by Caroline Glick • October 15, 2023 at 4:30 am
The US and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to coexist with the Jewish state.
"We made [the Israelis] think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack." — Ali Baraka, senior Hamas terrorist, RT.
"We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law." — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Reuters, October 12, 2023.
Abbas's statement is notable for many reasons. It doesn't name Hamas. It draws a moral equivalence between Israel's counterattack in Gaza and Hamas's orgiastic rape, torture, murder, immolation and kidnapping of babies, children, women and men. And it came after five days in which Abbas and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas's atrocities.
The subtext was clear. Hamas is the bad guy. The Palestinian Authority is the good guy. And if that weren't apparent as Biden spoke, Blinken's decision to meet with Abbas made the point explicit.
Fatah also called for all Palestinians to join Hamas's jihad against Israel.
The fakery of Abbas's milquetoast condemnation of Hamas's atrocities is self-evident when seen in the context of his actions and statements and those of the PA, PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian public. But it was clearly sufficient to convince Blinken that it is reasonable to meet with him and continue to base US policy on the fiction that the PA represents a moderate force within Palestinian society that is willing to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state.
Israel and the US have refused to acknowledge that they have been played by the PA the same way they were played by Hamas for the past two years, and Hamas was able to deceive Israel and the US for two years because they wanted to be deceived. Israel's generals wanted to believe that the Palestinians writ large aren't implacable foes. They can be appeased. We don't have to defeat them.
And the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, wanted to believe the deception — and to still believe it in the PA's case — because they want to believe that Israel is to blame for the violence waged against it. The lie of Israeli culpability is the foundation of 50 years of US Middle East peacemaking efforts. The lie of Palestinian moderation is the rationale for 50 years of near-continuous US pressure on Israel to concede territory to the Palestinians. It has been the justification and rationale for the US opposition to any effort by Israel to defeat the PLO on the battlefield.
The constant assertion "There is no military solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel" is predicated on the notion that there is a political solution.
But the slaughter of October 7 made clear — and not for the first or the hundredth time — that this isn't a political conflict. It is an existential one.
Last Sunday, senior Hamas terrorist Ali Baraka told the tale of how Hamas duped Israel and the US into complacency.
In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today), Baraka said:
"In the past couple of years, Hamas has adopted a 'rational' approach. It did not go into any war and did not join Islamic Jihad in its recent battle [its 2022 missile assault on Israel] ...
"We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack."
In other words, Hamas pretended it was a credible partner for negotiations, and that the only problem was Palestinian Islamic Jihad, its Iranian-founded spin-off.
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