03-Dec-17: Peace: What do Palestinian Arab insiders mean when they see it slipping away?

Al-Habbash [Image Source]

Our partners-in-peace, the Palestinian Authority and its president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, are taking pains once again to lay out how peace is going to come about, and how not.

As reported earlier today ["Abbas aide: Jerusalem recognition will destroy peace", Israel National News, December 3, 2017], a senior adviser to Abbas, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, evidently reacted yesterday to news reports that US President Donald Trump is likely to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as soon as Wednesday.

A brief extract of his views:

“Any American declaration of recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – if there is one – would mean total destruction of the peace process," said Al-Habbash, who was quoted in Israeli media. “The whole world will pay a price for any change or harm to the political reality of Jerusalem,” he warned. The Yediot Aharonot newspaper noted that Al-Habbash made the comments with Abbas standing at his side, meaning that Abbas fully backed the remarks. “The Arab states stand by us, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and the entire Arab-Islamic nation is united in one position,” Al-Habbash further claimed.

This Al-Habbash is no stranger to our blog even if his name is not so well recognized. He's the central player in "15-Jan-14: How jihadist messages heard in the Palestinian Arab villages go unreported in the wider world", and "2-Jun-14: Palestinian government ministers and the political necessity of speaking out of both sides of the mouth depending on who's listening". Starting in 2014, he has been serving as a Supreme Shari’ah Court Judge, as Chairman of the PA's Supreme Council for Shari'ah Justice and as Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs. Until 1994, he was an up-and-comer in Hamas.

In the earlier of the two pieces, we described him as a man "with a powerful megaphone" who

is today a certified PA/Abbas insider, a cabinet minister who is more influential in the villages of the PA regime's fiefdom than most of its other politicians. This is because of what he does for a living: after earlier stints as minister of agriculture and minister of social affairs, he has served as minister of "waqf and religious affairs" since 2009... In a society where religion plays such a deadly important role, the influence of Al-Habbash is tremendous, even if most analysts and reporters are oblivious to it.

And in the June 2014 post, we said

Al-Habbash is hectoring his assembled audience of Palestinian Arab VIPs, including the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas who heads the PA, on how the young men who are pointlessly and violently laying down their murderous lives in the name of jihad in Syria ought to think again and go do it in Jerusalem.

It's a shame this Koran-thumping, rabble-rousing man of extreme violence and major influence who explicitly wants to see more and more young Palestinian Arabs die in the service of the Abbas presidency isn't better known. Perhaps he will be now.

His Saturday statement on how a shift of the United States embassy to Israel's capital city will "destroy peace" has a lot packed into it. It doesn't convey anything especially new; you can see what he said of an almost identical nature nearly a year ago ["Abbas aide: Moving American embassy a 'declaration of war'", Israel National News, January 9, 2017]. But for sheer hypocritical double-talk, it ought to get more attention.

[Image Source]

It's a shame that mainstream analysts don't try to take it apart. When Al-Habbash says violence (and from past experience, he means extreme, lethal violence) will flow from a diplomatic move on the part of the Trump administration, here's what it would be different from:

• Training Palestinian Arab children to kill and be killed -- that would not destroy peace
• Distorting elementary and secondary school text books in such a way that a child learning a lesson in basic arithmetic would be unwittingly taught to hate Israelis -- that would not destroy peace
• Paying imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists once they are behind Israeli bars and when they are eventually released -- that would not destroy peace
• Declaring publicly via the mass media that the blood of dead Palestinian Arab children "fertilizes" the soil of their land and prepares it for a brighter Jew-free future -- that would not destroy peace
• Weaponizing Palestinian Arab children by encouraging them to pine for towns, cities and regions that have been parts of the State of Israel for seven decades, and not just to pine but to plan to struggle and kill and be killed for them as children or as adolescents or eventually as adults -- that would not destroy peace
• Operating a national budget that is designed from the get-go to be drastically dependent on foreign aid and particularly on funding from UNRWA (and especially for education in all its aspects) and that enables far fewer quality schools, innovative colleges and excellent universities and trade-schools -- that would not destroy peace
• When the head of the PA "pledges" that "there will be no Israelis in Palestine... not a single Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands" once a "resolution" has been achieved -- that would not destroy peace

The fact that Jerusalem has never been the capital city of any Arabic entity is pushed off the page both by demagogues like Al-Habbash and by the reporters who quote them.

If you're a regular reader, you probably know enough to extend this list further and further down the page. 

15-Jan-14: How jihadist messages heard in the Palestinian Arab villages go unreported in the wider world

Abbas' minister of religion and government-controlled
sermonizing Al-Habbash [Image Source: PalestinianMedia Watch
report, January 14, 2014]

While the rest of us tend to 'hear' only a handful of voices emanating from the Palestinian Authority government - one of the two quarrelsome regimes purporting to speak for the Palestinian Arabs - the citizens living under the yoke of the PA hear many more. 

Most of us recognize the name Mahmoud Abbas and more or less the things he stands for: the 'heroism' of those pathetic killers of elderly Jews and unarmed bus passengers, for instance. Some of us may know one or two of the names of PA cabinet ministers [here's a list]. But mention the name Mahmoud Al-Habbash and most observers of events in our neighbourhood will probably just give a shrug.

This is understandable but a shame. Al-Habbash, a Hamas member at an earlier stage in his career, is today a certified PA/Abbas insider, a cabinet minister who is more influential in the villages of the PA regime's fiefdom than most of its other politicians. This is because of what he does for a living: after earlier stints as minister of agriculture and minister of social affairs, he has served as minister of "waqf and religious affairs" since 2009. Or more accurately, one of the two such ministers since Hamas, naturally, has named its own man to the same post.

In a society where religion plays such a deadly important role, the influence of Al-Habbash is tremendous, even if most analysts and reporters are oblivious to it. (The dirty little secret about news reporting on what the PA stands for, wants, does and says is that it is based on the English-language versions of news releases put out by Abbas' bureau and by a handful of media outlets that play nice with the PA. The authentic Arabic-language messages are rarely reported other than by dedicated PA watchers like MEMRI and PMW. The work product of both is routinely ignored by most of the mainstream media most of the time.)

Palestinian Media Watch which specializes in just this kind of thing recently translated into English an Arabic-language press conference [here] in which the minister clarified to the citizenry the scope of his powers:

Al-Habbash explained that he is responsible for “all activity within the mosques” including the sermons, which require prior approval by his ministry. [He] emphasized that the mosques and everything related to them belong to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, from the employees – the imam, the speaker, the Quran teacher, the librarian, the caretakers and custodians – via the mosque and its adjacent structures… to regulation of the activity and the functioning, in accordance with Shari’ah and civil law… The Ministry is responsible for all activity within the mosques – the functioning, the centers for Quran study, the calls to prayer, and the sermons – and that the Ministry would not take lightly or be negligent in the fulfillment of its obligation. He noted that the religious lessons, Quran study and other activities going on in the mosques require prior approval by the Ministry.” [Al-Ayyam, Aug. 16, 2010 via PMW] 

Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority cabinet [Image Source]

In Palestinian Arab society, this amounts to a powerful megaphone. In fact, the editors at PMW point out that as minister, Al-Habbash himself often delivers the Friday sermons transmitted on official PA TV. These reflect messages that his ministry, Religious Affairs, chooses to disseminate to the Palestinian people. That's the way things work in authoritarian regimes.

Here's an extract from one of those authorized sermons from this past Monday:

"Whoever wants resistance, whoever wants Jihad, the direction for Jihad is well-known and clear... Those who send young people to Syria or elsewhere to die for a misdirected cause must stop and understand that Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction, Jerusalem is the address...  I don't think there is anyone who doesn't know this... A compass that does not point to Jerusalem, Muhammad has nothing to do with it. Put an end to your ignorance." 

Put an end to your ignorance: that certainly makes sense to us. PMW's report of the speech, along with the video evidence of it, is here. With his boss and chief Palestinian maker-of-peace Mahmoud Abbas present in the audience and applauding to show agreement, declaiming in front of a sign stating that the event was being held under Abbas's auspices, Al-Habbash's message to the villages and streets of the PA was clear: there is a role for the jihadists, and it's not in Syria (current death toll: about 130,000) but here in Jerusalem from where we are writing these lines. [Another striking and mostly-ignored Al-Habbash sermon is well covered in this Israel-friendly report, and this one.]

Abbas and his message spinners know they take almost no risk in identifying with pro-terror messages like that of the minister of religion. Their confidence stems from the certainty that reports like PMW's coverage of the Al-Habbash speech will never appear in the world's conventional news channels. The Israelis may get agitated about it, but no serious analysts take that seriously either since it goes on all the time. Lethal journalism happens, even if the vast majority of its consumers have no idea it exists.

That dull, grinding sound you hear in the background? It's the so-called peace-process, about whose actual contours and features (like the hate-filled, violence-friendly pro-jihad message of Mahmoud Abbas and his inner circle) most people know nothing.

It's something to bear in mind when the reports of a fourth tranche of murderers, convicted and sentenced but being released from their Israeli cells under relentless US pressure, appear again in the news in the coming weeks.