In the past few years, the Palestinians have made it a habit to step up their manufactured incitement against Israel and Jews on the eve of Jewish holidays. This year has not been an exception.
In the days preceding the Jewish New Year holiday, celebrated in mid-September, Palestinian leaders, spokesmen and factions went on a frenzied campaign of threats, lies and misinformation that triggered a wave of violence and terrorism against Jews.
At the core of the Palestinian campaign is the false claim that Jews are planning to “storm” and “desecrate” the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The mosque is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site for Jewish believers, where Abraham performed the binding of son, Isaac. It was also, in antiquity, the site of the two Jewish Temples.
Jewish worshippers have been peacefully touring the Temple Mount for years. Contrary to the claims made by the Palestinians, these visitors have not set foot inside either the al-Aqsa Mosque or the nearby Dome of the Rock, another holy site for Muslims.
Moreover, the Jews have not initiated any act of violence against the Muslim worshippers during their tours of the Temple Mount. In fact, the Jews and the police officers accompanying them are usually the victims of verbal and physical abuse.
The Palestinians, who have often falsely accused Israel of denying them free access to the Islamic religious sites in Jerusalem and the West Bank, have made it clear that they do not want any Jew to visit the Temple Mount. The Palestinians also, despite massive evidence in archeology and ancient texts such as the Bible, continue to deny any Jewish history in Jerusalem or elsewhere in the Holy Land.
This denial is part of the overall Palestinian narrative that basically denies Israel’s right to exist in the Middle East as a sovereign and independent homeland for the Jewish people.
The Palestinians evidently worry that if they or the rest of the world recognize the Jews’ historical and religious attachment to Jerusalem and other parts of Israel and the West Bank, this would be interpreted as acceptance and legitimization of Israel.
The Palestinian violence that erupted before, during and after the Jewish holiday last week revealed once again that the Palestinians are more interested in destroying Israel than in achieving statehood.
Most of the statements made by Palestinian officials, activists and terror groups over the past two weeks underscored the desire to step up terrorism against Jews and the need to pursue fighting against the Jews until they are driven from the entire country of Israel.
The terror attacks against Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank during the past week included shootings, car-rammings, hurling Molotov cocktails and bricks, and stabbings. This latest wave of terrorism is the direct result of the massive campaign of incitement against Israel and Jews by many Palestinians, including those belonging to the Palestinian Authority headed by President Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas himself has long been playing the US and other Westerners with carefully-crafted double-talk. On the one hand, he tells them that the Palestinians are “yearning” for peace with Israel and are opposed to violence and terrorism, as he did in his recent speech before the United Nations General Assembly.
On the other hand, Abbas and his senior officials continue to praise and glorify terrorists who murder or injure Jews. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority continue to make incendiary false allegations against the Jews and accuse them of committing “massacres” at the same time as they encourage Palestinians to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel on the totally false pretext that Jews are “desecrating” Islamic holy sites.
It was Mahmoud Abbas’s 2015 statement that Jews “have no right to defile the Al-Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet” that sparked a wave of anti-Jewish terrorist attacks that became known as the “Knife Intifada“. Abbas’s antisemitic remark back then came in response to the usual peaceful tours by Jews to the Temple Mount. Many Palestinians, however, interpreted their leader’s statement as a green light to go slaughter Jews. The result: between 2015 and 2016, 34 Jews were murdered and dozens wounded.
Abbas and the top Palestinian leadership have since steadfastly maintained their malignant policies towards Israel.
The Palestinian leaders continue with the same incitement against Israel and Jews as their new fellow-travelers in the Biden administration look the other way.
The Biden administration officials are not only ignoring the dangerous incitement and terrorism by the Palestinians, they are even talking about the benefit of establishing another failed and corrupt terror state for the Palestinians next to Israel. The Biden administration and others call this fantasy “the two-state solution.”
Palestinians have already made it clear that their true goal is to replace Israel, not live alongside it. The plan is to replace Israel with a fundamentalist Islamist state, controlled by the mullahs in Iran, who have no compunctions about beating an Iranian woman to death for not covering her hair.
If Iran’s mullahs are committing such atrocities against their own people, it is not hard to imagine what they will do to their much-hated enemies in Israel, Europe and the United States. Iranian missiles, eventually with nuclear warheads, are clearly being developed not just for Israel.
Consider the “new Axis of Evil,” Russia and Iran, complete with Iranian drones now being used by Russia against Ukraine. Imagine if those drones were, instead, nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles from Iran — especially as Russia will reportedly be in charge of Iran’s “compliance” and “excess” enriched uranium. An Iran with nuclear weapons would doubtless be a most welcome addition to Russia’s proxy arsenal.
The Biden administration has chosen totally to ignore the threats made by several Iranian leaders to eliminate the “Zionist entity.” The Biden administration is also totally ignoring Palestinian incitement against Jews.
Iran’s mullahs cannot tolerate the idea of a woman appearing in public without her hair fully covered. Palestinian leaders, such as Abbas, cannot tolerate the idea of a Jew visiting his or her holy site. The mullahs want to kill supposedly “immodest” Muslim women; the Palestinians want to kill Jewish worshippers for being Jews.
The same people now warning about the Iranian regime’s crackdown on protesters must also raise their voice against the Palestinian leaders who are encouraging and sending their young men and women to attack and murder Jews visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. The mullahs are the enemies of Israel, of their own crushed women, and of the West. The Palestinian leaders are the enemies of all Jews, especially those living in Israel.
The Biden administration would be doing a great service to Jews and Arabs alike by calling out the Palestinians for their continued campaign of incitement to violence against Jews. If the Biden administration does not wish to upset the Palestinians by doing so, it should at least shut up and let Israel continue its relentless war on terrorism, a real threat not only to Israelis and Palestinians but to all countries in the West.
{Reposted from the Gatestone Institute website}
