By
Morton A. Klein, National President
Dr. Daniel Mandel, Director of Center for Middle East Policy
Zionist Organization of America
It’s a constant refrain that, if Israel would only give more land and concessions to the Palestinians, peace would arrive. If only that were true. But the Arab war on Israel has nothing to do with borders; with Jews building homes in the West Bank or Jerusalem; or with the absence of a Palestinian state. The on-going war has one source – Jew-hatred, yes, anti-Semitism. Not recognizing this truth explains why every peace negotiation has failed.
As Yasser Arafat told a January 1996 secret meeting of Arab diplomats in Stockholm, “[We intend] to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State … I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews! We now need all the help we can get from you in our battle for a united Palestine under total Arab-Muslim domination!”
The PA has inculcated this Jew-hatred through its mosques, schools and media. Examples include a January 2010 PA TV broadcast of a sermon by a cleric labeling “The Jews, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger … Enemies of humanity in general.” This June, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the PA-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem said in a sermon that “The Al-Aqsa Mosque is threatened by the plans of the enemies of Allah [the Jews], who have violated all faith and religious laws, and even deviated from their humanity.” In a particularly horrific sermon, the PA-appointed cleric, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris, stated that “the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS.”
Abbas’ PA glorifies those who murder Jews, naming streets, schools, sports teams and children’s camps after these killers. It dedicated official days to glorifying Jew-killers like Abu Daoud, the Munich Olympics massacre mastermind, and Dalal Mughrabi, who commanded the terrorists that murdered 37 Israelis in a bus hijacking.
A PA 6th grade school text declares that “…Those [Jews] … are like a donkey carrying books…” Indeed, the dehumanization of Jews as being “descendents of monkeys and pigs” is recurrent in PA culture. In one case, a donkey was actually wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl by PA demonstrators in an anti-Israel rally. A senior PA academic, Dr. Riad Al Astal, has stated on PA TV that Israel is founded on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery that helped inspire Nazism. Hamas, which controls Gaza, claims the same thing in its Charter (Article 32) while also calling for the world-wide murder of Jews (Article 7).
Just recently, the PA Information Ministry endorsed an absurd study with the preposterous theme that Jerusalem’s Western Wall has no connection to the Jewish temples and is solely a Muslim site. And of course, they refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state.
Consider: Arabs were murdering Jews in the 1920s and 1930s before there was an Israel, simply because they were Jews. Indeed, most Jews were thrown out of most Arab countries when Israel was created. Arabs even refused British proposals for a legislature in the 1920s and 1930s because Jews, though a minority, would also have been represented!
Top PA officials make it clear that no Jew will be allowed in a future Palestinian state. Saeb Erakat, for example, insisted that no Palestinian “should agree to Israeli settlers remaining in the Palestinian [state].” In short, a future Palestinian state must be Jew-free.
Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority (PA) president and co-founder of Arafat’s ruling Fatah is himself the author of a PhD thesis and book that denies the Holocaust.
But this is not new. Jew-hatred has been a constant theme in the Arab war on Israel. The first leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin el Husseini, was fervently anti-Semitic, allied himself with Hitler and the Nazis, resided in Berlin during World War Two and worked hard to close of avenues of escape for Jew from Nazi-controlled Europe.
It’s no surprise that a November Arab survey found that an overwhelming 83% of Palestinians desire, in any final resolution, a single, Arab-controlled state. Put simply, they believe Jews have no rights to a state and that the Jewish state must disappear.
If Abbas and the PA were eager for statehood alongside Israel, nothing would be easier than to agree to negotiations that would lead in that direction, under an American president who has been strongly pushing for this. But they don’t, because lacking a state is less intolerable for them than accepting the right of Jews to have a state of their own. Remember the Palestinians turned down statehood in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008.
Without doubt, Palestinians want Jews out of the West Bank, want Israel to hand over land and want a state. It’s just that they don’t want these things for the purpose of living in peace alongside Israel. They want these for the purpose of destroying the Jewish state. That’s what 75% of American Jews have concluded – and so have we.