13-Sep-18: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?

The Oslo Accords are signed at the White House exactly 25 years ago today, on September 13, 1993 | Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister, signs  as Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin; President Bill Clinton and the PLO's Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas look on. [Image Credit: J David AKE/AFP]

One of the most interesting things we do here is look at what the Palestinian Arabs think. As we explained in our most recent attempt to do this ["16-Jul-18: What do the Palestinian Arabs want? What do they believe? What do they think?"], looking at accurate, well-collected and intelligently analyzed opinion poll data is

invariably more valuable by far than media guesses about what the Palestinian Arabs think and want. Claims are made freely and often about Palestinian Arab aspirations. Very often, though, the data tell a story that's at total variance from what's being claimed about them... [source] 

Bluntly, much of what the mainstream media claim about Palestinian Arab public opinion is just plain wrong. We make that statement on the basis of carefully reviewing the work of a Palestinian Arab organization called The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). It's headed by a respected professional, Dr. Khalil Shikaki. We have no personal connection with him or his work. His reputation for objectivity is why we pay attention. Here are some of our previous analyses:

• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 26-Sep-17: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?
• 16-Jul-18: What do the Palestinian Arabs want? What do they believe? What do they think?
• (Click here for the full list.)

Here are some insights we found PSR Public Opinion Poll Number 69, published yesterday (Wednesday September 12, 2018). It's based on survey data collected face-to-face in the previous week from a total sample size of 1,270 Palestinian Arab adults.

Political leaders?

From our perspective and with Arab-on-Israeli terrorism very much on our minds, the most clear-cut insights have to do with Mahmoud Abbas, the fading president-for-life of the Palestinian Authority:

• More than six out of ten Palestinian Arabs want him to resign. This is very slightly higher than the last poll showed. Broken down, the rejection stands at 52% in the West Bank; 78% in the Gaza Strip.
• An overwhelming majority disagree with his most important domestic policies. Overall about half of the Palestinian Arabs now see Abbas' PA as a burden rather than an asset.
• So where do they want power to reside? Well, fully two-thirds are against his decision (incapable at this stage of being implemented) to disarm the terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip.
• Furthermore, most reject his demand that Hamas hand control over the Gaza Strip to the so-called reconciliation government controlled by his PA. 
• Related to this, most Palestinian Arabs say they support Hamas’ efforts to reach a long-term Tahdia agreement with Israel even if the reconciliation government cannot be created. (Tahdia or Tahdiya is an Arabic word that is usually translated cease-fire or calming-down. It does not mean truce or peace.)
• These data points show that Hamas gets more overall trust and backing now than Abbas and his Fatah/PA/PLO factions. But both get less support than they had when the last survey was published three months ago.
• In party-political terms, if elections (which were last held since 2006) took place for the Palestinian Legislative Council and its 132 seats, 27% say they would support Hamas (down on the summer poll results); 36% would vote for Fatah (also down on the summer results); all the other parties combined would get 10%. The 28% who say they are undecided would be more numerous than Hamas' voters. By comparison, Hamas defeated the long-dominant Fatah in those 2006 elections, ending up with 76 seats out of the 132. Chaos ensued, followed, in June 2007, by the eruption of open fighting between the armed forces of Fatah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The winners of the blood-bath (the physical one, not the electoral one) were Hamas who have held on tightly to control until today. No parliamentary elections have happened in the ensuing 12 years, and none are realistically in prospect.
• But leaving aside the factions and focusing on the personalities, the picture gets confusing. If a two-horse election race had been held last week: 
• If it were Mahmoud Abbas up against Ismail Haniyeh (of Hamas), Abbas wins 47% to 45%. 
• If instead of Abbas, the Fatah candidate were the imprisoned murderer Marwan Barghouti, he would steamroller Haniyeh by the substantial margin of 58% against 37%.

The role of the United States?

It's no secret that the Palestinian Arab leadership is having a hard time with the Trump Administration. How have such moves by the US as ending most of its cash aid to the PA, cancelling its contributions to UNRWA, moving its Tel Aviv embassy to Jerusalem affected Palestinian Arab opinion?

• An overwhelming 90% now view the US as biased towards Israel.
• Half want their leaders to absolutely reject what the pollsters call the US “Deal of the Century” - the terms of which no one has actually seen yet - because "it will certainly be bad for Palestinians"
• Moreover, most oppose the resumption of any dialogue with the US.
• Most also are against going back to negotiations with Israel. 

How bad are things?

The poll looks at how ordinary people feell about the overall condition of where they live. The results are bleak. What proportion think their conditions are "positive"?

• In the Gaza Strip, a whopping 5%
• In the West Bank, just 19%.
• Overall, 77% worry that reductions in foreign aid from the US and others will generate more unemployment growth, more poverty and still further deterioration in daily living conditions.
• Who's to blame for all this awfulness? 43% say it's the PA and its head, Mahmoud Abbas - and note that Gazans are twice as likely to say this as West Bankers. 24% blame Hamas. 8% say it's Egypt that caused the problems. 17% say it's "others". 
• Presumably making matters even worse, 59% of Palestinian Arabs - not surprisingly, given the nature of the two regimes in question - say they cannot criticize the Palestinian Authority (except to the pollsters) without fear. And 77% say there is corruption in the PA's organs 
• A third of all Palestinian Arabs say they want to emigrate if they can. This trend is much stronger in Gaza (about 50%) than in the West Bank (22%). 

Violence?

• Two-thirds - and this holds equally true in Gaza and in the West Bank - favour allowing the "armed battalions", meaning terrorist factions and their weapons, where they currently are.
• 68% support (and 25% oppose) the PA decision to cease security coordination with Israel. At the same time, 69% think the Palestinian Arab leadership will never actually implement that decision.

Peace?

Has life gotten better or worse since the Oslo Accords were signed between Arafat's PA and the government of Israel in 1993? And how will peace look when it arrives?

• 73% say "conditions today are worse" than before Oslo.
• 36% blame this on Israel for "refusing to end its occupation"
• 35% say its the failure of the "international community" to press Israel harder
• 65% believe the Oslo Accords "damaged the national interest".
• Support for the two-state solution has risen slightly compared with three months ago: 47%.
• When asked to choose among (a) the two-state solution, (b) the one-state solution and (c) any other third solution, the two-state solution wins with 53%.
• At the same time, 56% say the two-state solution is no longer practical because of Israeli settlement. 
• Do they agree that the chances for the creation of a Palestinian Arab state side-by-side with the State of Israel in the next five years are slim or nonexistent? Yes, say 72% of Palestinian Arabs.
• And for 30%, the preferred next stage entails waging armed struggle against "the Israeli occupation”. 39% say "negotiation is the most effective means of establishing a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel".
• Don't expect or look for coherence or consistency.
• 80% think the Arab world doesn't see Palestine as "its primary cause", which sounds right to us.
• Depressingly, 57% "believe that Israel’s long-term aspiration is to expand the state of Israel to stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and to expel the Palestinian population". 

The biggest challenge?

What do Palestinian Arabs see as the most serious problem facing their society today? They're facing in numerous different directions.

• 27% say poverty and unemployment 
• 25% say the "occupation" and "settlement" activities (they mean by Israel)
• 22% say corruption in Palestinian Arab public institutions
• 20% say the "siege" (they mean by Israel) of the Gaza Strip
• 3% say the absence of national unity.

All in all, it's hard not to feel a sense of despair when confronted with views like those on which the PSR reports each 90 days. So much effort, so much news-reporting, so much foreign aid, so much waste... so little of anything constructive to show for it - except that a plurality of them now agrees that it's poverty that tops their list of challenges. 

But they're hopelessly divided on that too. 

And catastrophically ill-served by venal political operatives and self-serving insiders who have never shown the smallest interest or ability in addressing that vital issue among the many on their people's agenda.

This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Co myślą palestyńscy Arabowie?") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.

26-Sep-17: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?

[Image Source: PCR]

It's been about nine months since we last addressed the core question of what Palestinian Arab opinion polls tell us about their hopes, fears, ambitions and values. That last review is here: "15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?"

As it happens, this morning has gotten off to a really rotten start with another Arab-on-Israeli terror attack at the entrance to the bucolic northern Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar. As we write this, reports say three Israelis were shot to death and a fourth is fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital. The gunman is dead. We will report on what we know about this later.

With the fresh extreme violence in mind, what do the data tell us? What do Palestinian Arab polls of Palestinian Arab opinion, reveal about support for murder of this kind and about the other issues that are on the minds of the people who play such an influential/complicated role on the lives lived by us Israelis?

As we have said here before, what the Palestinian Arabs think is something we're very interested in knowing. Relying on newspapers or electronic media coverage of their views, a person is likely to get someone's wishful projections or politically-skewed understandings rather than data-based analysis. The difference between the two is vast and unbridgeable.

There are some serious polling organizations that are themselves Palestinian Arab. We tend to focus on the findings of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research or PSR [website] headed by the respected Prof. Khalil Shikaki. We're doing that again now.

In PSR's Poll Number 65 (there have been three on which we did not manage to report since our last related post), which was published on September 19, 2017, we think these are the key findings (italicized texts are taken verbatim from the source)

A syndicated AFP photo shows the supporters of Fatah and of Abbas in the
Gaza Strip last week. There may be more out of camera range. [Image Source]

• Violence: 35% of those polled "think that the most effective means of creating a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel is armed action". Negotiation gets 33% and "popular non-violent resistance" 26%. In the December  2016 poll, armed action got slightly more: 37%. A year ago, it got 34%. Those slight rises and falls are less significant than the reality that a third of the Arabs living closest to us see the best solution to the differences between as being achieved by murder and terror. A third. But it gets worse...
• Non-violence? Now bear in mind that "popular non-violent resistance" is an expression that means something quite different for the Palestinian Arabs and their advocates - including their president - than for most other people. Abbas and people around him use it to refer to lethal measures like hurling rocks at Israelis and their vehicles: non-violent resistance in  their lexicon includes rock hurling, knifings and vehicle-rammings. That's plainly terrorist violence, whatever advocates for the Palestinian Arabs claim, and it means that nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian Arabs are for it. 
• An "overwhelming majority" are "worried about the future of liberties in Palestine". Contributing factors, over and above the decades of heavy-handed, thuggish rule by a self-preserving clique of aging Abbas/Arafat regime kleptocrats (our observation, not PSR's) include a marked rise in PA arrests of reporters and "activists"; a new presidential decree enacting an oppressive piece of regulation that they call a "cybercrime law"; and upcoming changes to the PA's Law of the Judiciary. 
• Related to the first point: A large majority of Palestinian Arabs (85% of West Bank Arabs) now say they are afraid to criticize their PA masters. Fully half of them believe Abbas' PA has become "a burden on the Palestinian people". 
• This is evidently affecting their political outlooks. If presidential elections were held today, the Hamas candidate "Haniyeh would win against Abbas. Findings also indicate a decline in support for Fatah, particularly in the Gaza Strip where Hamas is more popular. In the West Bank however, Fatah remains more popular than Hamas." Just 3 months ago, PSR found that each candidate had the same level of support if this were a two-horse race. No longer. 
• But even before they get to elections, there's no doubting the appetite for immediate political change: "67% of the public want president Abbas to resign... Three months ago, 62% said [this]... Demand for Abbas’ resignation stands at 60% in the West Bank and 80% in the Gaza Strip."
• Gaza is one big set of problems for Fatah and its leader: "It is certain that [Mahmoud Abbas, president-for-life of the PA] would lose any presidential elections in the Gaza Strip to Hamas’ Ismael Haniyeh". 
• Worth recalling that the last time Palestinian Arabs were given the chance to vote for a president was in January 2005 when Abbas won; he has held tenaciously on to power ever since. The only previous presidential election, dominated by Yasser Arafat, was in 1996.
• For the rather touchy Abbas and his hangers-on, there's more bad news and it involves Abbas' fiercest rival: "Fatah is fast losing its popularity in the Gaza Strip, standing at 28% today compared to 40% only nine months ago. Those who still support Fatah in the Gaza Strip are shifting loyalty to Mohammad Dahlan whose popularity among Gazans has more than doubled during the past nine months, from 9% to 23% today, while his popularity among West Bankers did not change, remaining hardly at 1%."
• In a three-way race, the convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti who lives in an Israeli prison cell, would easily beat both Abbas and Haniyah.
• Support for violence against Israelis has risen over the previous poll, "despite the fact that a majority remains opposed to it", partly because of "the lack of trust in diplomacy. Findings show that about three quarters believe that the Trump Administration is not serious about Palestinian-Israeli peace making and an even higher percentage believes that the Administration is not an honest broker and that it is biased in favor of Israel".
• When they watch television, here's where they tune in: Al Jazeera (Qatar-owned, Qatar-based) 20%; Ma'an TV 14%; Hamas' Al Aqsa TV 13%; Palestine TV (controlled by the PA) 12%; Filasteen al Youm/Palestine Today 11%; Al Arabiya (Saudi-owned, Dubai-based) 6; Hamas' Al Quds TV 4%; al Mayadeen (satellite-news station based in Beirut) 3%.
• The popular perception of corruption in the PA and its institutions is now at 77%. This is actually something of an improvement; in a 2014 PCR poll, it stood at 81%.
• On the list of "Most vital Palestinian goals and problems", the top item with 40% support is the need "to end Israeli occupation". A mere 12% think the "first and most vital goal should be to establish a democratic political system that respects freedoms and rights". The most serious problem confronting their society today is poverty and unemployment (26%) with "the spread of corruption in public institutions" second at 25%.
• The violent confrontations that took place on Jerusalem's Temple Mount in July 2017 in the wake of the brazen and cold-blooded killing of two Israeli Druze security men [see our post] occupied much of the thinking of the Palestinian Arab public. In PSR's words and despite those other concerns we just listed, the "the installment of metal detectors at the entrance to al Haram al Sharif gates were the most important event during the period in question". 
• As for Israel's decision to quickly remove them, a minuscule 7% of Palestinian Arabs attribute this to King Abdullah II of Jordan despite Jordan's not-so-subtle PR efforts to grab the limelight, as in this Arab media quote: “Without the Hashemite custodi­anship and the steadfastness of the Jerusalemites, the holy sites would have been lost many years ago.” (Those of us old enough to remember life in Jerusalem pre-1967 recall how the Old City of Jerusalem was under illegal Jordanian military occupation from 1949 until freed in the Six Day War.)

There's not much here to feel good about. As their own societies - both Fatah and Hamas - explore new kinds of tyranny, between one-third and two-thirds of them hold tight to a vision of more violence as a solution to their problems. The future of their children, meanwhile, along with their health, their schools, their environment and their economy remain mired in self-inflicted gloom, failure and inertia.

PSR 65 was based on a sample size of 1,270 adults interviewed face-to-face (not by phone) in 127 locations selected randomly. The statistical margin of error is 3%. 

22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf

Elad Salomon Z"L, pictured with his wife Michal, was murdered at his parents'
Sabbath table on Friday night [Image Source]

The Friday night news from Neve Tzuf (often called Halamish which is the Hebrew word for flint) is devastating.
A man, Omar al-Abed, 19, from a Palestinian Arab settlement called Kobar - the home village of the notorious convicted Palestinian Arab terrorist Marwan Barghouti - jumped the fence in the dark and made his way to one of the nearby, brightly-lit houses. He burst into the home around 9:30 pm brandishing a kitchen knife he had purchased earlier in the day for what he admitted to be an intended knife attack on Jews.

Finding a family seated at their Shabbat dinner, he launched a frenzied attack and managed to stab four family members. We know now that they are Yosef Zvi Salomon, 70: his wife Tova, 68; their daughter Haya Esther Salomon, 46; and their son El'ad Menachem Salomon, 36 and the father of five young children.

Tova is seriously injured and underwent emergency surgery in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center last night. After surgery, she was told that her husband and two of their children had succumbed to their injuries. The older Salomons have three other children.

Times of Israel says the Salomons were celebrating the birth of a baby boy in the family. Also that El'ad's wife, Michal, managed to flee from the carnage and protect their five children behind a locked door in the house from where she called police.

That same report quotes the 19 year-old murderer saying he was driven to carry out the killings by the incitement of "the imams on the Temple Mount". This statement ought to be getting much media amplification but almost certainly will not.

And from another source, it appears he had been under recent suspicion of terrorist plans and was arrested three months ago by PA security forces, spending the next two weeks in PA detention where he was "violently interrogated about alleged plans to attack Israelis before he was released." His father described the son's motivation - that he:

was upset over the loss of Palestinian lives following violent clashes over escalating tensions at the Temple Mount and wanted to protect the “honor” of the Jerusalem holy site. “The honor of Muslims is only the Haram,” Mohammed al-Abed said. “If it’s gone, the Muslims’ honor is gone. This was the motive for my son.”

Honor. It's a value that underlies a colossal amount of bloodshed in their culture.

In a Facebook post prior to the attack, the knifer said

he expected to be killed in the attack. He wrote that he wanted his body to be covered by a banner of the Hamas terror group and a photo of Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat... [Times of Israel]

The Islamist terror movement in Gaza wasted no time aligning itself with the murderer:

Hamas issued a statement this evening welcoming the attack, which they called "heroic." According to Hamas, the attack followed "Israel's violation of the rights of our people in Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque." [Ynet]

It's been a big weekend for the stabber's family. Ismail Haniyeh, who became the head of the Hamas terrorists in May 2017, phoned the father and, quoted here, said "Your son brought pride to the nation."

Fatah, desperate not to fall too far behind in the terrorism stakes, issued its own statement [here] praising the Arab-on-Israeli killings. Mahmoud Abbas who heads Fatah in addition to being the PA's President-for-Life may yet condemn the stabbing-killings because... well, because he can. And doing that, in a cruel, superficial and hypocritical world, has its uses. But also because the mainstream news media routinely avoid pointing out the brazen, chronic contradictions in the man's stance on terror: advocates for it in his Arabic messaging, while claiming to be against it when talking to the non-Arabic media. This works.

It's a hard neighbourhood in which to live: all of Neve Tzuf's residents had to briefly abandon their community eight months ago ["27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration"] when wild fires destroyed a depressingly large number of the community's homes.

Neve Tzuf is located across the highway and an easy stroll from Nabi Saleh, the Tamimi clan's base of operations about which we wrote "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"; "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"; and "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize

Convicted murderer Barghouti: Man of peace? [Image Source]

Twelve years ago, the career of an ambitious Palestinian Arab gang leader, a member of Arafat's inner circle, ended when he was convicted in Tel Aviv District Court in relation to the deaths of five innocent people.

There were other charges as well: attempted murder, membership of a terror organization and conspiracy to commit a crime; he was convicted of those as well. He was acquitted on technical grounds in relation to 33 additional counts of murder. 

Our impression (we were personally present in the court room for part of the trial) was that the prosecution could have pressed those extra charges. Evidently a decision was taken that the accused would be imprisoned for a long-enough term if convicted on those charges where technical factors did not play a role. 

And indeed, that's what happened.

At the conclusion of Marwan Barghouti's trial in May 2004, the prosecution sought a sentence of one life term for each murdered victim and he was sentenced to - and is currently serving - five life terms behind bars:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's 

orders in 2001: Father George Tsibouktsakis

The court said in its verdict that "the defendant most of the time did not have direct contact with the field operatives who carried out the attacks. That connection was maintained through associates close to the defendant. Barghouti was responsible for providing the field units with money and arms via these associates..." The judges said Barghouti's orders for terror attacks were sometimes "based on instructions" from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. "Arafat would never give explicit instructions for attacks but he let it be known when the timing was right," the judges said. "He made sure his subordinates understood very well when he was interested in a cease-fire and when he was interested in terror attacks against Israel," the verdict said.
["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004] 

Barghouti was one of those Arafat subordinates. And when we wrote above that his career ended, we were engaging in what seems more and more to be wishful thinking. We'll get to that in a moment.

A few brief words about his victims, none of whom has been honored with even a tiny fraction of the often-fawning media coverage of their convicted killer:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's orders 

in 2002: Yoela Chen, mother of 2, 

shot dead at a gas station on her way
to a Jerusalem family celebration

• The court ruled that Barghouti was directly responsible for a January 2002 terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which an Israeli woman, Yoela Chen, 45 and a mother of two, was murdered. The attack, the judges said, was carried out at his direct order in revenge for the assassination of another Palestinian Arab terrorist called Carmi who had been responsible for a long list of murderous attacks on Israeli civilians. Barghouti admitted his responsibility for Yoela Cohen's killing.
• The killing of a Jewish-looking, traditionally bearded man, driving his car in the early summer of 2001 along one of Judea's intercity desert roads was carried out on Barghouti's orders, the judges said. That man was in reality not Jewish. Shot dead from a distance by Barghouti's sharp-shooters and a volley of 13 bullets, he was in fact a young, bearded Greek Orthodox monk, George Tsibouktsakis, also known as Father Herman, a religious devotee, one of two monks who lived in, and maintained, the ancient St. George Monastery perched on the edge of Wadi Kelt. Tragically, shot dead while looking Jewish.
• The court found that Barghouti explicitly approved the murderous March 2002 shooting and hand-grenade terror attack at Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant where three people were murdered in a frenzied assault just after 2 in the morning. The victims were Police Sergeant-Major Salim Barakat, 33, from the Israeli-Druze community of Yarka - killed by one of the attackers who fled the restaurant; and Yosef Haybi, 52, of Herzliya and Eliyahu Dahan, 53, of Lod - both of them killed inside the restaurant.
• He was convicted as well for masterminding a car bomb attack in Jerusalem.

The 2004 Barghouti trial in Tel Aviv District Court was public,

transparent, and definitive: the accused was convicted on multiple

charges of murder and sentenced to five terms of life

imprisonment [Image Source]

None of these convictions in a non-military court and in front of an overflowing and often unruly crowd of witnesses, many of them Arabs, and overseas observers who flew in especially for the trial, prevented tendentious media coverage before, during and after Barghouti's conviction. Much of it is just as tendentious today.

Of all the many distortions, inaccuracies and open lies connected with that coverage, none is as galling as the way this vicious, violent man is routinely - and dishonestly - called a "political prisoner", and sometimes a "detainee". He has never been either. 

As a matter of objective reality, he ought to be called convicted murderer. And taking into account his undisputed role as head of the Tanzim shooting-and-bombing division of Fatah, he fully qualifies to be termed a terrorist.

Associated Press, as we wrote in an earlier blog post ["21-Mar-14: Allegedly objective journalism"] produced one of these distorted, politically-spun articles two years ago. That AP piece, entitled "Jailed militant key to Mideast talk" (March 19, 2014), sought to depict Marwan Barghouti as a Mandela-like man of peace who, if only he were sprung from jail, would take his natural place in the pantheon of Palestinian Arab statespersons and blaze a path to whatever peaceful destination they believe the Palestinian Arabs are heading. (UKMediawatch documented similar news-media efforts in an excellent analysis in 2013.) 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Yosef Haybi

Here's some of what we wrote two years ago:

We personally sat through the [2004] murder trial of Marwan Barghouti... The hearing was in Tel Aviv, in the Magistrates Court complex that rarely gets the kind of lavish media attention in evidence that week. Aljazeera's TV crew were there along with reporters from all over. A motley assemblage of lawyers from Israel, the PA and overseas were too, intent on defending the 'great' man from the lowly offenses of which he was charged. Some of the most entertaining moments on the trial's first day involved one of those would-be advocates, an unusually boorish individual intent on making a splash, being physically picked up by the security people and thrown out the door of the court room and onto the floor of the adjacent lobby. (You dream of moments like that.) 

Two main factors (among many) persuaded us to be there. One: Marwan Barghouti had personally given post-massacre shelter and money to members of the Hamas gang that planned and carried out the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in which our teenage daughter was murdered three years earlier. He was, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact to the terrorism...  

For us as recently bereaved Israelis, grieving for the lost life of a fifteen year-old daughter with such goodness and potential, it was almost unbearably painful to observe the lengths to which Israel's organs of justice bent over backwards to give this prominent member of the loathsome Palestinian political 'elite', a first-degree Arafat inner-circle insider, the fairest and most transparent of trials.  

One of lawyers in the defense counsel team was the self-parodying (and subsequently disgraced) Shamai Leibowitz, grandson of one of modern Israel's great religious philosophers. Leibowitz proposed to the court, with chutzpah that brought some of us to point of choking with rage, that the cold-blooded Barghouti with those deeply blood-drenched hands ought to be viewed as a warrior in the service of freedom, challenging the Pharaohs of his time. The court ought to think of him as being like Moses, Israel's great Law Giver. There were less bizarre moments too. 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Police Sgt Major Salim

Barakat, 33, an Israeli Druze, father of a

3 year old daughter

It appears we are now facing a fresh round of bizarre Barghouti moments, the theological equivalent of fashioning a silk purse out of a female pig's aural orifice. 

As reported by a church news site a few hours ago [Episcopal Digital Network] 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has endorsed the nomination of Palestinian political prisoner, Marwan Barghouthi, for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the nomination letter sent by the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, he said, “I decided to support this campaign alongside seven other Nobel Peace Prize laureates as a reflection of our belief that freedom was the only path to peace… I hope the Nobel Committee will take a bold decision bringing us closer to the day this holy land, charged with unique symbolic value, can stop being a living testimony of injustice and impunity, occupation and apartheid, and can finally be a beacon of freedom, hope and peace.”

Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, is, to put it mildly, not one of our favourite church-people - or people of any kind - on the basis of his years of explicit support for Palestinian Arab terror and for Barghouti. He has been a member of the modestly-named International High Level Committee of the Campaign for the Freedom of Marwan Barghouti and all Palestinian Prisoners, launched in October 2013.

Nine years ago we noted [here] what he said when Gaza erupted in an Arab-on-Arab bloodbath with Hamas and Fatah battling it out for winner-takes-all control of the rich-in-absolutely-nothing enclave: Tutu, watching the thuggery and the slaughter from a safe distance, said he was "in despair over these events", though he claimed to understand why the rival factions were at each other's throats:

"When you are oppressed, it is so very easy to turn on yourselves," he said.

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Eli Dahan, 53

And so easy, we reminded ourselves at the time, to blow up innocent women, children, men, schools, hospitals, restaurants. 

So easy. And to have church leaders slobber their sympathy all over your poor oppressed heads.

The only thing more appalling about what the Palestinian Arabs have done to themselves is the unforgivable forgiveness, the incomprehensible understanding emanating from such ill-informed, theologically-addled, hand-wringing, high-profile individuals as the pious church-man quoted above. Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago. [Our June 2007 blog post]

Painful as this is, Barghouti and his terrorist handlers must be quietly confident the crimes of the bigoted, violent Fatah apparatchik will recede into the past as a groundswell of support builds for the frankly absurd notion that he is a peacemaker - perhaps the peacemaker - who can bring the Palestinian Arabs into a meaningful dialogue with the despised Israelis. 

The moral gymnastics involved in seeing things in that upside-down, black-is-white fashion are reality in this part of the world, and explain why we find it necessary to spend so much time reminding audiences of the catastrophic Shalit Deal and the ongoing suffering it has delivered.

The idea that Barghouti is now a serious contender for the same award that the Nobel Committee gave to Tutu - and with Tutu's enthusiastic endorsement - is an indictment of Tutu's twisted values and the values of the ideologues promoting this ugly initiative.

25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak

Luxury and privilege in Ramallah's so-called "diplomatic
compound", reserved for PA insiders. The AP caption reads: "The
gated community of villas with well-tended flower gardens... may help
explain why Palestinians almost universally believe there is
corruption in the government of President Mahmoud
Abbas. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)"

One of the open-secrets about the seemingly-never-ending nature of violent Palestinian Arab hatred of Israel, Israelis and Jews is the sustaining role played by money and power.

That's one of the reasons we mention often how the Palestinian Arabs live in a society ruled by kleptocrats - those aggressive and powerful Abbas/Arafat regime insiders whose well-being and wealth depend on keeping the flames of hatred going and their fellow-citizens under their heels.

Yesterday (Tuesday), Associated Press syndicated a somewhat rare look at what the ordinary folk think of their Palestinian Authority overlords, and how that translates into action.

The original AP version of the article (under the headline "In tough times, most Palestinians view government as corrupt", Karin Laub and Mohammed Daraghmeh, May 24, 2016) is archived here.

But about the headline: is it fair and accurate to say "most" when the proportion of Palestinian Arabs convinced of their governing regime's corruption is almost 96% according to the data quoted by AP. Given a 3% margin of error, that's about as close to unanimous as public opinion ever gets. What other consensus issues do we hear about anywhere where a trivial 4% of the total population disagree? Never happens.

Let's also note that massive Palestinian Arab corruption is neither new nor a secret. As the AP piece notes:

[T]he government hasn't submitted annual budget reports for mandatory audits for four years, effectively preventing scrutiny of how millions of dollars are spent, said corruption monitor Aman, the Palestinian branch of Transparency International.

How those millions are spent is precisely at the heart of the ongoing scandal via which willfully-gullible European governments, along with the co-operative United States, continue to fund the Arafat/Abbas Rewards for Terror scheme while pretending not to notice the array of fig leaves and overt lies. Those serve as cover for the jihadist murders - mainly of Israelis - that everyone involved knows is the actual purpose of the cash flowing into Ramallah.

If we have to choose one particular shortcoming in yesterday's news report, it's that AP could have depicted, but did not, Palestinian Arab corruption in ways that might have significantly changed people's perceptions. How? By photographs of those concrete expressions of corruption that we know about but that are rarely seen.

Pictures of villas for the powerful and well-tended, paved and - of course - guarded streets do that well. A shame that AP offered only one such image in its syndicated story (the photo at the top of this post), and that one shows no human beings. The text describing the exclusive neighbourhood ("built for senior Palestinian Authority officials on subsidized land") helps, but it's almost always true that pictures trump words for impact.

Modesty is not exactly at the top of their priorities. This lavish edifice
is currently under construction in Ramallah. The caption in
the Daily Mail article reads: "Grand: Ian Birrell at the £8 million
presidential palace on the West Bank - built by a country that
got £72 million in foreign aid 

There are probably many other concrete expressions of PA corruption that could easily have been caught on camera but were not, and perhaps never will. AP along with every other news company is subject to the reality that the production of photographic images from the areas under PA control has for years been subtly (and almost silently) controlled by the Abbas circle. By far the majority of photographers working in that field are themselves Arabs, who are the source of the photos syndicated out by Reuters, Xinhua, AFP and Associated Press.

What kind of images almost never emerge? How about photos or clips of PA insiders - the fat-cat ministers, the fancily-dressed bureaucrats, their privileged children - getting in or out of their fancy SUVs and limousines. We're thinking of that in particular because it's a reality we encounter when we make a weekly trip to the community south of Jerusalem to visit grandchildren. This involves our driving past Bethlehem, and sharing the road with drivers leaving or entering Bethlehem or Hebron or the surrounding villages.

If you have not made that journey recently, or visited other parts of the PA's domain, you might find the reality quite stunning. We do, seated in our seventeen-year-old Toyota Corolla and watching the procession of high-performance Audis, BMWs, Hyundais and Mercs glide by.

This video clip, made last year by a creative (and justifiably angry) Israeli individual with an activist bent, Ezri Tubi, delivers in simple in-your-face form an illustration of how badly people's ignorance and/or misconceptions serve them about non-trivial aspects of the lives lived by our Pal Arab neighbours.



Very rarely, images do emerge of the armed security men - many thousands of them, in at least eight different official organizations [source] - who keep the PA elite safe from their disenfranchised citizens. Sure, AP reporters can and do write (mildly) about this sort of thing, as we have just seen. And from time to time they can also remind the world that the Palestinian Arabs are not only exploited but their own power circles, but can do next to nothing about it since those same power circles have no interest in allowing them to exercise their democratic right to vote in elections. It's good to see those things written and said occasionally because they are true and meaningful.

But there's no substitute for producing images and the honest contexts that need to accompany them. (And yes, we know life and freedom are about many issues, not just villas and Volvos.) Photos really get into people's heads in ways that words rarely do. However that threatens those PA insiders and so their appearance is much rarer.

(In case it's not obvious, corruption in Gaza and among its Hamas ruling clique is as bad, if not worse.)

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Palestyńska kleptokracja i jej zachodni sojusznicy") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her again, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme

A written question, asked in the British parliament's House of Lords ten days ago on a subject that ought to be getting much more attention, has just been answered.

The subject: Overseas aid and the payments that the UK is making to the Palestinian Arabs. Yes, the very matter that is going to be debated in the parliament next month as we noted last month ["13-Apr-16: Parliament will debate UK funding of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme"].

It's an important debate that is going to happen because of some good activist journalism ["27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in'] by the Daily Mail which has turned the matter into a talking point ["27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad"] in the UK, at least for now.

Here's the exchange of question and answer [from this official UK source; and thanks to the ever-watchful MH for pointing us to this.]

Baroness Deech (asked on May 3, 2016): To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have given any consideration to suspending aid to the Palestinian Authority in the light of its decision to transfer over £85 million a year to the Palestine Liberation Organisation for the purpose of paying salaries to convicted terrorists imprisoned in Israel.
Baroness Verma (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Development and Ministerial Champion for tackling Violence Against Women & Girls Overseas)  (answered yesterday, May 12, 2016): DFID is currently reviewing all its programmes following the publication of the updated Official Development Assistance strategy last year. DFID provides financial support to the Palestinian Authority (PA) to help deliver peace and support progress towards a two state solution. DFID funding helps build Palestinian institutions and promotes economic growth so that any future Palestinian state will be a prosperous and effective partner for peace. UK funding to the PA is for vetted civil servants only. The PA has reaffirmed that prisoner payments are administered by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. We continue to lobby that the payments to prisoner’s families are more transparent and needs-based. 

Seems a reasonable answer, right? There's probably been a case of confused identity but HMG has gotten assurances from the terror-addicted Palestinian Authority and their actual reaffirmation. All cleared up. Nothing much to see here, folks. Move along.

If only.

What's on display here is (a) professional incompetence (which we think unlikely given the quality and quantity of staff people employed in the parliament to prepare ministerial written answers to questions posed by the Lords); (b) a factual mistake on a minor matter (but as we noted, there's going to be a full-scale parliamentary debate on this very issue in a few weeks, so at minimum the staffers are on top of the facts); or (c) cynical sand-in-your-eyes disinformation designed to confuse the gullible and paper over a deeply embarrassing UK policy failure (quite plausible, we think, in the absence of a better alibi).

Palestinian Arabs where they can do less harm [Image Source]

In formulating this deeply dishonest answer to a vitally important question, the back-room civil servants in the UK's Department for International Development have chosen to pretend not to be aware of relevant matters that should have brought them to a very different conclusion for their minister to deliver. We have wrestled with those issues here repeatedly. They are at the heart of the life-and-death issues which keep us blogging. And they are all about money - large servings of it.

For a representative overview of what we have written about them, you might want to see "25-Jan-16: Felons, funding, fooling, failing"; "09-Jul-15: When incitement to murder is financed by foreign aid, where will the accounting come from?" "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"; "30-Dec-14: Killers, heroes, passions and (sadly) churches"; "10-Nov-13: Who finances those savage acts of terror? And why is this so poorly understood?"; "4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought"; and from nearly a decade ago, "6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen". 

Here's a selection of the truths which the UK government and its representatives and servants evidently find too uncomfortable to share with the hapless British citizens who pay for this disgrace:

• In August 2014, the Ministry of Prisoners Affairs of the Palestinian Authority was torn down overnight. It was replaced the following morning with a brand-spanking-new, purpose-built entity that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinian Authority. 
• This is what's often called a switcheroo - a strategy carried out by frightened people (frightened of being exposed) made up of lies and bogus contentions. It's done solely to deceive.
• Why the need for deception? Because, as the Jerusalem Post reported at the time ["Palestinians duping world by denying it pays salaries to prisoners in Israeli jails", Jerusalem Post, May 27, 2015] the Abbas-ruled PA had been proudly and publicly funneling monthly salaries to Palestinian Arab terrorists inside Israeli prisons and released from them. Then it became aware of a certain degree of pressure from Western donors, the governments whose cash - in the form of foreign aid - made this doable and affordable. 
• What form did the deception take? The Jerusalem Post said: "Rather than a PA ministry, a PLO Commission of Prisoners Affairs – purportedly independent of the PA and its funding – was set up to pay the salaries. The international community... largely accepted these changes as assurance the PA was no longer paying salaries to terrorists... [But] the PLO commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the former PA minister of prisoners affairs, Issa Karake, became the director of the new PLO commission and PA President Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of the PLO Commission." 
• Based on comments made by Palestinian officials, the perpetually financially strapped PA spent $144 million in 2014 paying salaries to incarcerated and release prisoners. It has continued to do so right up until this week.
• Issa Karake, whose hate-filled, terrorism-encouraging utterances we have quoted in this blog numerous times, is key to the flim-flammery. He's the former minister for prisoners who overnight was turned into commissioner for some PLO business unit which is a completely different and perfectly legitimate thing. It's hard to think of a more cynical public figure than he. His is a name to remember.
• All of the donor governments who have provided the funding from the outset continue to do so and to by-and-large ignore the criticism. 
• Outside of Israel, where the real price of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme is paid, few governments care to know whether the Palestinian Arab political leadership is trustworthy, honest, credible - or (which we firmly believe to be the case) the exact opposite. What they want is simply for the problems to go away. Throwing money at it is, astoundingly, a widely-appreciated way to achieve that and at the same time curry favour with the Arab world.
• The criticism that has come is from non-government observers. For instance: "What Abu Mazen [meaning Mahmoud Abbas] will not tell donors is that their money is being sent to the PLO, who does use the money to fund terrorism. Abu Mazen hopes by having the money used indirectly instead of directly to fund terrorism, the criticism will die down among donor nations to the Palestinian Authority. [Foreign Policy Association, September 8, 2014]

We editors of this blog tend to have a more hard-eyed view of the outrageous Palestinian Arab tactics behind this scheme. Regular readers of our blog know this is because two of the biggest beneficiaries of this embezzlement of European money happen to be two of the jihadist savages convicted of murdering our daughter. Details here: "31-May-15: Lights, camera, action, terror".

Is it possible that all of this was unknown to the nameless, faceless insiders who composed Baroness Verma's parliamentary reply? Readers who know the Lords quoted in the parliamentary report above might consider sharing this post with them. And perhaps asking her if the revelations about this ongoing Palestinian shell-game are news to her or to her staff.

As an afterthought: Whatever derision people might think they detect in our observations about the UK government and its parliament on this heavy issue, we do have a healthy appreciation for the British sense of humour. That's why we are not surprised to see what's on the home page of the ministry headed by Baroness Verma at this very moment:

Signs of a British sense of homour: The home page of the UK office responsible for the ongoing funding, by British tax-payers, of' the Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror scheme.

See the featured article? The UK's Department for International Development proudly beats its chest, trumpeting its role in helping people beat "corrupt practices around the world". Given the flagrant blind-eye treatment they have extended to the chronically corrupt, kleptocratic Palestinian Arabs since Arafat's day, you have to be just a tiny little bit amused by the chutzpah of these public servants.

13-Apr-16: Parliament will debate UK funding of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme

The Daily Mail expose that led to the upcoming debate. The convicted
mass-killer in the bottom right corner, Abdullah Barghouti, built the
bomb that murdered our daughter [Image Source: Daily Mail]

There's some welcome news from the UK.

We wrote five posts here in the past two and a half weeks about the revelations in a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, about the Palestinian Authority being funded by UK taxpayers to run its horrific Rewards for Terror scheme. (They don't call it that, but our description is right.) 

Here are the links:

• 27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad
• 27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in
• 28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?
• 31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme
• 12-Apr-16: Wasted lives, stolen futures, obfuscatory answers 

The Daily Mail's expose tied in to an online petition. 221,010 people had signed it when we looked just now. And the British parliament has noticed. Here's a screen shot of what appears on the petition page right now:

Source: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/125692

A debate on the issues raised by the petition is now scheduled to take place in the British parliament on June 13, 2016 and will be covered by live video.

The text of the petition is here. The Daily Mail article that energized the process is here. The UK government's response is on the petition page and its UK Aid strategy is laid out here.

European money, and taxpayer funds from other Western countries have been the fuel that has enabled more than a decade and a half of systematic Palestinian Arab acts of terror and murder. The connection between PA corruption, malevolence and mendacity through the Arafat and Abbas years has been there at all times for anyone who wanted to see.

Now perhaps we can hope for this to be stopped.