By Elliot Kaufman
Monday, July 24, 2017
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), has announced that Palestinian leadership will freeze all contact with
Israel, including crucial security coordination. On Friday, a Palestinian
terrorist killed three Israelis, including a 70-year-old man, in their home in
the West Bank. On Facebook, the attacker posted: “They desecrate Al-Aqsa &
you sleep. They declared war on Allah & all I have is a knife.” Hamas
applauded the attack as “heroic,” and a Fatah-affiliated militia also praised it.
On Sunday night, a Jordanian man stabbed a security guard with a screwdriver at
the Israeli embassy in Amman. On Monday, yet another terrorist stabbed an
Israeli in the neck and torso, and then told police he “did it for al-Aqsa.”
Meanwhile, violence rages across East Jerusalem and the West Bank as
Palestinian rioters clash with Israeli police. Three Palestinians have already
died. Hundreds are injured. More bad news arrives each hour.
What in the world is going on?
The current spate of violence started last week, when
Palestinian terrorists smuggled guns into the Temple Mount. The guns were then
used to murder two Israeli-Arab police officers guarding one of the entrances
to the al-Aqsa mosque. Afterward, the attackers ran back to the Temple Mount plaza
to engage in an open gun battle. (This was all the more shocking since the
Temple Mount, home to al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, is considered the
third-holiest site for Muslims and the holiest site for Jews.)
In response, the Israelis temporarily closed the Temple
Mount for a police investigation. The site was later re-opened with metal
detectors and security cameras installed at its entrances. That Israeli
response — not the Palestinian smuggling of weapons, not the Palestinian
attack, not the shooting that followed — was then deemed an outrageous
desecration of the holy site by Palestinians and their leaders.
It’s worth noting that metal detectors and other security
measures are common at holy sites around the world. Everyone passes through
them to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, for example. It is also worth
noting that the status quo at the Temple Mount discriminates against Jews, who
are forbidden from praying there. In 2014, Abbas even called on Palestinians to
prevent all Jews from entering the Temple Mount. Before 1967, the Jordanians
did just that, blocking Jews from their faith’s holiest site.
But no matter. Abbas’s Fatah party told its followers to
“Set out for the al-Aqsa Mosque” on Facebook, initiating riots and clashes with
Israeli police. Videos, however, showed large crowds of Palestinians chanting
slogans against President Abbas, who is widely perceived as weak. Eager to
fight that perception, Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas,
escalated the situation by declaring Wednesday a “day of rage,” calling for
mass demonstrations at al-Aqsa and throughout the suburbs of Jerusalem. Abbas
has since placed responsibility for the resulting violence on the Israeli
government, of course.
Remember, these are the Palestinian “moderates.”
Senior PA clerics have also done their share to stoke
tensions and incite violence, as the Middle East Media Research Institute has
shown over the last few days. PA and Jerusalem mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein
banned Muslim worshippers from passing through the metal detectors on the way
to al-Aqsa. “The prayer of anyone entering the al-Aqsa mosque via the metal
detectors is null and void,” he said on Monday. On Thursday, the PA’s minister
of religion, Yousef Ida’is, declared that, “The continued damage to the holy
places requires exceptional activity by the Muslim Arabs.” The words
“exceptional activity” are rather open to interpretation; others aren’t. On its
official Facebook page, a Fatah branch posted: “Rage Jerusalem — the Intifada
will continue, the revolution will continue to Jerusalem.”
Today, the city’s Muslim leadership closed all mosques,
telling parishioners to go to the Temple Mount in order to form a volatile mob.
Seemingly every PA official has chimed in. “Israeli
intervention in the affairs of al-Aqsa constitutes aggression against the
Muslims’ religious and political rights,” the PA’s chief Sharia justice said.
“The occupation’s installation of metal detectors and cameras is part of
repeated attempts by Israel to take over al-Aqsa,” added Jerusalem district
governor Adnan al-Husseini. Abbas Zaki, a member of Fatah’s powerful Central
Committee, called for marches across the Arab world to protest America’s
support of Israel.
Hamas, the terror group governing Gaza, has also made its
voice heard. It has congratulated the terrorists who carried out the original
shooting near al-Aqsa, and called for more riots. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of
Hamas’s political bureau, went on television to get his message out: “I urge
all members of the Islamic ummah to
make Friday into a turning point for Arab willpower, when the people will
launch an intifada in every city to defend [al-Aqsa].” Palestinian media has
been flooded with fiery images calling on Muslims to “Arise and Resist.” Sheikh
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and a
religious leader for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, told his followers on
Twitter that “The Jihad will Continue” in reference to the al-Aqsa conflict.
All of this sends an urgent and clear message to the
Palestinian people: Riot. By pretending that the al-Aqsa mosque is under
Israeli attack, Palestinian political and religious leaders have deliberately
drummed up senseless violence.
How is it, after all, that murder on the Temple Mount
does not defile the holy site, but metal detectors and cameras around its
entrance do? Mecca, to take one example, is surveilled by 5,000 CCTV cameras.
Besides, the Temple Mount must be accessible to Jews as well of Muslims;
without the metal detectors, Jewish visitors might be unable to safely access
their holiest site — surely an unacceptable state of affairs in the world’s one
Jewish State.
For now, neither side is budging. Israel, on principle,
does not want to give in to the perpetrators of the violence. Abbas and the PA
cannot back down for fear of looking weak and abandoning al-Aqsa; without
Israeli security cooperation, the PA is now particularly vulnerable. And Hamas
— well Hamas doesn’t mind the violence one bit.
If this turns into a full-fledged intifada, Palestinians
will likely suffer most, as young men hurt and die in clashes with police,
while peaceful men and women must endure enhanced security measures. This would
truly be tragic — and it would be the fault of a Palestinian leadership class
that is content to sacrifice its own people for media attention.
Such demagoguery is nothing new, of course. Palestinian
leaders have been making false claims of Jewish threats to the al-Aqsa mosque
since 1929. For 88 years, they have beaten the same conspiratorial drum. For 88
years it has been a call for war and a call for the murder of Jews. For 88
years — at least — the Palestinian people have been treated as pawns by a
leadership more interested in protecting its own power than in helping them.
It’s long past time for them and us to see through the charade.
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