The Palestinians' Three No's: What They Mean
When Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad talk about "paying a political price," they are referring to demands that the Palestinian terrorist groups lay down their weapons, halt terrorist attacks on Israel, and abandon their dream of eliminating Israel. These are terms, of course, to which no Palestinian terrorist group could ever afford to agree.
Accepting such conditions would make them look bad in the eyes of their supporters, who would then accuse them of betraying the Arabs and Muslims by failing to fulfill their promise of destroying Israel. As far as these groups are concerned, keeping their weapons is tremendously more important than improving the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
To be clear: when the Palestinian terrorist groups talk about "resistance," they are referring to terror attacks on Israel. These include suicide bombings, launching rockets towards Israel, and hurling explosive devices and firebombs at Israeli soldiers and civilians. These groups do not believe in any form of peaceful and non-violent protests. For them, there is only one realistic option to achieve their goal of destroying Israel: the armed struggle.
Why are the Palestinian terrorist groups conducting indirect talks with Israel to reach a new truce agreement in the Gaza Strip under the auspices of Egypt and the UN? The answer is simple. They want a truce, or period of calm, so that they can continue preparing for the next war against Israel without having to worry about Israeli military operations.
“UNRWA is not serving Palestinians. It's a political arm that claims to serve Palestinians. We have for two years asked UNRWA to reform itself because it has this ongoing number of refugees that is unsustainable. We can’t sustain—and the world knows.” @NikkiHaley, Sept. 4, 2018 pic.twitter.com/e9Uacg4N3W
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) September 25, 2018
PMW: Fatah TV host anticipates taking Israelis hostage to "release our captives"
Commemorating the anniversary of the capture of 8 Israeli soldiers and holding them hostage in Lebanon in 1982, until Israel released 5,900 Palestinian and Arab terrorists from Israeli prisons, a Fatah TV host expressed his wish for a similar "operation" to "release our captives" - i.e., terrorists and murderers sitting in Israeli prisons.Israel’s Nationality Law, UN Resolution 181, and the Arab List
Interviewing Fatah Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul about the taking of Israelis as hostages in the 1980s, Muwaffaq Matar, host at the Fatah-run Awdah TV, described the 8 Israeli captives as "the hens that would lay golden eggs," because they were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
Fatah Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul: "They [Fatah fighters] shouted at them [Israeli soldiers] to lay down their weapons... There were six of them. The guys arranged them in one row, took their weapons from them, and ordered them to raise their hands... The two [additional Israeli] soldiers who were behind the hill advanced... laid their weapons on the ground, and raised their hands..."
Fatah-run Awdah TV host Muwaffaq Matar: "We had... 'the hens that would lay golden eggs'... the captives through whom, or through the exchange of whom, about 5,000 Palestinian prisoners were released... We think that this Palestinian wisdom... the Palestinian fighter will undoubtedly bring a new victory and a new quality operation one day. The conditions might have changed, and the means might change, but this hope and this promise will release our prisoners." [Official Fatah Facebook page, Sept. 4, 2018]
Ever since 1988, when after 40 years of rejection, the PLO feigned acceptance of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on the partition of mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the resolution has been the document used most frequently by Palestinians to underscore two of their major claims — the right to statehood within borders that were larger by far than those envisaged by the Oslo “peace” process, and the supposed Palestinian “right of return.”
For these reasons, Resolution 181 holds center stage in one of the PLO’s most famous documents — the Palestinian declaration of independence, which was approved by the Palestine National Council (PNC), the PLO’s legislative body, in Algiers in 1988.
It can be self-defeating to cite documents without having read them. And the Palestinians learned this in their attempts to mobilize Resolution 181 behind the Palestinian cause.
One major contradiction concerns Jerusalem. According to the partition resolution, Jerusalem was to be governed by an international regime that was separate from both the Jewish and Arab states. This, of course, directly contradicts the vision of Jerusalem as the Palestinian state’s future capital. (For this and other reasons, the document is never quoted by Israeli officials either.)
Even more blatant is this contradiction: the traditional PLO stance is to reject the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (or the state of the Jewish People), but the partition of Mandatory Palestine was to have been between a Jewish state and an Arab one. It was unproblematic at the time to define the future state with a Jewish majority as the “Jewish state.” The drafters of the document took it for granted that the Jewish state was to be the state of the Jewish people, which may be one of the reasons why the Arab states uniformly rejected the document and its contents.