New evidence has emerged that the Palestinian Authority leaders–the so-called “moderates” who are meant to be partners for peace, and who receive hundreds of million of dollars in direct aid from American taxpayers each year–are deliberately destroying the peace process. Not only are they continuing a pattern of propagandist incitement of hatred against Jews and Israel, but they are inciting specific acts of violence in Jerusalem.
The clearest evidence emerged in a press release by Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Alaa, who specifically urged that Palestinians take action to stop the conference at which Jewish activist Yehuda Glick, who works to encourage Jews to pray at the Temple Mount, was shot and critically wounded. According to Palestinian Media Watch, Qurei called for “immediate intervention… [to] rescue it [Jerusalem] from the threat of Judaization.”
Qurei’s actions are all the more disturbing because he was once seen by Israelis as one of the few Palestinians with whom they could hope to conduct peaceful deliberation. In 1999, at the height of hopes for immediate peace, he was specifically invited to the Israeli Knesset, which flew the Palestinian flag in his honor. Now Qurei calls for Jews to be assassinated as part of a Hamas-led but Palestinian Authority-backed effort to incite hate.
His fellow “partner for peace,” Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, has been even worse. Abbas sent a letter to the family of Glick’s attempted assassin, who was later killed in a shootout with Israeli police, praising the Palestinian terrorist as a martyr who would go to heaven. Abbas’s attempt to sanction a murder after the fact goes along with a recent pattern of ginning up of false fears about threats to Jerusalem.
Israeli leaders are openly blaming Abbas for inciting the recent round of violence in Jerusalem, which exploded brutally several days ago with a terror attack on a light rail station that claimed two lives, including that of a three-month old baby, Chaya Zissel Braun, who was also a U.S. citizen. (The Obama administration, in a sadly typical enabling act, expressed “deepest condolences” both to Braun’s family and to the family of a Palestinian teenager who also happened to be a U.S. citizen but was killed while throwing rocks and firebombs at civilians.)
It should go without saying that the U.S. should immediately cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. And yet the Obama administration still behaves as if it is Israel that must make the first move and deepest concessions. What the latest round of violence is showing is just how difficult–if not impossible–a two-state solution will be.
Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.
Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak
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