Ori Ansbacher, 19, who was murdered on Thursday, February 7, 2019 in a Palestinian terror attack. Photo: Twitter screenshot.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has finally found a terrorist act committed by a Palestinian against an Israeli that it wants to disassociate from. The horrific rape and knife murder of 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher prompted Qadura Fares, head of the PA-affiliated Prisoner’s Club, to say, “From our perspective, this [rape] becomes a criminal case. We’re against the idea that anyone who commits a criminal act can then try to cloak themselves in the nationalist flag.”

A senior Fatah official said, “Even if there was no rape, a murder like this is unacceptable. The victim wasn’t a soldier, and this wasn’t wartime. If you want to be a hero, you don’t go and murder an innocent woman who went into the woods to read a book.”

No go, guys. In the world of the PA, everyone is a soldier and every day is wartime. You own this, and you own Arafat Irfaiya.

Irfaiya is 27 years old, just about the same age as the Oslo Accords. In 2006, when Irfaiya was just a boy, the PA, aware that it could not field an army to go to war against Israel, adopted a strategy of “popular resistance” (i.e., terrorism) at the 6th Fatah Conference. Seemingly unplanned low-tech attacks (car rammings or stabbings) against Israelis and Jews were described after the fact by Palestinian leadership as “heroic actions” and “the natural response to Israel’s crimes.”

In 2015, Mahmoud Abbas instigated the “ramming and stabbing intifada” by calling on Palestinians to “defend” the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount:

There are earthly rewards as well, codified in Amended Palestinian Prisoners Law No. 19, which predates the 2015 violence. The law mandates free tuition, health insurance, and professional training for Palestinians released from Israeli jail. It also talks about salaries “linked to a cost-of-living index.” In 2013, the law was amended to give released prisoners “priority in annual job placements in all State institutions.”

The US’s Taylor Force Act cuts American money to the PA for such salaries, but Hassan Abed Rabbo, PLO head of the Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners’ Affairs, disapproved, saying: “It is the right of all of the prisoners and martyrs who have struggled and sacrificed for Palestine to receive their full salaries from the PA.” Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah said that inmates are “prisoners of war” and “their cause is the cause of all of us.”

No exclusion for rape. No exclusion for Irfaiya. Everyone is a soldier; every day is a battle.

Irfaiya didn’t stand a chance. He was marinated in the demonization of Jews and the illegitimacy of Israel. Any Palestinian under the age of 35 had at least a substantial part of his/her education in PA schools designed to promote war. Just last week, Congressmen Scott Perry and Lee Zeldin wrested from classification part of a US State Department study of Palestinian schools under the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) that called the evidence against the schools “damning.”

Even the math curriculum was “problematic” and “not aligned with UN values,” the report explained, because “[a] specific math problem using the number of Palestinian casualties in the first and second intifadas (uprisings) was clearly objectionable.” There is also “material that ignores Israeli narratives, includes militaristic and adversarial imagery, and preaches the values of resistance.”

And while UNRWA did produce additional materials that slightly corrected the problem, said the report, it acknowledged that those materials were not distributed, and that Palestinian teachers went on strike rather than receive and use them.

Furthermore, the list of “heroes” selected for Palestinian children to venerate and imitate is a list of terrorists. High among them is Dalal Mughrabi, mastermind of the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israeli bus company employees and their families — and one American — were killed.

A women’s center was named for her, two schools, a PA summer camp for children, a town square, and more than one soccer club. Al Quds University has soccer squads named for her and Yaha Ayyash (“The Engineer”) considered the “father” of suicide attacks.

Everyone is a soldier; every day is a battle. No exception for Arafat Ifaiya — a product of his culture and his education, and owned by the people who raised him.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. A version of this article was originally published in The American Thinker.