New York – The ZOA has condemned the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its on-going support for terrorism and failure to fight it in accordance with its commitments under signed agreements and the 2003 Roadmap peace plan, noting that a senior Palestinian official, PA National Security Advisor Jibril Rajoub, recently praised Palestinian terrorism, boasted that the PA never had and never would remove “resistance” from its platform and that the PA had no dispute with Hamas or other Palestinian terrorist groups on the “principle of resistance.”

Jibril Rajoub made his remarks on Al-Jazeera TV on January 11 saying, “We were the ones who fought and who kept up the resistance, sir. We never removed the resistance from our platform, and we never will. As you know, it was Marwan Al-Barghouthi who founded the Al-Aqsa Brigades, according to a decision by Yasser Arafat. Marwan was the chief of staff of the Al-Aqsa Brigades. Marwan and Abu Ali Yatta head the Fatah list of candidates, and this serves as a message that has to do with the resistance and the struggle. We have never had a dispute with Hamas or anyone else regarding the principle of resistance. In all our agreements with our brothers in Hamas and the other factions, we always insist that resistance is our legitimate right. We believe that certain fighting tactics should have been stopped, especially following 9/11” (MEMRI, January 16).

Rajoub’s comments praising and supporting terrorism follow a number of similar acts and statements by the PA and its officials in recent weeks.

• The PA permitted Hamas to establish its own PA television channel, Al Aqsa (Arutz 7, January 9, 2006).
  
• The PA official radio station, Voice of Palestine (VOP), praised a suicide bomber as a “martyr” and also suggested that the attack was a response to “Israeli aggression.” VOP did not report any condemnation of the attack by the PA leadership, only a comment by PA spokesman Nabil Abu-Rudeina, a top advisor to Abbas, who “considered today’s attack as something that might be used to justify Israeli aggression.” (IMRA, December 29, 2005).
  
• PA chief Mahmoud Abbas named the PA’s new Rafah border crossing the Shahid (martyr) Al-Aqha, in honor of the terrorist killer Al-Moayed Bihokmillah Al-Aqha, who was killed in December 2004 carrying out a terrorist attack that killed five Israelis (Palestinian Media Watch, December 15, 2005).
  
• Mahmoud Abbas approved a law and budget designed to pay money to families of such terrorists who die while murdering Jews a monthly allowance of $250, with additional allocations if the terrorist was married and/or had children (Arutz 7, December 11, 2005).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “The ZOA condemns the PA for its continuous brazen support for terrorism and those within the PA who carry it out. Any reasonable observer following the evidence of the PA’s acts and statements must conclude that the PA is not only lacking in resolve to fight terrorism and end incitement to hatred and murder in the PA as required by repeated agreements, but that it believes in praising, supporting and protecting terrorists. No Palestinian leadership committed to peace, disarming terrorists and ending incitement could possibly name a border crossing after a terrorist who murdered Israelis, or give Hamas its own radio station, or call terrorists who murder Jews “martyrs”, or sign into law stipends for families of terrorists. All such conduct points to one conclusion — Mahmoud Abbas and the PA are not and have never been serious about fighting terrorism and ending incitement and to build hopes of peace upon them is to build hopes on sand.

“We renew our earlier call upon the Bush Administration to pressure Abbas and the PA to fulfill its long-standing commitments to fight terrorism and end incitement and to review its policy of negotiating with and providing generous funding to the PA if these things do not start to happen.”