The terrorism plaguing Israel has been described in the media, perhaps for lack of a better term, as a “terror ‎wave.” This implies that what is happening is somehow a sudden and unexpected occurrence that has come to afflict us without warning. This is untrue. The warnings were crystal clear and have been ‎present for decades, visibly and scarily disturbing for anyone who cared enough to take notice.‎

The Palestinian Authority has been demonizing and dehumanizing Jews since it was established with the ‎Oslo Accords in 1993. This has been evident to anyone who has been watching their TV broadcasts and ‎reading their newspapers, as Itamar Marcus, director of the NGO Palestinian Media Watch, has been ‎documenting since the 1990s. ‎

In a 2012 interview, Marcus stated: “The tragedy is that the Palestinians were much ‎closer to peace with Israel before the Oslo Accords. An ocean has developed because of hate promotion ‎by the Palestinian Authority.” Marcus estimated that chances for peace may have been better in 1996, ‎when after decades of contact with Israelis, a poll of Palestinians showed that 78% considered ‎Israel to be positive in democracy and human rights. That figure sounds like science fiction today.‎

Two decades later, there is a generation of people raised on an unadulterated diet of ‎hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, courtesy of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and their ilk. In kindergartens ‎and schools, in the written and electronic press, on TV and especially on children’s TV, Jews have been called ‎monkeys and pigs that need to be killed. Schoolbooks show Israel erased from the map, history lessons deny the existence of Jewish nationhood and never teach the Holocaust, ‎monuments are erected in honor of terrorist murders of Jews in city squares, and terrorists are rewarded with fat ‎salaries. Documents show that terrorists responsible for some of the worst attacks on Israelis pocketed ‎salaries of $52,000 to $78,000 in 2013. Former PA Prisoner Affairs Minister Ashraf al-Ajrami’s ‎comment: “They are seen as heroes and we are obligated to their welfare.” Is it any wonder that the ‎perpetrators of the stabbings and shootings are all young terrorists, as young as 15 and not much ‎older than 20, when this is what they have been fed their entire lives? ‎

All the above is sponsored by Western taxpayer money and expertly executed with the aid of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. ‎In this way, the international community actively aids and abets the terror and ultimately the murder of ‎Jews in Israel. ‎

There is a tragic, almost unbearable irony in the fact that changing Israeli governments have allowed this ‎demonization and dehumanization to go on, unhindered, for decades, with the lethal and harrowing ‎consequences that now haunt our cities and roads again with terror attack upon terror attack. How ‎pathetic that the Jews, of all people, have forgotten the lessons of what a committed and unwavering ‎propaganda machine, fabricating the biggest, most horrendous lies and repeating them to their people, ‎especially their youngest, ad nauseam until it becomes their truth, can do. Because that it exactly what Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine did to the Jews before and during the Shoah. ‎

This is the generation that the world would have us make peace with and give concessions to. How do you ‎make peace with people who have been raised to see you as less than human and as something that should ‎be killed?‎

It is said that you reap what you sow; we have helped to bring about this generation of hatred by not ‎interfering with the propaganda machine that created it — by not taking the statements seriously, by ‎pretending that it was for some inexplicable “internal consumption” within the PA and on the “Arab ‎street.” What does that even mean? If people say, “We want to kill you,” take their word for it.‎

The recent incitement by Mahmoud Abbas pales in comparison with the constant incitement that his PA ‎has been conducting all these years. Israel cannot undo that, but every effort should now be made to stop all ‎incitement, wherever it is found in the PA, immediately. That, in itself, will not ‎solve the current terror problem, but it is a first step in acknowledging the lesson that has ‎been bought with blood and endless sorrow, so as never to repeat it again.‎

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel.

This article was originally published by Israel Hayom. 

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