{Originally posted to the authors’ website, This Ongoing War}
Soaking rain and the first significant storm of the winter season are greeting the first day of 2016 here in Jerusalem. There’s a chance of snow tonight. Understandably, such are the matters on Israeli minds as people hunker down for an indoor Shabbat.
Meanwhile in the news media, at least for those watching for such things, there are indications of approaching turbulence of a different sort.
The Jerusalem Post this past Monday quoted a report by Gal Berger on Israel Radio’s Reshet B of the same day [Hebrew audio of the Berger article here]. Berger recounts things he heard from an un-named “senior Palestinian official”. In our words, here are some of them:
- Voices within the leadership of Fatah are currently calling for the resumption of ‘suicide bombing’ attacks. For the moment, Fatah’s view is to wait before acting – in the words of the JPost report, to “see which way the wind is blowing”. Fatah, in case it’s forgotten, is headed by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
- The current street violence, the Arab-on-Israeli attacks carried out daily for the past three months, is “sooner or later” going to be escalated . Fatah sees itself as being “forced” to “join the current uprising“.
- Those same insiders, realizing that the young people who are at the bleeding edge of the current violence directed at Israelis, see an impending collapse of the PA establishment and its power. This is, naturally, Israel’s fault.
- What’s likely to happen next is a rechanneling of the Arab-on-Israeli street violence into physical attacks against the Palestinian Authority regime. When that happens, the Palestinian Arab political leadership – again, out of having “no choice” in the matter – will redefine how it relates to Israel. (He gave no indication of what the Palestinian Arabs would do for water, electricity, medical care and a long list of other civil services in the wake of such a redefinition.)
- “Lone wolf attacks” will proliferate and this will be “very difficult” to control.
- It’s foreseeable that internal rivalries among the numerous Palestinian Arab factions and their competing with one other for popular support will produce bad outcomes. Israel’s fault, again.
We have commented several times in the last few weeks about the incitement emanating directly from the PA’s Abbas. When he stands in front of foreign media and global gatherings of polite politicians, he’s for peace, against terror and manifestly moderate. When speaking in Arabic to the people who groan under the burden of being led by him, it’s a very different story, like when he notoriously praised the terror being done on Israel’s streets by Palestinian Arabs:
We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah… The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours and they [the Jews, naturally] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.” “01-Dec-15: PA president: When the subject is terror, double-talk and blatant hypocrisy work”
Incitement clearly works. We summarized an under-reported Palestinian Arab public opinion survey [“14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?“] which laid this bare:
- They unambiguously support violent, armed violence against the Israelis: 60% support it today, up from 57% in the PSR September 2015 poll.
- The cohort most supportive of “an armed intifada and stabbings” is the one aged between 18 and 22. That’s also the cohort most opposed to a two-state solution. In fact, the notion of a two-state solution, so admired by peace-oriented outsiders (like the Obama administration and the EU) and by 63% of Israelis in a 2013 poll, is rejected by a growing majority of Palestinian Arabs (54% today; 51% in the September 2015 poll.)
- Fully two-thirds of all Palestinian Arabs say they are in favour of stabbing attacks on Israelis.
- About the same proportion are of the view that Abbas, elected in January 2005 to a four-year term as PA president, holding on tenaciously to his power for the past eleven years and with no election on the horizon, must resign. This doesn’t happen because, as the poll shows, if presidential elections were held today, the Hamas candidate would defeat Abbas comprehensively.
Another sign of very bad weather ahead: Hamas, according to Ynet yesterday (Thursday), has ordered its cells in the West Bank to launch “suicide” bombings against Israeli targets, and will target senior officials in the Israeli political and defence establishments. It is specifically targeting victims inside the so-called Green Line, the 1947 cease-fire line that is mischievously referred to often in the news media as the 1967 borders.
Hamas says it has “sleeper” cells in place and is now activating them. One such cell was the subject of a post here [“24-Dec-15: Another terror outrage narrowly averted – and Shalit Deal releasees are again at the heart of the darkness“] last week. Its members were discovered, interrogated and arrested in a joint Shin Bet/IDF operation in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Abu Dis, along with a sophisticated, well-stocked explosives lab that was preparing bombs for use against Israelis.
In yesterday’s Ynet report, Hamas voices are quoted, saying:
“the only reason the members of the cell were caught was that one of its members told a member of the Palestinian security forces of the cell’s existence, asking him to obtain fake permits for him and the other cell members… [T]he other terror cells would not be exposed because their members have no record of security-related offenses that would make them suspects… [“Hamas planning suicide bombings, targeting Israeli officials“, Ynet, December 31, 2015]
How separate are these Fatah/PA and Hamas efforts at ramping-up terror? Not as separate as they might appear. Times of Israel said yesterday that the reporter’s unidentified source inside Hamas claimed that it was maintaining ties with members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement… [“Hamas says it plans to resume suicide attacks in Israel“]
This ought to surprise no one. When the Abbas regime pays out millions of dollars each month in its ghastly, but mostly ignored, cash-for-terror payments scheme, who gets most of the money? Again, Reshet Bet’s Gal Berger provides some clear answers via Jerusalem Post. He managed to lay his hands on actual Palestinian Authority spreadsheets that show precisely which convicted terrorists behind Israeli bars the PA subsidizes and at what level… Here are comprehensive statistics that illustrate exactly how the PA uses its resources – including moneys handed over monthly by Israel as well as contributions the PA solicits from international donors… Apprehended, convicted and incarcerated terrorists – including the linchpins of the ghastliest of mass murders – are paid substantial monthly stipends while they do time… The newly uncovered evidence, moreover, shows that the PA’s largesse isn’t limited to Fatah terrorists but that most of its outlays are earmarked for Hamas members… Organizational rivalries and political affiliations are no bar for PA generosity toward terrorists. This encourages bloodletting, and is part and parcel of the glorification of terrorism in the purportedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah-ruled jurisdiction. The glorification – indeed near-deification – of mass murder is an integral component of incitement to terrorism by Abbas’s top hierarchy… It was never a secret that the PA financially underpinned the prisoners’ relatives, a fact that helped boost their heroic status. Now, however, we know exactly who gets what, down to such details as how much is deposited when into which particular account in which particular bank… The PA ’s own paperwork shows unambiguously that tens of millions of dollars are shelled out every month to imprisoned terrorists and their relations – at a time in which Abbas moans that Ramallah can’t make ends meet. [“PA Spreadsheets”, Jerusalem Post, October 10, 2015]
Several of the terrorists convicted of their involvement in the massacre that took our daughter’s life in August 2001 are included in the PA payments plan.
Berger’s revelations, and the PA spreadsheets, received virtually no mainstream news coverage when they were revealed in October. Now, with much colder air and many dead on all sides, we’re likely to to reap the harvest of that willful neglect.