I touched on this yesterday but it is worth highlighting.
From AP:
The chief Palestinian representative to France said moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would violate international law and adds that he does not think Donald Trump's new administration will make such a decision.Elherfi knows quite well that any US embassy would be to the west of the Green Line, and would not be considered to be in "occupied territory" by the world.
Salman Elherfi told The Associated Press that a Mideast peace conference Sunday in Paris sent a "very clear" message calling on everyone not to make any changes that would affect a final solution for the region, especially regarding the status of Jerusalem.
He said,"I do not believe that the United States will violate international law because transferring the embassy of the United States into an occupied territory would mean admitting the annexation of this territory by Israel."
Even though he is knowingly lying, he is the official Palestinian representative in France and speaks for the PLO leadership. This means that the official PLO position is that all of Jerusalem is Palestinian and Jews have no rights to the city at all.
As outrageous as this is, I am more fascinated by the fact that statements like this are given a pass by the dozens of reporters and scores of diplomats on the scene, especially the AP reporter who quoted it. While the statements of Israeli officials are dissected endlessly to find the tiniest grounds to assume that they really don't want peace, a statement like this - a bombshell in any other context - is simply ignored. And it has been over 18 hours since he said it.
This was a prime opportunity to have a Palestinian official explain exactly why they are against the move. So far the only reason given has been the threat of violence - violence that the PLO itself is encouraging, another fact that the world media and the diplomats in Paris choose to simply ignore.
This lack of pushback indicates at least one of the following:
- Everyone assumes that Palestinians are liars and therefore no one holds them to any standards.
- Reporters are so thoroughly ignorant about the basics of the stories that they cover that they simply let insane lies like this fly by without having a clue.
- The meme of "Israel is intransigent, Palestinians only want their rights" is so strong that anything that contradicts it is simply ignored; violating the meme is a worse crime for reporters and diplomats than admitting the truth.
Experience shows that all three statements are correct.