Abbas, the PLO and the PA actively promote the destruction of Israel - opinion

Even before being elected, in the twilight period between the death of Yasser Arafat and the 2005 Palestinian “presidential” elections, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas promoted the legislation that entrenched the PA’s terror rewarding “Pay for Slay” policy which guarantees substantial monthly salaries to terrorist prisoners. Since then, he has twice authorized pay raises for the imprisoned terrorists.

In parallel, Abbas funneled billions of shekels to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to pay both monthly allowances to injured terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, and fund the PLO member organizations that include internationally designated terror organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel knows about the terror payments, but has mostly turned a blind eye. These terror incentivizing and rewarding payments are a clear breach of the Oslo Accords.

A year after being elected, he insisted – again in breach of the Oslo Accords – that Hamas, the genocidal terror organization that planned and led the October 7 massacre, and other Palestinian terror groups be allowed to participate in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Israel capitulated and Hamas won the elections in 2006. While Abbas deposed the Hamas government in Ramallah, the organization’s electoral victory served as the basis for seizing the Gaza Strip.

Under Abbas, the PA school curriculum, according to IMPACT-se, has become more and more radicalized and fanatical. Statistics published by the PA at the end of 2023, claim that 65% of the Palestinians now living in the “State of Palestine” – i.e. the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – are under the age of 30. In other words, an ever-growing number of Palestinians have never known any other governance system except the PA, and have been brainwashed by the PA education system to hate Israelis, hate Israel, and actively seek its demise.

The PA formal education, funded substantially by the European Union, together with the PA summer camps, teach generations of Palestinian kids to idolize terrorists and actively participate in terror. The depth of the depravity is such, that Palestinian parents actually celebrate the death of their children.

Incitement and PA's role in terror

Incitement in the PA media, as exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, is rife. PA leaders openly invoke blood libels and call for the murder of Jews. Abbas himself, in Germany, has openly claimed that Israel has carried out “50 Holocausts,” and that the Jews’ social role, not the genocidal intentions of the Nazis, were responsible for the Holocaust. While blaming the Jews for their own slaughter, in reality it is the PA media, together with the social media platforms of Abbas’s Fatah Party, that invoke imagery and messaging used by the Nazis to demonize and dehumanize Jews.

AGAIN BREACHING the Oslo Accords, Abbas’s PA has done the utmost to push the UN and other international organizations to recognize the nonexistent “State of Palestine.” While some are willingly blind and allow themselves to be fooled into believing that a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem (of course) and the Gaza Strip would bring peace, for Abbas, the PLO and the PA, realizing that goal is just another step in the PLO’s 1974 “Plan of Stages” to destroy Israel.

Even the October 7 massacre, that he has never condemned, could not sway Abbas. Rather, Abbas, the PLO and the PA see the massacre as an opportunity to again attack Israel for having the audacity to defend itself.

Days ago, speaking in the Turkish parliament – the hub of the Muslim Brotherhood – Abbas led a prayer call for the terrorist “martyr” Ismail Haniyeh, and demanded that he be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip. Conveniently, Abbas neglected to mention that he hasn’t actually set foot in Gaza since before 2007 or that in 2018, he decided to punish the Gazans by refusing to pay for their electricity.

While the list of Abbas’s malfeasance is far lengthier than the few examples listed above, when seen in their entirety, the policies of Abbas, the PLO and PA, their education, terror promotion, and incentivization are the root causes for both the October 7 massacre and continuing Palestinian terrorism.

In stark contrast, Israel has done very little. Israel provides 65% of PA funding. According to statistics of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, between 2010 and August 2023, Israel collected over NIS 107 billion for the PA. In other words, out of every 100 shekels Abbas, the PLO and the PA have spent demonizing Israel and Jews and inciting and rewarding terror, and as Hillary Clinton once said, “profoundly poison[ing] the minds” of the Palestinian children, Israel, outrageously, contributes 65 shekels.

Inexplicably, the Israeli establishment has refused, until now, to even consider any alternative to the PA. It has allowed Abbas, the PLO and the PA to actively promote the destruction of Israel. After thousands of victims have been murdered and severely wounded, and considering the broadening delegitimization of Israel in the international arena, the time has come, with all of the difficulties, to say: Enough is enough.

The writer is the director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform in the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs. He served for 19 years in the IDF Military Advocate-General Corps. In his last position, he served as director of the military prosecution in the West Bank.