23-Oct-15: When the people inciting the knifings/rammings/shootings need really good doctors, where do they turn?

Mrs Mahmoud Abbas sought surgery in Tel Aviv a year ago;
her brother is doing the same right now

It's been a notably successful few days in the lives of the Mahmoud Abbas family.

The Palestinian Authority president (elected to a four year term as president of the PA on January 9, 2005, and successful in deflecting all attempts at another election since then) had the satisfaction of knowing his brother-in-law (the brother of his wife Amina) was given Israeli approval for, access to, and then saved by, life-saving heart surgery at a private hospital in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. In a report this morning, Times of Israel says the operation, carried out at Assuta Medical Center in the Ramat Hachayal section of Tel Aviv, was successful and the patient is recovering in intensive care.

Is this routine and ordinary? No. The patient's room at Assuta, according to the news reports, is protected by security guards. His privacy is protected as well: an Assuta spokeswoman is quoted saying under its policies “we don’t discuss patients hospitalized or not hospitalized at the medical center.”

There's room for doubt as to how much Abbas appreciates or even understands the scrupulous and principled respect of other people's rights by Israeli institutions. But no doubt at all that he knows about Assuta's policy since his wife Amina received the full VIP treatment there last summer ["Mahmoud Abbas’s wife undergoes surgery in Israel", Times of Israel, June 15, 2014], Note that this happened at precisely the time that all of Israel was in agony over the seizing and then murder of three Israeli teenage boys ["24-Jun-14: The price of treating one of the sides in the conflict as if they were children"] at the hands of Palestinian Arab terrorists.

In fact, there's a well-trodden path along which family members of the most senior fat-cats in the Palestinian terror hierarchy (including Fatah, the PLO and Hamas) request, and then receive, the best medical care in the region which, naturally, is the medical care of Israel. [See "13-Aug-15: What their choice of health care providers says about terrorists and their lackeys"; "20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible" and "18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?"]

How fair is this? How reasonable is it that Israel, against whom the entire Palestinian Arab enterprise is currently arrayed in a savage, merciless war of terror directed principally at ordinary non-uniformed Israeli going about their daily lives, should set all of that aside and permit the chief instigators to use their influence to obtain medical treats for their loved ones that they deny their own fellow villagers and subjects?

And if, which we don't accept, there's a case for saying "Yes, we ought to do it, it's right and merciful and humane that we do it", why are those Palestinian Arab fat-cats not compelled by our side to confess to their own people that this is happening? That their well-being, at the end of the day, is secured and improved by the Israelis?

From a quick Google search, we see there is a small number of dry analysis-free reports of this latest Palestinian Arab VIP story in the Arabic media [for instance, Saudi News; Egypt's 7 Days], all quoting Israeli sources. But there's no sign of any serious debate, as far as we can tell, about what this could mean to the conflict between the Arabs and Israel. We hope one of our Arabic-reading readers will consider translating this post to Arabic and then publish it somewhere in the Arabic world. Who knows what good might come of it?

[More 'successes' for Mahmoud Abbas are reported here: "23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror"]