Time to hold the PLO accountable for its crimes
By
Caroline B. Glick
Israel Hayom
September 25, 2020
Earlier this month, the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
announced that PLO Executive Committee Chairman Saeb Erekat has been
hired as a senior fellow for the school's Future of Diplomacy Project
for the 2020-2021 school year. This week, former senior Justice
Department official, attorney Neal Sher sent a letter to US Attorney
General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf
asking that Erekat be denied a visa to the United States.
Sher noted that Erekat's long record of supporting terrorism
as a senior PLO official includes numerous acts of inciting,
facilitating and soliciting terrorism. According to the US Immigration
and Naturalization Act, Sher argued, Erekat is legally barred from
setting foot on US soil.
The timing of Sher's letter was noteworthy.
Twenty years ago this week, the PLO's Palestinian Authority launched
its terrorist war against Israel. It was two months after Erekat's
longtime boss PLO chief and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected Israel's
offer of peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace summit.
Arafat called the terrorist war "the al-Aqsa Intifada." The name sent
a signal to the Islamic world that the Palestinians were the advance
guards of the global jihad.
Despite the PA's acts of slaughter and incitement, despite its
complete abrogation of all of its commitments to live at peace with
Israel, and its embrace of the global jihad, no one disavowed the PA.
Israel continued to seek peace through appeasement. Washington continued
to treat PA leaders as credible peacemakers even as they oversaw the
massacre of hundreds of innocent Israelis. So did the wider
international community.
Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak learned neither from Arafat's cold
shoulder at Camp David nor from the terrorist offensive he launched in
September. Barak continued to beg Arafat for peace even as the streets
of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv grew red with the blood of Israelis. At Taba,
Barak's negotiators made even more lavish offers for Israeli surrenders
of land for peace than the offer he made at Camp David.
And the death toll continued to rise.
Three months after the Palestinians began their war of jihad, then-US
president Bill Clinton announced his "vision for peace." Clinton's
"vision" included the first official American endorsement of Palestinian
statehood.
Even after the administrations changed in Washington and Jerusalem
the Bush administration and the Sharon government maintained their
slavish devotion to the fiction that the PLO was Israel's peace partner.
When, after the Sept. 11, 2001 then-President George W. Bush declared
war on "global terrorism," he made a carve out for Palestinian
terrorism. Two months later, his secretary of state Colin Powell
declared that the administration supported Palestinian statehood.
In 2007 and 2008, Bush's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice devoted
near manic efforts to achieving a peace deal between Israel and the PA.
Her favored method for achieving progress was not to compel the PA to
end its support for terrorism and Israel's destruction. It was to
pressure Israel to make concessions to the PA.
In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Arafat's heir
Mahmoud Abbas, an offer of peace even more generous than Barak's offer
at Taba. And like Arafat before him, Abbas didn't even bother to
acknowledge Olmert's offer. Instead, he stepped up his political war
against Israel and expanded the PA's financial support for terrorists.
Throughout his eight years in office Barak Obama made supporting the
Palestinians and their unrelenting war against Israel his highest goal.
His method for advancing it was applying unrelenting pressure on Israel
and showering it with abuse, threats and condemnations.
The PA, needless to say, returned the favor by spurning Obama's peace plan.
What stood behind this delusional response to Palestinian aggression?
Why did the US and Israel continue to lavish the PA with financial,
political and military support instead of blackballing it and shutting
it down?
The main reason was because for the past generation, the
establishment view of the Middle East was that there could be no
resolution of the Arab world's conflict with Israel until the
Palestinian conflict with Israel was resolved. And the way to resolve
that conflict wasn't by forcing the Palestinians to choose leaders that
supported coexistence with Israel. It was by forcing Israel to appease
the PLO through land surrenders. In other words, the idea that all the
who's who from Washington to Paris, to Berlin to Tel Aviv ascribed to
was that Israel was the side that needed to change for there to be peace
– not the Palestinians.
Among the Israelis – who were the direct victims of Palestinian
aggression – the majority of the public realized by 2000 that the peace
process with the PLO was fake and that Israel needed to disavow it and
set out on a new course. But despite the ever-rising casualty count and
the unprecedented campaign of delegitimization led by the PLO and joined
by the EU and the UN against Israel, Israel maintained its allegiance
to the phony peace process and continued to support its enemy and phony
peace partner because two powerful constituencies insisted on it.
The Israeli left, including the media, and Israel's security brass
refused to accept the implications of the PLO's command of the terror
war. They would not reconcile themselves to the reality literally
exploding all around them, that the PLO and its PA were Israel's enemy,
not its peace partner because they couldn't imagine a situation in which
the Palestinian cities and villages run by the PA would be run by
anyone else.
There were many reasons for this willful delusion. Some feared
Palestinian demography. Some were driven by hatred of the Israeli right.
Many – from the far-Left to the IDF General Staff to the top echelons
of the Israel Security Agency to the Foreign Ministry – were simply
unable to admit that they had been mistaken in their support for the
peace process with the PLO. For these reasons and others, Israel's
security establishment and political left refused to get their heads
around the basic fact that even if there was no good alternative to the
PLO-run PA, that didn't make the PLO-run PA a viable alternative. The
PLO-run PA is a hostile, corrupt, corrupting and dangerous enemy. And it
will never, ever change.
Abbas regularly threatened to shut down the PA unless he received
further billions of dollars in funding from the EU and the US and tax
revenues from Israel. Abbas felt comfortable repeating his threat
because he knew that he was the irreplaceable man and that his regime
was the irreplaceable regime. Without them, after all, the "experts"
from Brussels to Boston to Haifa insisted, there could never be peace
anywhere in the Middle East. Obviously, the world powers had to continue
propping up the PA. Obviously, the IDF General Staff had to insist that
Israel's tax authority continue collecting taxes for the PA and
transferring the revenues to Abbas's bank account.
The peace agreements Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and
Bahrain last week at the White House, and the Arab League's rejection of
the PLO's demand to condemn the deals demonstrate the idiocy of the
notion that the Palestinians are now, or ever have been the key to
Middle East peace. Far from being the key to peace, the PLO is
irrelevant to peace. The moment the leaders of the UAE and Bahrain
decided that making peace with Israel served their interests, they made
peace with Israel. The Arab League's refusal to condemn them points to
the depth and breadth of support for relations with Israel among Arab
leaders.
This brings us back to Sher's letter about Erekat. There is no
question that Erekat has played a key role in facilitating Palestinian
terrorism for more than a quarter century. As recently as June he
falsely accused Israel of "executing" an innocent Palestinian. Erekat's
cousin Ahmad Erakat was killed by Israeli forces at a checkpoint south
of Jerusalem after he tried to kill them by ramming them with his
vehicle. His terrorist act was captured on film.
Erekat's most notorious and successful effort to spread blood libels
against Israel occurred in the wake of the bloody battle in Jenin during
Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Jenin had been the terrorism
capital of Judea and Samaria. In March 2002, numerous suicide bombers
were deployed to Israeli population centers from the city.
In the course of the battle, IDF reservists fought terrorists
everywhere. All the buildings in the area had been booby-trapped.
Twenty-three IDF soldiers were killed. Some 53 Palestinians, most of
whom were armed terrorists were also killed.
But just as Erekat portrayed his would-be killer cousin as a martyr
so he misrepresented the battle in Jenin. In the wake of the battle he
appeared on CNN three times and accused Israel of massacring
more than 500 innocent Palestinian men, women and children. He likened
the battle to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Israelis to Nazis and the
Palestinian terrorists to Jewish Holocaust victims.
A few months after President Donald Trump entered office, Erekat
received a lung transplant in the US America's lifesaving hospitality
didn't provoke any gratitude, or even politeness from Erekat, however.
Since recuperating, Erekat has repeatedly condemned and insulted Trump
and his senior advisors Jared Kushner, Ambassador David Friedman, former
chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt and former Ambassador to the UN Nikki
Haley. He wrote an oped in the New York Times insisting that the US has
no right to mediate negotiations between Israel and the PLO.
Despite his long and bloody record of lies, and incitement and
facilitation of terrorism, Erekat has never been called to account for
his actions, much less paid a price for them. Now, perhaps, when it is
clear to all that the PLO is irrelevant to peace, the time has finally
arrived when he and his PLO colleagues will be treated like the malign
terrorists and liars that they are and have always been.
Sher is right. There is no reason to grant Erekat a US visa so he can
come to Harvard and share his blood libels and his incitement of
terrorism with American students.
And there is no reason to stop with him. America and Israel should
both end the joke of PLO moderation. There is no reason for Israel to
continue collecting taxes for the PA or transferring the revenues to the
PA, which exists to eliminate the Jewish state. There is no reason for
the Israeli government to shield the PA from law suits from terror
victims. All the taxes that Israel has collected for the PA rightly
belong to the 15,000 Israeli families that have been shattered by its
terrorist aggression.
The PLO era officially began at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993. It
officially ended at the White House on Sept. 15, 2020. It is time for
Israel, the US and the rest of the world to recognize this truth and act
accordingly.
