On March 11, 1978, Dalal Mughrabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian woman, led a group of 13 terrorists from Lebanon by boat and landed on an Israeli beach between the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa. Realizing that they had missed their target destination of Tel Aviv, the group casually ate lunch on the beach, then ran into nature photographer Gail Rubin, a New Yorker and the niece of a U.S. senator. They asked her for directions to Tel Aviv and then Mughrabi shot Rubin point blank.
They flagged down a taxi, killed its occupants and began driving to Tel Aviv. En route, they hijacked a bus full of civilians and proceeded to shoot Kalashnikovs and toss grenades at passing vehicles. They killed one of the bus passengers, tossed the body from the vehicle and carried on.
They commandeered a second bus, piling the surviving passengers from the first vehicle onto the second one, amassing 70 hostages. After blasting through successive barricades, the bus was finally stopped by a roadblock just outside the northern edge of Tel Aviv. The terrorists launched a firefight with sub-machine guns, grenades and explosives against ill-prepared and lightly armed officers. When the battle ended, 37 Israelis and one American, among them 13 children, were dead. Another 71 were wounded.
It remained the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history until October 7.
On International Women’s Day 2020, the official Palestinian Authority TV celebrated Mughrabi and other female terrorists: “They are the mothers of the leaders and the sisters of the heroes. They are the praiseworthy rebels who have carried the weapons and created generations of educated people.” A photo was tagged: “Heroic Martyr Dalal Mughrabi.”
Today, throughout Palestine, Mughrabi’s photo adorns posters and T-shirts. “Sisters of Dalal” groups exist on university campuses. In 2010, a town square was named in her honor. In 2017, a women’s center was named in honor of Mughrabi, funded in part by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and the government of Norway.
“We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” the New York Times quoted a member of the Fatah Central Committee saying at the dedication. “For us she is not a terrorist [but] a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”
A 22-year-old who attended the ceremony said, “Dalal sacrificed for her country and is a symbol for every Palestinian girl.”
There is nothing unusual in Palestinian society about the treatment of Mughrabi’s memory. The celebration of Palestinian “martyrs” is at the heart of the ongoing conflict and is part of a comprehensive strategy of incitement, of inculcating especially in the young a sense of the rightness of violence and a legitimacy of maximalist “resistance,” even as an alternative to negotiated peace. Palestinians from the youngest ages are encouraged to admire those who have died for the cause, to aspire to emulate them and, not coincidentally, to develop an intensively nurtured grievance-based loathing of Israelis and Jews.
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As a Palestinian woman, it pains me to confirm every syllable of the above. After Israeli hostages were shot in the head, Israel is facilitating polio vaccines in Gaza. The stark contrast between the people who value life and the people who value death is so remarkably clear. I grew up valuing death. I understand that mindset. I was born and raised and lived that mindset. Those of you who have never seen it are loathed to believe it’s true because it’s just too evil. It can’t be real. Humans are not like that. I envy you. I would love to live in the head of a person who does not intimately and viscerally understand that this is the devastating truth. The devastating reality. The people whose lives are in danger do not have the same luxury as you. We can’t pretend it’s not real. Like every person in Israel, I know it’s real. Like them, I feel the cold steel on my neck everyday. Also like them, I know what it feels like to scream for help and to have people’s eyes skim past yours to settle empathetically on the the evil behind you. How much must we scream? How much must we bleed? When will the world start to see that as they ignore our cries and our blood, theirs will be next?open.substack.com/pub/pat604john…
Sultan Abu al-Einein, an adviser to Abbas on civil society organizations and a Fatah Central Committee member, said in a 2016 interview with the Palestinian news site Donia al-Watan:
If you ask me my blunt position, I would say — every place you find an Israeli, slit his throat. Likewise, I am against talks, negotiations, meetings, and normalization in all its forms with the Israeli occupation.
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