It seems you can’t read an article about the Arab-Israeli conflict these days without someone promoting and praising the National Accord Document, formulated by jailed Palestinian terrorists and proposed for a referendum by Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. The New York Times, for one, called it the “Palestinian Peace Plan.” But, in fact, this document written by leaders of the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the DFLP, and PFLP, which are all anti-Israel terrorist groups, is nothing less than a declaration of continued violence against Israel, support for the “right of return”, and cancellation of the Palestinian’s obligations under Oslo and the Road Map, while not recognizing Israel.
This document supports Palestinian “massive resistance”, meaning violence against Israel and Israelis, 14 different times. It abrogates the Oslo and Road Map agreements which rejected violence and permitted only negotiations as a means to a resolution. The demand for “right of return” appears eight times using phrases like we must “stress the right of return and cling to this right.” In fact, by demanding the so-called “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian “refugees” of the 1948-49 war and their descendants, the Abbas document is simply reiterating a long-standing Palestinian call for Israel’s destruction from within by flooding the country with Palestinian Arabs. Put simply, the “right of return” is incompatible with Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
In addition, Abbas’ document calls four times for the release of “prisoners” — in reality, jailed Palestinian terrorists — from Israeli prisons. The goal of obtaining the release of these killers is described in the document as a “sacred national duty.” Moreover, it calls for “a unified resistance front under the name ‘Palestinian resistance front’ to lead and engage in resistance” and for the “joining” of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), two major Palestinian terrorist groups, to the Palestine Liberation’ Organization (PLO). Oslo and the Road Map call for dismantling terrorist groups, not strengthening and legitimizing them.
Not only does the Abbas document call for a union of terrorist groups but it makes it explicit that it intends that Israeli civilians beyond the 1967 armistice lines be targets for terrorism. That means that Israeli families walking the streets of eastern Jerusalem or Israeli schoolchildren traveling on a bus in Ma’ale Adumim or Ariel or Efrat, etc., are designated in this document as suitable targets, in effect legitimizing and legalizing the murder of Jews. The Nazis would have been especially proud of this clause.
This plan is not bashful about the terrorism it promotes — it simply sees terrorism at this moment as an adjunct to diplomacy. In its own words, it calls for “focusing the resistance in the occupied territories of 1967 alongside with the political action and negotiations and diplomatic action.”
A document outlining a defined strategy of terrorism is obviously not only a non-starter as a peace plan, but is in fact a program for committing war crimes. If the IRA produced a proposal whereby it publicly advocated terrorism against Protestants living in Northern Ireland, it would he immediately denounced as barbaric and unacceptable.
The Abbas document also speaks of “loyalty to the martyrs of our great people and the pains for their prisoners and the agony of their injured” that is, dead and jailed Palestinian terrorists who have murdered Israeli men, women and children. Far from fighting, jailing, and extraditing terrorists and, as required by the Oslo agreements, this document glorifies them and calls for massive efforts in support of them. Nowhere in the document is there any expression about Israel’s right to exist, the unacceptability of terrorism or the need to fulfill the Palestinian Authority commitments that have in fact never been honored by either the Palestinian Authority in the past or Hamas in the present.
Instead there are references to the “apartheid wall”, the “Judaization of Jerusalem”, the “annexation of more areas of the West Bank”, and praise for the “sectors that carried the burden of the intifada who were victims of the Israeli crimes of aggression, especially the families of the martyrs and prisoners.”
But then little else perhaps could be expected of Mahmoud Abbas, who after all co-founded the terrorist group Fatah with Yasser Arafat, was Arafat’s close confidante and advisor for 40 years and wrote a thesis and later a book denying the Holocaust. On any reasonable reading, Abbas’ document cannot be considered a step forward to peace and reconciliation but instead is a step towards more terror and war. It deserves unqualified condemnation and rejection by the civilized world.