On June 29, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at an Institute for National Security Research (INSS) conference titled “In the Absence of Progress toward a Final Status Agreement: Options for Israel.” Inevitably, Netanyahu addressed the abduction of the three teens, who — it was learned just a few hours later — were the victims of a deadly terrorist attack. He presented the abduction as the by-product of the dying Sykes-Picot agreement, which demarcated the British and French areas of control in the former Ottoman territories of the Middle East after World War I, as well as of the death of the secular dictatorships in the Arab world.
In other words, according to Netanyahu, the murder of the three teens who were hitchhiking in the heart of the West Bank has nothing to do with the Israeli occupation. Brutal terrorist attacks against settlers have nothing whatsoever to do with the struggle between the Palestinian national movement and the Zionist movement. It has nothing at all to do with the increasingly extreme conflict between Jewish and Muslim religious zealots, both of whom believe that land is more important than people. The people responsible for the abduction and murder of the three youths should be sought in the Arab Spring, which brought radical Islam upon us.
