RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Thursday, buoyed by the international warm bath he received for making a pact with the devil Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned Israel for a “grave escalation of violence.”

Abbas was responding to Wednesday’s joint Israel Air Force and Shin Bet security agency strike on targets in Gaza, following a rocket attack that barely missed a major highway in the southern part of the country. Luckily, the missile landed in an open area, missing its mark, innocent civilians. But the message was as clear as the air raid siren and subsequent explosion: Terrorism pays.

If Israelis are killed, or merely sent running to bomb shelters with children in tow, the mission is a success, particularly if Israel does not retaliate, since rendering the Zionist enemy powerless is a key aim.

But even when Israel does take action, as it did this week, the terrorists also win, through propaganda.

Indeed, residents of Gaza who witnessed the Israeli strike claimed that a man on a motorcycle had been assassinated and three others seriously wounded. This is enough to set the “international community” and Israeli leftists on their hind legs.

Never mind that the biker happened to be Mohammad Awwar, a well-known jihadist who had worked as a Hamas policeman and participated in several rocket launches against Israel. Forget the fact that he had been planning to down an Israeli helicopter. Imagine that he was just a harmless biker.

This is how Abbas would like the “narrative” to play out, of course, which is why his office issued a statement for foreign consumption.

“We hold Israel responsible for this escalation, which we consider an attempt to exacerbate the situation and pull the region into violence,” it read.

As usual, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself having to refute the charge. During a meeting on Thursday with the visiting former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, Netanyahu explained that the attack on Gaza was made necessary by Abbas’ failure to curb terrorism in the first place.

Though Netanyahu has known all along that Abbas is neither interested in, nor capable of dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza or Judea and Samaria, he deems it prudent to use Palestinian rhetoric when calling Abbas to task for not living up to his promises.

In the immediate aftermath of the IAF raid, Netanyahu said, “This is the true face of Hamas — it continues to plan terror attacks against Israeli citizens while being part of the Palestinian government. I would like to remind the international community that on the day [Abbas] formed a government with the Hamas terrorist organization, [he] promised to honor all previous agreements. This means that he is responsible for disarming Hamas and the other terrorist organizations of the arsenals in Gaza.”

Like previous Israeli “reminders,” this one did not have the desired effect. On the contrary, the State Department rushed to absolve Abbas of all responsibility for Hamas’ bad behavior.

Abbas could not have been surprised by Washington’s reaction. He has never been held accountable by the governments that finance his dirty dealings, regardless of their nature or extent.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, is treated harshly by those very governments whenever he dares to assert Israeli sovereignty over areas even they claim to agree would remain part of Israel in the framework of the two-state solution of their fantasies. (Only Australia has had the guts to question calling Jerusalem “occupied territory.”)

Abbas and his Hamas brethren are aware that the wrath aroused by missile fire does not come close to that elicited by additional housing in Jerusalem. It is a situation that not only enables terrorism to continue, but encourages it to flourish.

The only thing that gives the Palestinian leaders cause for pause is Israeli military might. When Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon warned on Thursday that Israel would “hunt down and lay our hands on anyone who threatens us,” they knew he meant business.

No match for Israel on the battlefield, these leaders rely on the international community to keep the Jewish state on the defensive. And they have been doing a very good job of it — so good that even opponents of Abbas’ reconciliation with Hamas are missing the point.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 88 U.S. senators sent a letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to “cease any alliance with terrorist organizations such as Hamas and to return to the negotiating table with Israel.”

Though a genuinely commendable effort, its impetus is based on a false premise.

“The recent formation of a Palestinian Authority unity government supported by Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization that has never publicly accepted the Quartet principles, represents a serious setback to efforts to achieve peace,” it says. “We are gravely concerned that the formation of this government and President Abbas’ renewed effort to upgrade the status of the Palestinians within international organizations will jeopardize direct negotiations with Israel to achieve a two-state solution. By its actions and inaction, Hamas has demonstrated it is not a partner for peace.”

It doesn’t take a Gaza rocket scientist to recognize that the PA, by its own “actions and inaction,” has rejected negotiations for a two-state solution and is now embracing Hamas’ more direct approach to annihilating Israel.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”