.@USAmbIsrael Tom Nides gets it exactly wrong

In a recent interview in Hamodia, US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides said, when asked about a recent poll that showed 72%  of Palestinians support terror groups like Lion's Den, "I firmly believe, and you might disagree with me, but the vast, vast majority among the average Palestinians doesn’t wake up in the morning wanting to kill someone who happens to be Jewish. They want to live just like you and I do."

Stephen Flatow responded quite nicely in JNS to this.

I would like to add my own observations.

Nides was careful in his words. He didn't say that the vast majority of Palestinians don't support terror, only that most of them don't want to personally kill Jews.

I've been closely following Palestinian polls for over 15 years.  I suspect Nides knows that polls show consistently over the years that a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks as part of a strategy to gain independence. Those questions are asked in the abstract.

But when Palestinians are asked about specific terror attacks, support goes way up.

In 2008, a terrorist entered the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and started mowing down students. 8 were killed, including 4 children. When Palestinians were asked if they supported that attack, an astonishing 84% said they did.

You can see how Palestinians consistently support specific terror attacks that murder Jews more than general attacks in the abstract from that March 2008 poll.

This is more than simply supporting terror for political gain. This is bloodlust against Jews. 

Nothing has changed since then. In 2014, after a string of stabbing attacks including the massacre of four rabbis in Har Nof, not only were celebrations shown on Palestinian TV. A survey shortly after the event asked, "Recently there has been an increase in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in attempts to stab or run over Israelis. Do you support or oppose these attempts?" Four out of five Palestinians supported murdering Jews, and one in three emphasized that they strongly support such attacks.

Although the media and government officials try hard to wave this away, the truth is in these surveys.

It goes beyond that. You will never find a Palestinian official on Arabic TV condemning these attacks - besides when Mahmoud Abbas is pressured to do so by the US. On the contrary, the murderers are "martyrs" and "heroes," virtually every time. 

Do well-meaning lies and obfuscations from people like Nides, and New York Times reporters, and Europeans, help the cause of peace? No, they don't. When the West gives Palestinians who support terror the benefit of the doubt, they learn an important lesson: that the West is on their side. By downplaying explicit and overwhelming Palestinian support for terror, they leaves the door open for "human rights" groups and Western parliaments to demonize Israel as the obstacle to peace, and the Palestinians as hapless, defenseless victims. 

This emboldens the terrorists and results in more dead people on both sides.

It is important to note that Gulf countries, in Arabic, have been criticizing Palestinians for nearly a decade now, even as their own support for suicide terror has plummeted in other surveys. The Abraham Accords is in no small part a result of a refreshing honesty in parts of the Arab world about the real situation. 

The West needs to stop its default stance of "don't upset the Palestinians." It hasn't worked and it has empowered them to be more intransigent, thinking that the West is doing their bidding. 

Palestinians live in an honor/shame society. Therefore, upsetting them is exactly what needs to be done. Palestinians must be shamed into stopping support for terror in their schools and media.  

If Tom Nides really wants peace, that is the most effective tool he has. 

Coddling and covering up Palestinian support for terror does the exact opposite - and we see how well that has worked.

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19th century Arab Palestine was a bunch of squabbling groups who hated each other

Some claim that the Palestinian people have existed for centuries. Here is an account of what Southern Syria (what Arabs called Palestine) was really like in the 19th century, from an 1883 article in the Fortnightly Review by  Captain C. R. Conder, about how absurd the idea of a unified Palestinian Arab population was:

Why do not these oppressed subjects of a foreign power [Turkey] help themselves to liberty? There are, it is true, perhaps only a dozen real Turks in the country, for the Pashas even are Kurds, Armenians, or Europeans. Yet to expect a national rebellion is to argue a great want of acquaintance with Oriental character. The power of combination for a common object is unknown in Eastern communities. Arabi's army might — so some of his officers said — have deserted en masse if any one of them had been able to trust another with his real wishes. To the peasant, the village faction appears more important than any national league, and the Turk knows well how to rule by dividing. Southern Palestine, within the memory of living men, was divided into two fierce factions — the Keis, who seem to have been mainly the original peasantry on the west, and the Yemini, allied with the Eastern Arabs, who were pushing northwards from Yemen. The battles fought between these factions are yet related by the village elders, and much courage and daring was then exhibited by the peasantry.

In Jerusalem itself, three of these factions still divide the Moslem population. The Hoseini, in the middle of the town, are the most powerful ; the Khaldi occupy the east quarter ; the despised Jauni abide among the Jews on the south. A Hoseini mother would rather see her daughter die unwedded than suffer her to take a Jauni husband. The same survival of faction I have traced in many other towns of Palestine, and the division of these Moslem parties, even in the petty villages, is almost as great as that which separates the Moslem from the Arab Christian, Latin, Greek, or Maronite. It is by fostering such ancient enmities, and by playing the Druze against the Maronite, the Arab against his elder brother, the Greek against the Latin, that the Turk retains his power over the numerous sects which are found in Syria. It was the same spirit of disunion which in older days gave birth to fifty Gnostic sects in the Holy Land, and which created the twelve Christian creeds which are now to be found side by side in Jerusalem.

The same spirit of disunion exists also among the Bedawin, and, indeed, manifested itself among the early conquerors of Islam as soon as their prophet was dead. Recent events in Egypt and Sinai have not shown us the "noble Arab," in whom we have been told we are to place our trust, in a very favourable light ; and the student of history, whether in Omar's time or in the days of Napoleon, will find that the Bedawin have never fulfilled the expectations of their admirers, and have rarely evinced any great nobility of character. As allies no nation could be more unsatisfactory. They skulked over the Kassassin battle-field to rob and mutilate the dead ; they took money to murder Englishmen who trusted to their reputation for good faith ; and they stole a few cows from the British camp. They never took a side heartily for or against Arabi, and they deserted him at his need. Truly, the noble Arab is not found either in Moab, in Sinai, or in Egypt; and we may well question if he exists in Arabia, for those who know the Syrian Arabs well say that the Nejed and Yemen tribes differ only in being fiercer and more warlike ; while as regards the Sakhur and the Anezeh and other large clans who are more remote from European influence than the Belka Bedawin, it has been my experience that they only differ in being greater savages, more ignorant, crafty, and unreliable than those who know better the power of the West. Truly, one is tempted to regard the noble Arab as " an extinct race which never existed."

This is the history that has been excised from not only Arab but Western textbooks as well. 

(I had excerpted much more from this article in 2008.)

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Kushner vs. Erekat shows that Kushner is right

There has been an interesting clash in the media between Jared Kushner and Saeb Erekat that, when analyzed, shows that Kushner is right.

Kushner went on Arab MBCTV to defend the plan. As usual, no one can argue with what he says so they are upset over his tone which they claim is condescending. This interview does not sound condescending to me:







During the interview Kushner also slammed Erekat for being part of the problem:

"He says a lot of things that have turned out not to be true," Kushner told Egyptian journalist Amr Adib on MBC Masr's Al Hikaya political program. "The guy has a perfect track record at failing at making peace deals."

Kushner riled up Erekat and anti-Israel activists last week when he said, accurately, that Palestinians like Erekat have screwed up every previous opportunity for peace:

Jared Kushner, senior adviser to the President, says the White House's Middle East plan is "a great deal" and if Palestinians reject it, “they’re going to screw up another opportunity, like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.” pic.twitter.com/ABAI3gKjig

— CNN (@CNN) January 28, 2020

Erakat tweeted after the MBC interview:

 It is because of people like you who want to dictate rather than negotiate and who they thought could impose an apartheid Netanyahu plan on the Palestinian people forever. Ending the occupation, two states on the 1967 borders, otherwise is failure.

Yet as I noted, the 2008 Olmert plan gave Abbas everything he demanded - and more. Erekat admitted this himself:

“I heard Olmert say that he offered 100% of the West Bank territory. This is true. I’ll testify to this. He [Olmert] presented a map [to Abbas], and said: ‘I want [Israel] to take 6.5% of the West Bank and I’ll give [the PA] 6.5% of the 1948 territory (i.e., land in Israel) in return.’ [Olmert] said to Abbas: ‘The area of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on the eve of June 4, 1967, was 6,235 sq. km. [I said to Abbas]: ‘There are 50 sq. km. of no man’s land in Jerusalem and Latrun.’ We’ll split them between us, so the territory will be 6,260 sq. km.” [I said to Abbas:] Olmert wants to give you 20 sq. km. more, so that you could say [to Palestinians]: ‘I got more than the 1967 territories.’ Regarding Jerusalem, [Olmert said]: ‘What’s Arab is Arab, and what’s Jewish is Jewish, and we’ll keep it an open city.’ Regarding the refugees, [Olmert] offered him [Abbas] 150,000 refugees … [Olmert] said: “The refugees’ right to return to the State of Palestine is your law. But regarding Israel, we will accept 150,000 refugees over 10 years. 15,000 [per year] over 10 years.”

So by denouncing all previous plans - which is in fact what many "pro-Palestinian" activists are doing in response to Kushner's CNN interview - Erekat is saying that his opposition isn't to Trump's plan but to every single previous plan as well for not going far enough.

The only possible interpretation is that Abbas' demands in 2008 were a lie, and he wanted to paint Olmert into a corner, not thinking he would (stupidly) agree to every demand for land and Israel taking responsibility for 1948 refugees and splitting Jerusalem. Abbas didn't want to end his claims on all of Israel down the line; he didn't want to stop at 150,000 Arabs "returning" - he didn't want to agree to anything that would leave Israel strong and viable.

Kushner is accurately pointing out that if Palestinians want a state, they can have one. In this plan, he notes, all the checkpoints will be gone - a Palestinian can travel through the entire state without seeing a single Israeli. Any Arab that wants to pray at Al Aqsa can do so. Details that were never dreamed of in previous plans are considered with the welfare of average Palestinians in the forefront of its philosophy.

Erekat's fuming response is, essentially, that nothing less than full Israeli surrender to the demands of those who claim they have nothing is acceptable - and that includes "return" to destroy the Jewish state. He is showing that his problem is not with Trump but with all previous plans, which fulfilled every ostensible Palestinian demand.

Erekat's words show that Palestinian leaders were never serious about peace or an independent state.And the Palestinian people are the ones who lose out because of the egos of Erekat and Abbas and all the rest.

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