We Need To Kill Lots Of Jews, But Not So Many That We Lose Sympathy

By Mahmoud Abbas

Balance is the key to the successful conduct of any enterprise. Give too much weight to only one set of interests, and the entire project will be in jeopardy. For us Palestinians, the challenge since at least the 1960’s has been to kill as many Jews as we can, but not so many that it seems excessive and we lose the enthusiastic backing of the international community.

In other words, our national mission has to be cultivating the role of the underdog, the outgunned, the victim, and to use that role as the pretext for pursuing manifestly genocidal ambitions, but only to the point where those ambitions are still plausibly deniable. Overdoing it risks blurring the roles of victim and victimizer, so we have to be careful to kill only as many Jews at once as the world considers reasonable.

Of course that number does not remain constant, fluctuating as it does with various events that bring a waxing and waning of international interest in Jewish welfare. That unpredictability accounts for many of the optics failures of the Palestinian national cause over the last five decades. And I will be the first to agree that over the years we could have done a better job gauging and managing our adherence to that line. But with the help of better statistical tools, we hope to do just that. From now on look for a more consistent Palestinian approach to officially condoned violence, one that more readily strives to kill the highest number of Jews we can while still not triggering a level of international disapproval that would actually hurt our interests.

We intuitively know this when we focus our attacks on uniformed members of Israeli security forces. And targeting “settlers” – even unarmed or pregnant ones – in itself is not enough to force our supporters to distance themselves. But a few too many people targeted just for being Jewish and we can find ourselves less flush with international donor cash than before. It is a tricky algorithm.

Timing plays a role, as well. If Jews are targeted elsewhere in the world, it is considered bad form to do the same to Jews here. But timing also works in our favor: when the brutality of groups such as the Islamic State is on full display, we can get away with more murder and mayhem, because our behavior seems tame by comparison. So we have to take all of these factors into account in setting the level of murderous violence we direct at Jews. It can be hard to calibrate, but it is in our national interest. Just like killing Jews.