Video: Why West Bank Palestinians Not Handing Out Candy After Itamar Massacre

The video is in Hebrew, but if you don't understand Hebrew, jump ahead to the summary below.



Hat tip to Yaacov Lozowitz, who provides the following summary of the report by Shlomi Eldar:

I've been reporting in the Palestinian territories for many years, and the responses I recorded today in Shchem (Nablus) really surprised me. They seem to show a substantial distance between the PA leadership and regular people. The leadership (he cites Abbas and others) are muttering a condemnation of the murder, mostly not in Arabic and not in front of their public, and then they're condemning Israeli settlements. Nothing new here. On the other hand, I went to Shchem today, and was very surprised. People on the street were willing to condemn the murder unequivocally, in Arabic and in Hebrew, with no embarrassment, in front of the camera, and even identify themselves. [He shows some examples]. I've been covering the Palestinian territories for years, but this I've never seen before. In the middle of town, publicly, people had no compunctions openly to condemn the murder of children.

At this point one of the two anchormen asks if this is real, or perhaps a one-off encounter with unusual townsmen. Eldar insists: the interviews I've just shown were representative, and I made lots of them, not only the snippets I just screened. Moreover, I didn't find anyone saying the usual things about how it's settlers and Israelis and IDF violence and all that. The atmosphere in Shchem today is that the murder of the Fogel family was a terrible crime.

Check out Yaacov's post, where he gives 5 possibilities to explain why the reaction of the Palestinian Arabs to the Fogel family massacre is different than what they've said in the past..

Technorati Tag: Fogel Family.