This story reminds me of a joke about Marshal Filsudski, Poland’s most prominent leader between the wars, who stands up before a committee of the allies in 1918 and warns: If you don’t grant Poland its independence, then we’re all going to be very upset, we’ll get drunk and go out and kill a lot of Jews. So they ask him, And if we give you independence, what will you do? That’s easy, he answers, we’ll be very happy, we’ll get drunk and go out and kill a lot of Jews.
That is to suggest that some news stories have a moral subtext, in this case the moral of the story is: better make peace in a hurry with the good Arabs, because the bad Arabs are not far behind.
Of course, the bad Arabs are PLO members, while the good Arabs are members of the PLO.
According to the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, leftist Palestinian parties on Saturday held demonstrations across the PA in opposition to negotiations with Israel and against U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s framework proposal that will serve as the basis for future negotiations.
Of course, those same leftist folks—like the communist Palestinian People’s Party, which joined the PLO in 1987—couldn’t hold rallies in Gaza, on account of they’d get shot in the street by the Islamists and their funeral would be in the form of dragging their corpses tied to motorcycles.
The rallies in Hebron and in Shchem brought hundreds to the street to reject Kerry’s negotiations proposals, which they said were intended to “liquidate the question of Palestine and prolong the Israeli occupation.”
The rally in Hebron started in front of al-Hussein Ibn Ali football stadium in the city. Demonstrators carried Palestinian flags and flags of leftist factions, as well as signs denouncing the “pressure” the U.S. and Israel are putting on the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority to accept negotiations.
Seriously? Somebody give these people a newspaper – when did Israel pressure them to negotiate? We were happy to just keep this thing going until they had more middle class and gainfully employed working class people who would have a greater stake in cooperation with Israel. Then Kerry showed up, all eager for his Nobel peace prize and everything went south.
Communist PLO member Fahmi Shahin, also a member of the central committee of the Palestinian People’s Party, delivered a speech calling upon the Palestinian Authority to “immediately stop peace negotiations and to reject the US sponsorship to these talks.”
The U.S. proposals “to accept the Israeli occupation as a fact must be rejected,” he added.
Shahin urged the Palestinian Authority to reject any move to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and called upon them to demand the implementation of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to the villages from which they were expelled in 1948.
At last, a Palestinian determined once again not to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Thank God for PLO Communists.
In Shchem, hundreds attended a rally starting at the Martyrs’ roundabout in the city center.
The rally condemned Kerry’s proposed framework agreement and U.S. bias in favor of Israel in the ongoing peace talks, as well as any proposal to extended negotiations or impose an agreement on the Palestinians.
Ramzi Rabah of the political bureau of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another PLO faction, said that Kerry’s repeated visits to the region have served as a way to give Israel more time to continue settlement activities, in the process imposing a new status quo that is destroying the possibility of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.