The USA and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to live with the Jewish state.
Last Sunday, the leading terrorist of Hamas, Ali Baraka, told how he beat Israel and the United States.
In an interview with RT (Russia Today), Baraka said: "For the past few years, Hamas has adopted a kind of 'rational' approach. It did not enter into wars, it did not join the latest action of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization (the rocket attack against Israel in August 2022).
“We made them believe that Hamas is busy governing Gaza and that it wants to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians (who live there), that it has completely abandoned armed resistance. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Hamas has been preparing for the big attack."
In other words, Hamas has pretended that it is a credible negotiator and that the real problem is Islamic Jihad – its Iranian-founded offshoot.
What is frustrating about Baraka's testimony is that Hamas' deceptive policies are nothing new. Deception is an integral part of jihadist doctrine that dates back to the days of Muhammad. Equally frustrating is that even those who are unaware—or willfully blind—to the fact that Islamic jihadism and faith are central to Hamas should have been familiar with Hamas's tactics.
This tactic is straight out of the PLO script.
Five days after Hamas massacred more than 1,300 Jews in southern Israel, and on the eve of Friday's meeting in Amman with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PLO and head of the PLO/Fatah, issued a statement.
"We reject the practice of killing or abusing civilians on both sides because it is against morality, religion and international law."
Abbas' statement is noteworthy for several reasons. He does not name Hamas. He equates the Israeli counterattack with the orgy of violence committed by Hamas: torture, murder, mutilation, and the abduction of babies, children, women, and men. All this after Abbas and Palestinian society as a whole did nothing but celebrate and defend the terrorists' atrocities for five days and blamed Israel for the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas against the Palestinians.
In his speech on October 10, President Joe Biden hinted that Hamas does not represent the aspirations of the Palestinians. According to his words
"Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people's right to dignity and self-determination."
The underlying meaning of what he is saying is clear: Hamas is the bad guy, the Palestinian Authority is the good guy. And if that wasn't already obvious from Biden's speech, Blinken's decision to meet with Abbas made that message abundantly clear.
Fatah and Hamas
For five days, Abbas praised Hamas and condemned Israel. As Palestinian Media Watch reported, the day after Biden's speech, Abbas issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas. On October 11, Abbas promised that the Palestinian Authority
"stand by our people, the Gaza Strip will not be alone".
The governing Fatah faction of the PLO (of which Abbas is also the leader) loudly praised Hamas. As reported by MEMRI, on October 9, Fatah's Central Committee praised Hamas for the massacre and called for national unity—that is, unity between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
Fatah stated that the goal is "real and conscious unity for the sake of national unity, unity in the fight, and unity in the field of politics and diplomacy by all means, so that we fight the fight unitedly."
At the same time, Fatah called on all Palestinians to join Hamas' jihad against Israel.
"The public must answer the call to stand up against the aggression, against the crimes committed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to escalate the conflict in every zone against the occupier (Israel) throughout our country, Palestine, to defend our people and to stand up for the people living in the Gaza Strip next to".
Fatah's terrorist organization, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, has published on its Telegram pages calls for jihad, containing quotations from the Koran, which are indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda. Fatah quoted the verse of the Koran that calls for the annihilation of all Jews, and which Hamas also uses in its constitution:
"Smite the sons of the apes and the sons of swine ... slaughter all who are Israelites."
Along the lines of the "diplomatic unity" advocated by Fatah's Central Committee, the Palestinian Authority functions as the foreign ministry of Hamas. On Tuesday, the organization's UN ambassador, Riyad Mansour, wrote a letter to the Security Council accusing Israel of committing "war crimes" and calling its decision to cut free water and electricity to Gaza "nothing less than genocide."
Crowds in the Palestinian Authority welcomed the news of Hamas atrocities with jubilation. Celebrations, victory parades, and public parties took place from northern Samaria to the mountains of southern Hebron. Palestinians took to social media to mock the Jewish victims and celebrate the mass killings. A pizzeria in Huwara, Samaria, published an ad showing a grandmother, a Holocaust survivor now held hostage in Gaza, holding a pizza.
Enough to convince Blinken
The falseness of Abbas's condemnation of Hamas atrocities becomes clear when viewed in the context of his own actions and statements, as well as those of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, Fatah, and the Palestinian public. But his words were apparently enough to convince Blinken of the need to meet with him and continue to base America's policy on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority represents a moderate line within Palestinian society willing to live peacefully with the Jewish state. .
Abbas' lies and deceptions are his modus operandi - his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, and his comrades in the PLO and Hamas pursued a similar strategy. The fact that he felt strong enough to not even bother with a clear (false) condemnation of Hamas proves Abbas's self-confidence and contempt for the USA.
In the early days of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, Arafat regularly condemned Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel (in English) and then called on the Palestinians (in Arabic) to slaughter Jews in the way of jihad. Just a few months after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and Jericho in 1994, Arafat sent his security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, to negotiate cooperation with Hamas. The deal concluded gave Hamas a free hand to massacre the Jews on the condition that the PLO would not be involved in their actions.
Dahlan was the head of military affairs for the PLO's negotiations with Israel. He charmed his Israeli interlocutors by speaking to them in Hebrew (which he learned in an Israeli prison, where he served time for involvement in terrorist acts in the 1980s). Dahlan was seen as a moderate—the tough guy who would eliminate Hamas for Israel. While smoking cigarettes with IDF generals, Dahlan struck a cooperation agreement with Hamas terrorist leader Mohammed Deif.
In times of peace, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority operated separately. The Palestinian Authority's US-funded and trained security services provided Israel with valuable intelligence that led to the dismantling of several Hamas cells. However, during terrorist offensives, the two organizations joined forces. The most murderous terrorist group operating during the 2000-2004 Palestinian terror war (also known as the second intifada) was the "People's Resistance Committee". This consisted of terrorists from Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The feigned separation of Hamas from Islamic Jihad is the same trick. Also, when Islamic Jihad was used to convince Israel and the United States that Hamas had taken a more moderate line.
The lie of the moderate Palestinians
Israel and the US refuse to admit that the Palestinian Authority has tricked them the same way Hamas has for the past two years, and that Hamas was able to fool Israel and the US for two years because they allowed themselves to be fooled. The Israeli generals wanted very much to believe that the Palestinians were not our implacable enemies. You can agree with them. We don't have to defeat them in war.
The Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, also wanted to believe this lie—in the case of the Palestinians, they still believe it—that Israel is to blame for the violence against it. The lie of Israeli guilt has underpinned 50 years of US peacemaking efforts in the Middle East. The lie of the "Palestinian moderates" is the reason why the United States has been pressuring Israel almost continuously for 50 years to cede more and more territory to the Palestinians. This was the rationale and logic behind the USA's resistance to all Israeli efforts to defeat the PLO on the battlefield.
The statement "there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" is based on the assumption that there is a political solution.
Saturday's massacre made it clear - not for the first time, but not even for the hundredth time - that this is not a political, but an existential conflict - which is not just between Israel and Hamas. The war is between the vast majority of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian leadership as a whole - who seek the physical destruction of Israel and the global extermination of Jewry - and the Jews who want to live in peace and freedom in their Jewish state.
(The article was published on October 13, 2023 on the Jewish News Syndicate website. Translated by DeepL, Mihály Pátkai)
Featured image: REUTERS/IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA
