gilad Shalits, for the Israeli soldier seized by Hamas and held for five years until "swapped" in 2011 for 1,027 Arab prisoners whose crimes had included the killing of 569 Israelis. The celebrants of mid-June were mocking the value that Jews place on individual life, one that contrasts so sharply with the value they place on taking Jewish life. Three Shalits would have given them three times the bargaining power had the abduction not ended with the boys being shot instead. Almost a month after the murder of the Jewish boys, the Arab perpetrators are still on the loose.
In startling contrast, Israeli police instantly distinguished among several false leads to track down the Arab victim's suspected killers. Some Israelis had already denounced the presumed Jewish seekers of vengeance, with neither side waiting for formal indictment much less due process before engaging in self-recrimination on one hand and accusation on the other. The identification of Jewish suspects by the Jerusalem police triggered instantaneous condemnations: Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, who heads the Yeshiva at Elon Moreh, said Jewish law calls for capital punishment for crimes of murder, citing first the crime against the Israeli Arab and then the crime against the Jewish students.
Speaking at the funeral of the three Jewish boys on July 1, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion." He made the same allusion to political and moral asymmetry four days later in his message of condolence to the Abu Khudair family, pledging that the crime against their son would be punished because "[that is] the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don't. We condemn them and we put them on trial and we'll put them in prison." It is one of the ironies of Israel that Jewish parents whose children are murdered by Arabs are not guaranteed justice as surely as Arabs whose children are murdered by Jews.
The problem of evil may be universal, but Jews have faced evil in an existential and political form to a degree that makes it different in kind. In reclaiming their land, Jews acquired the ability to defend what they create, and perhaps by their example to inspire others to resist criminal forces. In 1957, Golda Meir, who was later to become Israel's prime minister, told an American audience that peace would come "when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us." To pretend otherwise is to fail those Arab children no less than the Israeli schoolboys who looked forward to a long and useful life.
Ms. Wisse, research professor of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard University, is the author, most recently, of "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor" (Princeton, 2013).
