While the closing statement of “The Promise of the Hereafter” contained a paragraph about “securing Palestine’s resources” when the “campaign for the liberation of Palestine begins,” the document devotes significantly more space to plans to “purge” the territory encompassing Israel of “Jewish settlers” and “hypocrite scum that spread corruption in the land.”
In his own address to the conference, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Al-Sinwar declared that the “liberation [of Israel] is the heart of Hamas’ strategic vision, that speaks of the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river.” Political bureau member Mahmoud Al-Zahhar likewise rejected any notion of a two-state solution, stating that Palestinians must not relinquish “a single inch of our land.”
The organizing committee of “The Promise of the Hereafter” effort will reportedly formally present its recommendations to Hamas’ leadership. These include, for example, sparing for at least a short time the lives of “educated Jews” so that they may be subjugated and have their mental prowess presumably forcibly harnessed in a future “Palestine.”
As translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute:
Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained [in Palestine] for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests.”
One can only guess why the AP opted to highlight Hamas’ strategy for managing an extinct Israel’s natural resources, but did not deem it newsworthy to include the terror group’s plans related to human beings.
Incredibly, the article contains other instances of anti-Israel bias.
It claims, for instance, that wages are “much higher” within the Jewish state’s pre-1967 borders than in the West Bank “in part because of Israel’s 54-year military occupation of the territory.”
But according to figures provided by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians who work in the PA-controlled parts of the West Bank earn, on average, $37.74 per day, corresponding to a monthly salary of some $750. By comparison, in neighboring Jordan, the most recent records peg the average salary at $530 per month.
In fact, workers in the Palestinian Authority take home about 22 times the amount of Lebanon’s minimum wage.
Despite all of this, the AP makes Israel out to be the bad guy, even as thousands of Gazans were lining up for hours in the hope of obtaining Israeli work permits. And this just days after Hamas held a conference to plot the annihilation of the same country that evidently is trying to alleviate the plight of the terror group’s current “subjects”: Palestinians.
Akiva Van Koningsveld is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article was originally published.
