RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week Israel was roundly castigated for plans to build homes for Jews in Gilo, an almost 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem numbering 40,000 people that “peace plans” have already recognized as part of Jewish Jerusalem for almost two decades.

Also this week it was reported that MEMRI had posted a video of Abbas Zaki, senior member of the Fatah Central Committee led by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, advocating Israel’s downfall and calling Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu “scumbags.”

Naturally, if a comparable Israeli official made a comparable statement, there would be an uproar and demands that he be sacked—which is what Israel would do. But the same leaders who got their dander up over Gilo—particularly German chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, but also the State Department—had nothing at all to say about Zaki. True, they may not have known about it, since the mainstream media doesn’t consider such statements by a Palestinian official to be news.

In his interview to Al Jazeera on September 23—given on the same day Abbas made his incendiary anti-Israeli speech to the UN—Zaki said any final Israeli-Palestinian agreement “should be based on the borders of June 4, 1967…everybody knows that the greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he added: “If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, evacuates the 650,000 settlers, and dismantles the wall, what will become of Israel? It will come to an end.”

At the same time, he advised circumspection: “If we say that we want to wipe Israel out…. C’mon, it’s too difficult. It’s not [acceptable] policy to say so. Don’t say these things to the world. Keep it to yourself.” He didn’t take his own advice, though, when he said: “Who is nervous, upset and angry now? Netanyahu, [Israeli foreign minister Avigdor] Lieberman, and Obama…. All those scumbags. Why even get into this? We should be happy to see Israel upset.”

Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said in response:

here is further proof that the conflict is not about territory. The Palestinians have been offered a state repeatedly for several decades and have rejected each and every offer. This is less about the creation of a Palestinian state than it is about the destruction of the one Jewish state.

Indeed, at any time one can point to clear evidence that the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza—dubiously lumped together as “the Palestinians”—do not have the slightest interest in peace with Israel and instead seek its destruction. For instance:

* Abbas’s September 23 speech, in which he referred to Israel as an occupying power since its creation in 1948 that practices “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” called for its demographic dissolution via the “return” of millions of descendants of refugees, associated the Holy Land with Jesus and Mohammed while erasing any Jewish connection, and demanded the release of thousands of (terrorist) prisoners.

* A recent poll of Palestinians by prominent American pollster Stanley Greenberg that found 66% of them saying their ultimate goal is a single Palestinian state replacing Israel; 62% favoring the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers; 53% favoring the teaching of anti-Semitic hate songs in Palestinian schools; and 73% endorsing a quote from the Hamas Charter (drawn from a hadith) about stones and trees helping Muslims kill Jews.

* A recent article by Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University (in Jerusalem and the West Bank) and considered by many an irreproachable Palestinian moderate, that Elliott Abrams characterizes as “mak[ing] him sound like [Hamas leader] Khaled Meshal, [Hezbollah chief] Hassan Nasrallah, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his description of Israel.”

* The fact that September—the month in which the Palestinians submitted their statehood request to the UN—was “the most violent month in the last year and a half in terms of rock throwing in the West Bank,” with 498 incidents in 30 days including one in which an Israeli man and his infant son were killed. Anyone aware of the close link between statehood initiatives for the Palestinians and violent eruptions can only regard this with trepidation.

True, while Israel-bashing reflexes continue over matters like building in Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ current diplomatic push has not been an easy ride. It’s uncertain whether they can obtain nine pro-statehood votes in the Security Council, and if they do, it now appears definite that the U.S. will use its veto, evoking bitterness in Ramallah. Congress is withholding $200 million in aid. In a preliminary vote on Palestinian acceptance by UNESCO, European countries except Russia and Belarus either voted against (with the U.S.) or abstained—a positive result relative to past European behavior.

That is not to say, of course, the West has yet seen the light: namely, that given the Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Israel along with the West Bank’s and Gaza’s importance to Israel’s security and hence to regional stability, there is not and has never been a Western interest in turning those territories into a twenty-second sovereign Arab state. The rationale that doing so would allay Arab anger, and thereby defuse the region, has been laid to rest by a stream of Wikileaks showing Arab leaders far more concerned about Iran than the “Palestinian issue,” and by violent upheavals (still called the “Arab spring”) in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere that have no connection to that issue.

The Palestinians are lucky to have the high degree of autonomy they now have. As they continue spewing hate, no one owes them anything more.