"Let me ask a rhetorical question," President Biden retorted in response to a considerably annoying journalist, who tried to force the US president to voice criticism of Israel's conduct in Gaza: "What would we have done if we had to face this situation?". In other words, had the Hamas massacre on October 7 been carried out against Americans.
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I personally know a number of Israelis who on hearing that simply wanted to hug the elderly US president, but only a short while afterwards they would have gladly "strangled" him, as almost in the same breath he obsessively adhered to the plan to establish a Palestinian state in the Tel Aviv, Lod and Jerusalem "Otef" (surrounding areas), and "on the day after the war" to hand over the Gaza Strip to the PA (Palestinian Authority) and to Mahmoud Abbas, and create a governmental and possibly even a territorial link between the Gaza Strip and Judea & Samaria. Do you remember the "Safe Passage" from the Oslo Accords that was intended for the Palestinians?
Video: The 11 hostages being handed over to Israel, November 27, 2023
What President Biden sees so clearly in the Palestinians from Hamas, he refuses to see in their twins from the PA, and he is not the only one who is unable to see this. The most frustrating thing of all is that the conception that regards the PA as the lesser of two evils is still present, alive and kicking at the highest echelons in our security establishment, as though our entire world had not collapsed on top of us just 50 days ago. It is alarmingly similar to the conception to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many others had adhered in relation to Hamas. Hamas too was considered "the lesser of all evils" for years, and here too people believed that the money would overcome the murderous ideology and would buy us peace and quiet. Here too, they refused to take a sober and clear look at the reality of the situation and believed that Hamas was deterred.
Now this illusion is beginning to crumble when faced with Fatah, which is an inherent part of the PA, the 'darling' of this conception. We have already witnessed the initial harbingers of the potential danger of the PA turning their guns against us, and we, Mr. President, wish to ask only one rhetorical question: what would you do if only a few kilometers away from the densely populated metropolis of Washington or New York there were terrorist cells not from Hamas, but Fatah, that were preparing to carry out acts of slaughter and terrorist attacks on the American civilian population – women, children and the elderly?
We wish to raise this issue, Mr. President, as recently such a Fatah cell, hiding out in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, a Fatah stronghold in the heart of Judea & Samaria, was killed, and a similar terrorist cell was killed the week beforehand in the Tulkarm refugee camp (which also included Fatah men, such as Jihad Maharaj Shuhada), and other similar terrorist cells have been killed in Jenin and Ramallah (where Muntaser Saif from the village of Burka was killed). And in a similar manner to them, two senior Fatah officials, Abbas Zaki and Jamal Hawil, thanked Hamas for the October 7 massacre and praised them, and they are far from being the only ones to do so.
"Hasana's Doll"
How would your USA, Mr. President, have acted when faced with dozens of schools of the "good guys" – those with whom you seek to do business – that are named after mass murderers and suicide terrorists; what would you do to counter the phenomenon of turning arch-murderers such as Dalal al-Mughrabi, who took part in the murder of 35 Israeli citizens on a bus on Israel's coastal highway in 1978, or Abbas al-Sayed, who masterminded the murder of 30 Israelis celebrating Seder Night at the Park Hotel in Netanya in March 2002, into national heroes? How would the US act in our position, when faced with an education system that presents to its students the "genuine" map of Palestine from the River Jordan to the sea, when they are clearly aware that Tel Aviv and Hadera do not appear on it, and the name Israel has been erased from it?
How would the Americans treat the indoctrination in the PA education system that engages in the systematic delegitimization of any Jewish presence in Israel, or the teachers and schoolbooks that describe the Jews in Israel as foreigners, who should be sent back to the countries from where they came in the Diaspora? Have the president's advisors recently seen the video clips shown to ninth graders in the PA, in which two young female singers promise that for "their Palestine", they are willing to die as martyrs on their land?
Have any of the president's men ever looked at the study materials of the Palestinian education system, in which the students have to learn that Haifa and Acre wait to be freed; that jihad for Allah is one of the greatest acts that an individual can perform, even if it is one of the most difficult for the soul, and so it constitutes the peak of Islamic belief?
The schoolbooks for fifth-graders in the PA encourage children to go on the path of shuhada (suicide attacks), and the children's book "Hasana's Doll" underscores the "right of return" to those places where Jews have been living for 75 years, after during the War of Independence they succeeded in thwarting the plan concocted by the Arab nations to destroy the nascent Jewish state.
And just one more rhetorical question, as you put it Mr. President: How would you, the Americans, treat a neighboring entity on your very borders, which transfers more than 600 million shekels a year to murderers, or to the families of the murderers of women, children and the elderly in your midst; what would be your reaction to a governmental authority that seeks to transfer, right now, an even greater sum of money to the PalestiNazis from Hamas and their twins in the PA who have murdered Jews for years now, including those who murdered 1,300 people on the October 7 massacre? What would you do with the official publication of that governmental authority, in the memory of the murderers of Jews; with the PA senior officials who organize military funerals for them, or the official PA-salaried preachers who regularly glorify the murderers in the mosques?
The Turkish aid to Palestinian return
All these questions are of course, clearly aimed at us too, here in Israel. Some of those responsible for the collective blindness that "Hamas is the lesser of all evils" are those who, even now, encourage the Biden administration to adhere to the same crooked logic when faced with the PA. The fact that only Netanyahu – who is currently for many the arch-nemesis and demon – dares to publicly challenge the Biden administration on this existential issue, is a genuine tragedy. The Americans (and not just them) treat him as a temporary hurdle, as somebody whose days as prime minister are numbered.
We thus genuinely need additional significant voices to contend with this blind American belief, and also with the idea, born in the US State Department, to coin the phrase the "Revitalized Palestinian Authority." This is no more than pure verbal acrobatics. As, essentially the PA is based on a coherent ideology, which is backed by the people. They are committed to the continued struggle to destroy the Jewish state and to establish a Palestinian state from the river to the sea. This a vision and these are people that cannot be 'recalibrated'. They already tried. In Oslo.
The most unequivocal signs of the similarity between Hamas and the PA – apart from the military training of the PASF (Palestinian Authority Security Forces) with both arms and exercises to conquer settlements (and we are talking about a 40 thousand strong force) – are the dogged refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and the unwavering adherence to the right of return, which if it were implemented would eventually lead to the collapse of the State of Israel from within. Many Palestinians of course dream of this. Many Palestinians in Judea & Samaria, 68 percent according to a survey conducted by Bir Zeit University, also support the October 7 massacre of the Jewish residents in the Gaza belt communities carried out by Hamas.
The idea of the Palestinian right of return as a fully practical issue is not just alive and kicking, but one that dominates the Palestinians in the PA, in the Palestinian diaspora, and also among numerous Israeli Arabs. It is precisely for this reason, that the Palestinians are serial obstructers of any plan to improve the situation of the "poor refugees", who have for years been exploited and used as a weapon against Israel. For years now they have been preparing the ground for the great return to tens of thousands of "their" homes and plots of land inside Israel, while the Erdogan government in Turkey provides them with tens of thousands of Ottoman Empire archive documents in order to help attain this objective.
It is with this authority, that seeks to "kill us softly", or with its imaginary replacements, that Biden and some of the architects of the failed conception regarding Hamas, are asking us to do business. Well sir, our answer is perfectly clear, no thank you!
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