NEW YORK- In blatant violation of President Bush’s Road Map, the Palestinian Authority has justified the Palestinian Arab suicide bombing in the town of Rosh Ha’ayin, in which one Israeli was murdered and ten wounded.
The official PA statement regarding the Rosh Ha’ayin bombing included a brief, perfunctory condemnation of what it called “the Tel Aviv operation,” but then proceeded to offer a lengthy justification of the attack. The PA portrayed the attack as a response to “the criminal Israeli operations in Nablus … the aggression against our masses and people … [the] thousands of martyrs and wounded people, destruction, and siege.” The PA also accused Israel of engaging in “the ugliest forms of terrorism, destruction, coercion, and racial discrimination against our people.”
The PA statement implicitly compared the Israelis to locusts, declaring: “This occupation, the likes of which was never witnessed in the world, devours our lands, farms, resources, and groundwater,” and further attempted to incite the Palestinian Arabs by accusing Israel of harming “our Christian and Islamic holy places.”
The PA then claimed that Rosh Ha’ayin is “an Israeli city build [sic] on the rubble of the Palestinian city Ras Al-Aa’ain after being occupied by Israeli occupation forces in the 1948 war,” strongly implying that Arab terrorism in Rosh Ha’ayin today is a justified response to the alleged Israeli destruction of Ras Al-Aa’ain. In fact, however, Ras Al-Aa’ain was voluntarily abandoned by its own Arab inhabitants in the early 1900s; even the pro-PLO extremist Walid Khalidi, in his book All That Remains (p.251), wrote that the town was a “village that was deserted at the beginning of this [ie the 20th] century.” The deserted area was settled in 1949 by Jews who were brutally expelled from Yemen. Its original history as a Jewish town goes all the way back to Biblical times, when it was known as Aphek. (Citation courtesy of CAMERA.)
Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), said: “Why is the Bush administration silent in the face of the PA’s continuing justification of terrorism? By portraying suicide bombings as a response to Israeli ‘terrorism’ and by suggesting that Israel deserves to be attacked because of its alleged past mistreatment of Arabs, the PA is openly inciting Arabs to violence—a blatant violation of President Bush’s own Road Map plan. The inadvertent message of the Bush’s administration silence is that there is no price to be paid for Palestinian Arab murders of Jews.”