WarSclerotic

Israeli officials voiced outrage on Thursday after the U.S. State Department suggested that Israel “may have used excessive force” in quelling the recent surge of Palestinian and Israeli Arab violence targeting Israeli civilians and security forces.

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said the State Department’s claims were “so far-fetched and so twisted that I expect President [Barack] Obama and Secretary of State [John] Kerry to distance themselves from them and clarify the American position on the matter.”

Erdan, who oversees the police force as part of his ministerial duties, stressed that the police officers tasked with preventing terrorist attacks were given “moral and just” directives.

“Any sane person knows full well how the police in the U.S. would react if terrorists armed with axes and knives tried to murder civilians in Washington or New York, and that’s before mentioning the American bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan as part of a justified war on terrorism, where mistakes do happen,” Erdan said. “There should be a limit to the hypocrisy.”

Erdan said that “traditionally, the State Department has been hostile toward Israel.”

“The fact that the State Department falls for the lies they are presented is in fact very strange, amateurish and even worse, especially when we have full documentation of the events,” he said. “The Israel Police do not hurt any innocent people. The Israel Police and the citizens of Israel engage in self-defense and life-saving actions under the confines of the law.”

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon also criticized the State Department statement, wondering in an interview on Thursday: “We use excessive force? If someone waves a knife around and they are killed, is that excessive force? They have a warped understanding of the situation here. Anyone saying these things is utterly ridiculous.”

The statement that sparked Israel’s fury was made by State Department spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday. He said that the department had seen “credible” reports of activity that could indicate the excessive use of force by Israeli forces, and that the U.S. considered an Oct. 9 stabbing attack on four Arab men by a Jewish assailant in the city of Dimona an “act of terrorism.”

“I think you’re going to ask me, ‘Do we consider it an act of terrorism?’ and we do,” Kirby told reporters. “Certainly individuals on both sides of this divide have proven capable of and, in our view, are guilty of acts of terror.”

The Dimona attack was denounced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We’re always concerned about credible reports of excessive use of force against civilians and we routinely raise our concerns about that,” Kirby added.

According to Kirby, violence and settlement activity are undermining the viability of a two-state political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Speaking a day after Kerry said he would soon travel to the region to try to calm tensions, Kirby said the secretary was not assigning blame when he said a “massive increase in settlements” over the past year had been followed by the current outbreak of violence.

Kirby said Kerry had been consistent in “not trying to affix … blame for the recent violence” but had discussed “the challenges that are posed on both sides by this absence of progress towards a two-state solution.”

“He wants both sides to take the affirmative actions, both in rhetoric and in action, to de-escalate the tensions, to restore calm, and to try to move forward toward a two-state solution,” Kirby said in the daily briefing. “The secretary has made clear his concerns … and his desire to travel to the region to engage and discuss and to try to find ways to reduce the tensions, restore the calm and then start to work, collaboratively hopefully, toward a two-state solution.”

Kirby indicated that Kerry’s plan to travel to the region did not mean he would go to Israel or the Palestinian territories.

Meanwhile, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the U.S. was in regular contact with Israeli and Palestinian officials about the escalating violence.