OK, you say, but they’re not Hamas. True enough, but a month before the launching of more than 4,000 Hamas rockets, official PA media was openly inciting violence. Abbas’s religious affairs adviser told PA-TV viewers, “Islam does not want you to be submissive to others,” and “If you die fighting, you go to paradise; if you kill the enemies, they go to hell.” Did that spark the shooting of three Israeli students, including the murder of 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta?
Images of Palestinians beating Orthodox Jews were posted to the social media site TikTok seeking “likes” and “approvals,” and engendering the name “TikTok Intifada”; Abbas called to “defend the mosque”—a historic call for violence against Jews in Jerusalem; and the ever-popular song on PA-TV, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts. … My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.”
But never mind.
References to Palestinian incitement to violence against Jews and Israelis over the past seven months have been deleted from the State Department’s mandated report to Congress on Palestinian violence.
Since the conflict in mid-May between Israel and Hamas (which dropped anywhere from 450 to 650 rockets inside Gaza, killing an unknown number of its own people), the administration has advanced the idea of an “extra” $57 million to be funneled through the PA and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) to Gaza. This despite the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying that State Department reporting on textbooks for Palestinian students was “problematic” (read: “ignored blatant incitement to violence, antisemitic and historically inaccurate”). In a grammar exercise, a flashcard reads “the occupier commits all kinds of torture.” An exercise in verb conjugation includes the line “jihad is the road of glory.” Social-studies curricula don’t acknowledge the existence of Israel, referring to the British Mandate area as “Palestine.”
As a further gift to Abbas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested the United States would reopen the Jerusalem Consulate, closed (as would be normal in every other country) when the US embassy opened in Jerusalem in May 2018. The consulate had operated as diplomatic representation to the PA, never reporting through the US embassy, including when it was in Tel Aviv. If America needs representation to the PA, it seems that it should be in Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian governance.
That’s not to say the administration is ignoring Israel. Not at all.
The State Department criticized the razing of the home of the Palestinian who killed Guetta. With perhaps unintended irony, the US embassy in Jerusalem said, “All sides should refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution; this certainly includes the punitive demolition of Palestinian homes.”
Guetta’s murder, it seems, was not “unilateral” and did not “exacerbate tensions.”
In addition, the United States froze the Abraham Fund designed to finance programs in Israel and its Gulf and African partners involved with the Abraham Accords.
An Israeli court decision on squatters who have failed to pay rent to Jewish property owners for nearly 50 years appears to be a source of aggravation for the State Department.
And, finally, in a move that can only be called disgusting, America announced that it would not raise the issue of the return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers held by Hamas since 2014, and the repatriation of two Israeli civilians who are said to suffer from mental illnesses and crossed the border by mistake. While claiming to be sympathetic to Israel’s position, the United States didn’t want to “derail” talks with Hamas about allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.
When supporting Abbas and the corrupt PA—and not derailing talks with the terrorist organization Hamas—is the priority of the US government, it isn’t only Israel that’s in trouble.
Shoshana Bryen is senior director of the Jewish Policy Center and editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.