"Gates of hell" remain closed, "Day of Rage" was a bust. West Bank Palestinians lose interest in protesting Israel

When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US does not consider Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria to be illegal per se,  PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said, ""The decision shuts the door on peace and opens the door on extremism, terror, corruption and violence. It will open the gates of hell.

These were the same dire warnings given if the US was to move its embassy to Jerusalem or recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

None of them came true.

Not that the PLO didn't try. Last week they called a "Day of Rage" to protest the US move. They closed schools to maximize the number of young people who would participate. Yet nothing major materialized, as I reported at the time. Israeli media noted this and picked up on the fact that most of the protests were held inside Palestinian cities and not near Jewish areas, minimizing friction.

A more telling report from Al Monitor notes that West Bank Palestinians stayed quiet even during the recent flare-up in Gaza between Israel and Islamic Jihad:

 Amid the recent military flare-up in Gaza, there were no protests, sit-ins or strikes on the West Bank to express support for the Palestinians trapped in the besieged enclave. The lack of public displays of solidarity has reportedly left Palestinians in Gaza angry and bewildered.

Imad al-Frangi, former head of the Forum of Palestinian Journalists in Gaza, published an article on Nov. 17 in the newspaper Felesteen, which is close to Hamas, claiming that Gazans are in shock over the absence of supportive actions on the West Bank. Zakaria al-Agha, former member of Fatah’s Central Committee, wondered in a Nov. 15 Facebook post why this was so, noting that in the past, the Palestinians have reproached other Arabs for being apathetic to their suffering. He went on to say that Gazans had adopted “Ya wahdana” (“Oh we are alone”) as their slogan, borrowing from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish dedicated to Palestine.

...To those in Gaza, it was unacceptable that the official Palestinian television broadcast a FIFA qualifying match, Yemen versus Palestine, on Nov. 14 while the Israelis and factions in Gaza launched missiles at each other.

This mirrors the lack of protests in the Arab world towards the Palestinian issue in recent years. Anti-Israel protests are more spirited in London than in Libya (whose foreign minister just said he'd like to see normal relations with Israel while naming Turkey as an enemy.)

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