Abbas Admits: The PA is Behind All Terrorism

PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas recently made an admission that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is behind all Arab terrorism in Israel. The admission made the headlines nowhere, except in Israeli and Jewish press:

“We have been paying salaries to the families of the Martyrs, to the prisoners, and to the wounded since 1965. This is because they were killed, imprisoned, or wounded because of a national interest and for the sake of a national interest, and not for personal reasons. It is our obligation to take care of their relatives” Abbas said.

His spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeina, completed the admission. “Israel needs to understand this. It is impossible to send a soldier to war and then not take care of his family. We are talking about someone who acts on our behalf and receives orders from us” [emphasis added].

Every Israeli child, teenager, man and woman killed in a terrorist attack had his life taken away simply because Abbas and his henchmen thought they should die for being Jews in the land of Israel. This admission seems to bother nobody. The EU, certainly, does not love Abbas any less for it: He remains its favorite terrorist. Killing Jews, simply because they are Jews, appears to be an entirely acceptable agenda, still, in Europe.

The EU, in fact, has vowed to continue playing a key role in funding the PA’s terrorist prisoners. Abbas, who is seeking to create a humanitarian crisis, recently announced that he would cut the salaries of the PA’s public employees in half in ‘protest’ against Israel’s decision to withhold and freeze funds used by the PA to pay Arab terrorists, and their families, monthly stipends as a reward for committing terrorism.

Thankfully, for Abbas, he remains the EU’s top priority. The EU’s Foreign Policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said as much herself at the most recent Arab League summit in Tunis on March 31: “The first point, the first top issue on our respective agenda: Israel and Palestine. We need to continue to work together very closely, because we share… the same sense of urgency…to get back to meaningful negotiations towards the two-state solution… And you know that you can count on the European Union on the Palestinian issue. We share exactly the same views and it is vital in this moment that we work together on this” [emphasis added]. As a result, the EU has vowed to pay the salaries of the PA’s public employees after the PA asked the EU for money, claiming, as predicted, that Israel was to blame for the brewing humanitarian crisis. Consequently, the EU has pledged 15 million euros to the PA to cover public employee salaries, so that the PA will continue having enough money to pay salaries to terrorists. Problem solved. If only the EU were as efficient when it came to solving the world’s real humanitarian problems, but it seems that the EU’s humanitarian instincts are strongest when the recipients are Arab terrorist out to murder Jews.

“We do not support the system of Palestinian payments to ‘prisoners and martyrs’, said EU Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy & Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn on April 30, but evidently that is just not true. They literally enable it.

It is one thing how the EU and the rest of the world chooses to react – or as it were, not to react – but it is an even more crucial matter what the official Israeli response to this admission will and should be.

It is unlikely that there will be much of an Israeli reaction. Since Abbas is the terrorist in charge of the PA, Israel is not going to ‘jeopardize’ the security cooperation it has with the PA over an admission that constitutes no surprise whatsoever to the Israeli government, which is obviously completely aware of the crucial role that the PA plays in not just dispatching terrorists, but training them from infancy to hate Jewish Israelis and to see them as legitimate terror targets.  In addition to the monetary rewards, Arab children in the PA are taught from kindergarten and onwards that the murder of Jews is an honorable act and they see this teaching reinforced all the time, as squares and schools are named after terrorists, who are promoted as the most important role models to follow.

One might consider, however, how Israel could react to this admission, which exposes the PA as what it is and has been all these years, namely an illegitimate terrorist enterprise. The terrorism coming from the PA continues being waged on a regular basis. No peace, however defined, can be made with such an entity and the recent admission presents the clearest incentive that the Israeli government could ever wish for to finally treat the PA as what it is – an open enemy that should be defeated for the purpose of creating lasting peace. Defeat does not necessarily mean military defeat only: Starving a regime of its oxygen – as Israel symbolically does by withholding a tiny percentage of the PA’s total revenues in order for it not to be paid as terrorist stipends – can also bring a regime to its knees. That would bring the much needed imposed victory that would make it possible to even begin talking about a framework of peace.

What is certain, is that the status quo, in which the PA raises an entire population on a diet of hatred and terrorism is a certain recipe for future war. At some point, whether now or later, Israel will have to deal with this fact.