A top UN envoy has met with four ministers of the new Palestinian unity government in the formerly Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, assuring them of United Nations support, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso told an Israeli security conference on Sunday that Palestinian unity deal with the Islamist Hamas movement must be supported.
“In the interest of a future peace deal and of a legitimate and representative government, intra-Palestinian reconciliation... should be supported,” Barroso told delegates at a conference in the coastal city of Herzliya.
In fact, this support of a unified Hamas/Fatah government is effectively the legitimization of terrorism.
If the world wants to embrace Hamas as part of the Palestinian Arab leadership, that means that it is embracing this:
If Hamas is part of the government, a statement like this must be immediately condemned not only by the UN and EU and US but by the PA itself.Hamas has called on members of its armed wing in the West Bank to target Israeli soldiers
and civilians in a bid to ease the plight of its prisoners in Israeli jails, a party spokesman said on Monday.
“We call on the men of resistance in the West Bank, primarily the Al-Qassam Brigades, to fulfill their duty in protecting the prisoners on hunger strike by targeting the occupation soldiers and its settlers,” Hamas spokesman Hussam Badran wrote on his Facebook page Monday.
“The occupation must pay a high price in the blood of its soldiers and settlers until it is persuaded to solve the issue of prisoners on hunger strike. This is everyone’s task, on the individual and organizational levels,” he wrote.
But it won't be. It will be ignored by the world community, not wanting to embarrass Abbas into publicly pretending he is against terrorism, which would jeopardize the "unity" government that embraces.... terrorism.
So not only is "unity" with Hamas the antithesis of peace, it also creates a scenario where public incitement to terror is tacitly accepted by the supposedly progressive EU and UN. Before, the West could brush off such statements as just the rantings of a terrorist organization; by ignoring them now the West is effectively saying that the PA government can legitimately hold such positions.
The same people who fall over themselves to condemn the horror of an Israeli government agency approving a possible stage in the building of some houses in a few years are utterly silent when representatives of the Palestinian government calls for terror attacks (and keep in mind that to Hamas, all Israelis are "settlers.") Priorities, you know.
The real fruit of "unity" is the mainstreaming and acceptance of Palestinian terrorism in the world community.
(h/t Josh K)