https://www.jns.org/opinion/biden-delivers/
Seeing the region through the lens of the “Palestinian-Israeli peace process,” President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department are backing the Palestinian Authority under oppressive octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas—in the 17th year of his four year term as president—as America’s partner.
Abbas canceled the announced Palestinian election scheduled in May, understanding that years of his corruption and heavy hand might actually cause him to lose. Since then, P.A. critic Nizar Banat died in custody after his arrest by P.A. “police,” dozens of activists have been arrested and social-media accounts by those who posted the “wrong thing” keep disappearing. But the administration appears to believe that the P.A. needs only some enticement from the United States and concession from Israel to show its true—if hidden—liberal, Western, political credentials.
So off the administration delivers.
In early April, the administration rolled out a pledge to deliver $75 million to Palestinian areas; plus $40 million for security assistance; $150 million to UNRWA; and $15 million for COVID assistance (one might assume that money will not be delivered, as the P.A. rejected 700,000 vaccine doses from Israel); and $10 million for Palestinian-Israeli people-to-people programs.
OK, you say, but they’re not Hamas. True enough, but a month before the launching of more than 4,000 Hamas rockets, official P.A. media was openly inciting violence. Abbas’s religious affairs adviser told PA-TV viewers, “Islam does not want you to be submissive to others,” and “If you die fighting, you go to paradise; if you kill the enemies, they go to hell.” Did that spark the shooting of three Israeli students, including the murder of 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta?
Images of Palestinians beating Orthodox Jews were posted to the social media site TikTok seeking “likes” and “approvals,” and engendering the name “TikTok Intifada” for the activity; Abbas called to “defend the mosque”—a historic call for violence against Jews in Jerusalem; and the ever-popular song on PA-TV, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts. … My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.”
But never mind.
References to Palestinian incitement to violence against Jews and Israelis over the past seven months have been deleted from the State Department’s mandated report to Congress on Palestinian violence.