RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran is stepping up its condemnation of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas after his recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly seeking statehood for the Palestinian people.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last week denounced a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, saying Abbas’s appeal for statehood is doomed.

The Palestinians should not limit themselves to seeking a country based on the pre-1967 borders because “all land belongs to the Palestinians,” Khamenei said in an address to the 5^th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada, being held in Tehran.

“We neither propose dumping the migrant Jews in the sea nor the U.N. arbitration. Rather, our proposal includes a referendum to be participated in by all Palestinians,” Iran’s semi-official FARS news agency reported Khamenei as saying.

“Today the West is standing on a crossroads, and it should either leave its age-old bullying and recognize the rights of the Palestinians or wait for harder blows in the near future,” Khamenei warned.

Iranian leaders have always seen Abbas as an appeaser of the West and a barrier to the Iranian regime’s influence in the Palestinian territories.  In order to challenge his authority, the Iranian leaders have continuously provided funding and arms to its terrorist proxies in the region such as the Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Brigades, and Hamas.

The Mahramaneh Online Website, which is close to Khamenei, in a recent analysis wrote that “[u]nfortunately what we witnessed in the … speech … by Abbas, the so-called representative of the Palestinians, at the United Nations was nothing more than a feeble and dispassionate speech that felt more like begging for affection; one can say that Abbas begged away a part of the Palestinian people’s rights, and giving that main part away for acceptance, he pleaded and supplicated at the United Nations.”

Mahramaneh Online implied that Abbas is a “stupid, inexperienced politician” because he should know that “begging, pleading and supplicating do not help one obtain one’s rights. No politician ever gives up something that he has arrived at through force and invasion,” referring to Israel’s conquest of Palestinian lands.

Mahramaneh Online concluded that no nation will be able to achieve its rights without war.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ website, Javan Online, added in a recent commentary that it is only through war and destruction of Israel that a free Palestine could be achieved.

“The biggest goal of supporting the Palestinian Intifada is the fall of Israel, and that with the current events in the region (the Arab Spring), Israel is next in the line,” Javan Online warned.

Negotiations are not the way forward, Javan Online said.

“History attests to the fact that any discussion between the Palestinians and Israel will either end in indignity or will be diverted onto the path of corruption,” Javan Online said.  “The downfall of Yasser Arafat, the living director of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was his acceptance in 1988 of Article 242 of the U.N. Security Council.”

Article 242, passed unanimously after 1967’s Six-Day War, refers in its preamble to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.”  That article has been the basis for all Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

“The only way to liberate Jerusalem,” Javan Online said, “is for the resistance of the nation of Palestine and their firm stance, as well as an international united and defiant front which will send shivers through the weak Israeli posture, but given the new regional shifts and the awakening of the Islamic masses, it will quicken the liberation of Palestine and the downfall of Israel.”

It is time to realize that in the view of the Islamists ruling Iran, there is no room for Israel in the future of the region and that they are committed to the elimination of Israel even if that means a destructive war, which would destabilize not only the region, but also the world.

“The murderous Zionist regime of Israel ultimately is reaching the final fall and destruction of its own non-existence,” Khamenei has warned.

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons.  He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double-life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, April 2010.  A Time to Betray was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award and the 2011 International Best Book Award.