TEL AVIV – Relatives of Israeli-American victims of Palestinian terror attacks warned President Donald Trump’s advisors Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt on Friday that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is impossible until the Palestinian Authority ends its policies of paying salaries to terrorists and their families and inciting and educating their children toward violence against Israelis.
“This is madness,” Arnold Roth told the Algemeiner in reference to Kushner and Greenblatt’s visit to the region last week to jumpstart moribund peace negotiations. Roth’s 15-year-old daughter, Malki, was murdered along with 14 other people when a suicide bomber struck the Sbarro pizza restaurant in downtown Jerusalem on August 9, 2001.
“No progress towards peace will ever come if we tolerate the ongoing sanctification of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs,” Roth said.
Roth’s remarks came following reports from Palestinian media that PA President Mahmoud Abbas was “fuming” following his Thursday meeting with Kushner in which American concerns about the payments to imprisoned terrorists were raised. Abbas reportedly refused to comply with watered-down demands from Washington that the PA cease payments to 600 terrorists imprisoned on multiple counts of murdering Israelis.
Stephen Flatow, whose daughter Alisa was murdered in a suicide bombing attack on an Israeli bus in the Gaza Strip in 1995, believes the Trump administration has not understood the full extent of the PA’s incitement.
“I’m scratching the back of my head a bit, because everyone is focusing on the payments,” Flatow said.
“If there is no correct education about what it means to be an Israeli or a Jew, and these kids are being fed a daily diet of lies and anti-Semitism, how will we have any hope for the future?” Flatow asked.
“I wished Kushner and Greenblatt a lot of luck when they left this week,” Flatow said. “I don’t know what their mood will be when they get back from Jerusalem, but I’m pretty sure they will be no farther along than they were before they got there.”
Roth said that while he isn’t surprised by the reports that Abbas was enraged by his meeting with Kushner over the payments, what he doesn’t understand is “how the West — the U.S., the EU and Israel — has backed off for decades whenever the Palestinian Arabs say, as they do now, that the payments are a red line, that they amount to a ‘social responsibility,’ that they are a holy part of Arab society’s social contract.”
Roth told the Algemeiner show he confronted a senior EU official charged with transferring funds to the PA in 2002. “I armed myself with facts on the free flow of European foreign aid that was lubricating Arafat’s terror apparatus,” he said. “I asked some sharp questions, and when the answer I got turned out to be a complete fabrication, I understood how much paying the Palestinian Arabs to keep their ‘martyrdom’ payments going was perceived as unchangeable by both the European side and by the Arabs.”
“I have never gotten over the bitterness this made me feel,” Roth reflected.
Both Roth and Flatow said the White House should also focus on urging other Arab nations to end their hostility toward the Jewish state, saying it would set an example to the PA.
“Would it kill Saudi Arabia to sign a peace treaty with Israel and finally end the 1948 war?” Flatow asked.
Kushner and Greenblatt “must impress on the PA side that overcoming their addiction to terror is an essential prerequisite, and perhaps the only one, to sitting down to horse trade,” Roth added. “After that, everything is possible.”
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