25-Jun-17: Addressing Pal Arab society's addiction to terror: Small signs of hope?

Kushner and the US delegation with Abbas in Ramallah three days ago [Image Source]

If you haven't already seen it, may we direct your attention to a fine Ben Cohen analysis in The Algemeiner. dealing with reports from Palestinian Arab sources that PA President Mahmoud Abbas was reportedly “fuming” in the wake of a meeting in Ramallah this past Thursday with Jared Kushner in which the US side sharply criticized the notorious PA program of “martyr payments” to terrorists and their families, some $183 million annually in foreign aid funds.

A couple of excerpts in which our views get some airing:

“This is madness,” Arnold Roth — whose 15-year-old daughter, Malki, was murdered along with 14 other people when a suicide bomber struck the Sbarro pizza restaurant in downtown Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 — told The Algemeiner. “No progress towards peace will ever come if we tolerate the ongoing sanctification of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs,” Roth said... In recent weeks, the Trump administration has sent out mixed signals regarding its policy on the payments. But after Thursday’s meeting with Kushner, one PA official complained to Haaretz that Kushner and his team “sounded like (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s advisers and not as honest mediators.” ["No Peace Possible While Palestinian Authority ‘Sanctifies’ Terror, Israeli Victim Families Caution Top Trump Aides", Ben Cohen in Algemeiner, June 23, 2017]

And

Roth said that while he didn’t believe the PA would collapse because of pressure on its bureaucracy over the terror payments, that outcome would still be preferable to one where “we accept some ongoing level of deaths-by-murder among Israeli families, so that the PA can preserve what they regard as cultural imperatives.”
Kushner and Greenblatt “must impress on the PA side that overcoming their addiction to terror is an essential prerequisite, and perhaps the only one, to sitting down to horse trade,” Roth concluded. “After that, everything is possible.”

It's an article worth reading in full and sharing.

The tolerance by donor countries of the pathology that has the Palestinian Arabs in its grip is a strange thing, one that has gotten far too little attention over nearly two decades. We have focused a lot of thinking- and writing-time on this over the years this blog has appeared (click Rewards for Terror to see several dozen). And experienced a tremendous amount of frustration and anger at the inability of political leaders in Europe and the US - many of whom we have tackled personally and directly on the subject - to grasp how fundamental the matter is to peace and better lives for all concerned.

If the Trump administration is ready to address it forcefully and to stay the course, that would be a welcome change with positive consequences for the pursuit of peaceful relations in this area.