Vice Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon presented the “incitement index” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, detailing the uptick in the level of incitement by the Palestinian Authority (PA) against Israel in recent months.
The Strategic Affairs Ministry, tasked with tracking incitement against Jews and Israel in Palestinian society and media, presented the data after three years of monitoring, revealing explicit demonization of Israel and glorification of terror by PA officials and organs.
Unsurprisingly, the central conclusion of the index is that the PA bears ultimate accountability for the atmosphere of incitement, and even more damning, that it engages in an active policy of rejection of normalization with Israel.
Among the most egregious examples are a recent event in which PA President Mahmoud Abbas held a map that delineated Israel’s neighbors but omitted Israel, as well as statements on PA TV that characterized “the Jews” as “swindlers”, and demanded that they “return to the countries from where they came so that we can return to the communities that we left in Acre, Haifa and Jaffa.” The overarching theme of these and other official expressions is that Jews are foreign interlopers whose presence in Israel is illegitimate and temporary.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the report by saying that “the index sheds light and helps us prepare ourselves and avoid the mistake of not understanding with whom we are dealing with, who cooperates with and initiates this awful incitement. The Palestinian leadership is bequeathing this incitement to the coming generations and…it itself is incapable of adopting a dialogue of peace.
“It is a reminder to the world that the root of the conflict is the refusal of the Palestinians to recognize the national state of the Jewish People’s right to exist,” Netanyahu concluded. “We must bring this to the attention of the governments of the world, especially ahead of the upcoming UN General Assembly.”