Ruthie Blum The Palestinians continue to prove the peace fantasists wrong
https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-palestinians-continue-to-prove-the-peace-fantasists-wrong/
As Mahmoud Abbas himself told leaders in Baghdad, the Trump administration “is encouraging Israel to be a state above the law,” as well as “biased and not suitable to be a sponsor of peace talks.”
The Palestinians have been busy for the past week demonstrating in word and deed that U.S. President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” will be dead on arrival.
In an op-ed on Sunday in the official, Palestinian Authority-controlled daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, who served as national-affairs adviser to former P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, launched an assault on the White House. While he was at it, he offended all people with special needs.As Palestinian Media Watch reported, Al-Ghoul wrote, “Anyone who looks at [Trump envoy Jason Greenblatt] discovers that he has external and inner characteristics similar to those suffering from Down syndrome: He is short, his eyes are similar to Mongoloid eyes, he prattles unrestrainedly, and is politically retarded.”
Al-Ghoul continued: “The ill Greenblatt is not the only one who has Down syndrome, for it strikes all the components of the American administration. Anyone who examines the general genes of the components of the Trump administration sees that it is a politically crippled creature. … Mongoloid Greenblatt, together with President Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Zionist [US] Ambassador [to Israel David] Friedman can prattle on as much as they wish about the ominous deal. However, they should know for certain that without the signature of PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas no deal will pass, and their foolish steps and policy will continue to be pointless.”
Four days earlier, as PMW also revealed, Abbas’s Fatah faction posted an anti-Semitic diatribe on its official Facebook page. Along with three World War II photos, Fatah distorted a story from the memoirs of a Russian prisoner, claiming that he said that Jews eagerly responded to a Nazi order to bury Russian civilians alive. According to the Fatah account, after the Jews began to throw dirt on the Russians in a pit, the German commander stopped them from completing the task and shouted to the victims, “I just wanted you to know who the Jews are and why we are killing them!”
As if on cue, three Palestinian terrorists on Monday rammed their car into an Israeli border guard and an IDF officer who had exited their stalled jeep. Both were wounded in the attack, one of them seriously.
Other soldiers on the scene opened fire on the terrorists’ vehicle, killing two of them and wounding the third. It later transpired that these terrorists earlier had been hurling Molotov cocktails at a nearby highway.
On Monday morning, Hamas lauded the “two martyrs,” saying, “their death proves that the Palestinian people are continuing their fight against the occupier until our land is liberated.”
The families of all three perpetrators will now be rewarded with a hefty stipend from the P.A., which announced this week that no matter how much money Israel deducts from tax revenues—according to a new law aimed at curbing Abbas’s “pay-for-slay” policy—the terrorists would be paid their salaries. Hatred for Israel, after all, is one of the few things on which Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in Ramallah are in complete agreement.
Speaking of which, on Monday evening, two balloons carrying explosives were “flown” from Gaza into Israel, going off between two homes in the Eshkol Regional Council. The incident occurred hours after Israel attacked terrorist targets in Gaza in retaliation for last week’s round of explosive balloons and Palestinian riots, which included the burning of tires and setting off of numerous explosives along the security fence.
Meanwhile, the Gaza-based Palestinian Scholars’ Association issued the latest in a series of fatwas (Islamic religious opinions) warning against peace agreements with the “Zionist entity.” According to a Gatestone Institute report by Khaled Abu Toameh, the P.S.A. fatwa ruled that “normalization and reconciliation means empowerment of Jews over the land of the Muslims, surrender to the infidels and loss of religion and Islamic lands.”
In addition, the P.S.A. fatwa determined, any peace with Israel “denies the right of the Palestinian people to its land and falsely recognizes the right of the Jews to it. Reconciliation and normalization with the Zionist enemy is considered null and void and an explicit violation of the provisions of Sharia.”
Abbas clearly intends to adhere to this fatwa, as he made clear during a trip to Egypt in January.
“I will not end my life as a traitor,” he told reporters in Cairo. “I can say ‘no,’ and I have a people that can say ‘no’ beside me. … The doors are closed to the U.S. As long as it does not retract its decisions against the Palestinian people, no Palestinian should meet with the American leadership, no matter what their role is.”
More recently, on a visit to Iraq on Monday, Abbas told leaders in Baghdad that the Trump administration “is encouraging Israel to be a state above the law,” as well as “biased and not suitable to be a sponsor of peace talks.”
So much for the “deal of the century,” whose details have yet to be revealed. So much for the fantasists in Israel and abroad who continue to harbor any hope.
Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”
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