Does the PA have a strategy?Richard Baehr
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13955
A third intifada has not yet been officially designated by Haaretz or The New York Times or National Public Radio, though it may feel as if one is underway, when over 60% of Israelis in the latest public opinion survey say they now fear for their personal safety. So too, there is no evidence yet that the wave of Palestinian attacks or — new to this current campaign — the attempted mass crossings from Gaza, have peaked.
Certainly, the reporting on the current events in Israel reflects old habits about how most journalists cover stories of Palestinian violence and Israeli responses. Two standbys always work. One if that there is “a cycle of violence” ( a pox on both your houses), always leaving unclear who the original perpetrators were in an individual attack or group of attacks. A second is to keep a daily scorecard of the comparative body counts, especially when there are more Palestinian casualties and fatalities than Israeli, courtesy of Israeli police or soldiers responding to stabbing attacks, not all of which prove lethal before the attacker is neutralized. This narrative leads to the inevitable charge of disproportionality, one that has become the principal media assault on Israeli responses to terror emanating from Gaza in recent years. As in every other instance in recent years, Haaretz is playing its appointed role of feeding the many international journalists in the country with the “truth in English” as it sees it, and as the international media want to receive and see it, confirming all their established biases about Israel behavior.
For Israeli responses to the current violence to be “fair” and proportional, the comparative Jewish and Arab body counts would need to be more in balance than in prior years. When the current campaign of attacks on Israelis began, The New York Times relegated the story to it its interior pages. Once a few Palestinians were killed by Israeli police, the story became front page news.
Any attack on Arabs by an Israeli is always highlighted since it removes any attempt by Israel to argue it is the victim of attacks. It also buttresses the PA’s charges that Israelis, whether in security roles or settlers, are willing executioners, committing crimes against Palestinians. Regardless of how infrequent these individual attacks by Israelis are, they serve to solidify the cycle of violence theme. The Israeli government can condemn these attacks and capture the perpetrators, but it makes no difference. The PA, meanwhile, will applaud the heroism of their new martyrs protecting the holy places on the Temple Mount from an invasion of stinking Jewish filth.
The current wave of Arab attacks followed a Palestinian Authority incitement campaign with language such as that above, in which President Mahmoud Abbas, seemingly the president for life, though only elected to a four year term, condemned Israel’s campaign to change the status of the Temple Mount, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, probably in seclusion and being treated with antidepressants since being denied the Nobel Peace Prize for his abject surrender to the Iranians in Geneva, has acknowledged to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Americans understand there is no Israeli effort underway to reshape any policy regarding behavior on the Temple Mount. Kerry can probably blame Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize for the peace prize medal he did not receive (and likely would not have tossed away). The selection committee was probably not anxious to have the Iranians make them look like fools in years to come once they violated the nuclear deal as Arafat tossed Oslo aside when it was inconvenient.
The naked demagoguery of Abbas’ continually repeated lies about Israeli plans for the Temple Mount will always have the desired affect on the many young men on whom the PA can depend to take to the streets and do their part to protect the ”holy places” for a fee. While there is no consensus on the degree of PA control over the attacks, the Palestinians certainly know where their rhetoric leads.
The question, though, is why the Palestinians have chosen this point in time to overheat the situation, resulting in the loss of both Israeli and Palestinian lives.
The answer offered by most analysts so far is that the PA wanted to draw international attention back to its grievances with Israel, which most basically begins with the continued existence of the State of Israel. For many months, relations between Israel and the United States, never very good at any time during the Obama years, have become much more fractious as a result of the disagreement between the two countries over the wisdom of America’s spearheading the effort to make all the concessions required as achieve the nuclear deal with Iran by the P5+1 group of nations.
In prior administrations, when relations between the two countries hit a rough patch over some policy disagreement, typically there was an effort made by both parties to try to restore the historic relationship. In the Obama years, the White House has had problems with Israel on pretty much everything — whether to impose new sanctions on Iran, inhibiting Israeli steps targeting Iran’s nuclear program, the nuclear deal itself, and of course the peace process with the Palestinians, the breakdown of which was blamed on Israel by the administration. In no prior administration has the public rhetoric and off-the-record commentary about Israel and its elected leader been so consistently hostile. A boycott of Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress was supported by the administration, which pulled Vice President Joe Biden from attendance. Near a quarter of all Democrats in Congress chose to observe the boycott. The administration doubled down on its boycott campaign when Kerry and Ambassador Samantha Power were instructed not to attend Netanyahu’s recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly. It makes sense that the president has never condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns targeting Israel on American college campuses. He would probably be leading them if he were now a student.
In any case, Abbas may sense that a reconciliation between Israel and the Obama administration is not at hand this time around. The obvious and petty boycott of Netanyahu’s speech at the U.N. certainly supports that thesis. This president carries grudges. In Israel’s case, he seems to have come into office carrying one. With the president in full-time legacy-building mode in his last 16 months in office (the climate treaty and executive action on gun control are next up), it is hard to believe that he will simply accept defeat and an inability to influence the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the time he has left.
Abbas has resorted to the strategy that always works to get his cause back in the news — get some of his people killed by Israel, and blame it on Israeli over-reaction and trigger-happy behavior. Maybe Obama will then show his disgust with Israel and commit to not vetoing new measures targeting Israel at the U.N. Security Council, including establishing a plan for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is also possible that Obama planned to lower the temperature of the American-Israeli relationship now that the Iran deal had not been blocked by Congress. The prime minister had been invited to the White House next month, and reportedly the president planned to show up. If Abbas thought this was the new glide path, then throwing a monkey wrench into the mix with new violence would certainly complicate things. Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, gave a particularly awful response when questioned about the new wave of Palestinian violence this week, suggesting he had not been advised to turn any page:
“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms violence against Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We call upon all parties to take affirmative steps to restore calm and refrain from actions and rhetoric that would further enflame tensions in that region of the world. We continue to urge all sides to find a way back to the full restoration of the status quo at the Temple Mount in Haram al-Sharif, the location that has precipitated so much of the violence that we’ve seen there.”
In other words, both sides are guilty for attacking the other’s civilians, and somehow a change in the status of the Temple Mount (Israel’s doing) was the root cause of the new problems.
When the administration’s top spokesperson makes this kind of comment, do you think Abbas will decide to ease up on the violence accelerator?
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