Pro-American democracies and anti-American dictatorships are not the same. The Biden administration shouldn’t treat them as if they are.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week spoke to a visiting Israeli official about “the importance of Israel and the Palestinians taking affirmative steps to de-escalate tensions and bolster stability in the ‘West Bank’.”
Blinken’s position of even-handedness wrongly asserts that both sides are guilty of causing tensions. It’s yet another sign of the Biden administration’s steady drift away from America’s longstanding alliance with Israel.
The first problem with blaming both sides is that it’s simply false.
Since the 1920s, the Palestinian Arabs and their allies have been the aggressors, and Israel has been the victim of their aggression. The Arab-Israeli wars have consisted of Arab invasions, and imminent Arab invasions that were pre-empted only by last-minute Israeli self-defense actions.
Palestinian Arab terrorists are waging war against Israelis—not the other way around.
The Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah, boasts that it is actively engaged in terrorism against Israel—not the other way around.
It’s the Palestinian Arabs who shoot, bomb, stab and run over Israelis–not the other way around.
Every day in Israel, Palestinian Arab mobs throw deadly rocks and firebombs at defenseless motorists—not the other way around.
It is the PA, not Israel, which pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of terrorists. It is the PA, not Israel, which runs summer camps that train children in the use of weapons and teach them to idolize terrorists.
The second problem with blaming both sides is that it creates a false moral equivalency between Israel’s democratic, pro-American government, and the PA’s totalitarian, anti-American regime.
Israel is a country of free elections, equality for all citizens, and respect for civil rights. The PA, by contrast, arrests and tortures dissidents, crushes unions, relegates women to second-class status, and refuses to hold democratic elections. PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 18th year of his four-year term. The last election to the Palestinian parliament was in 2006.
Israel has always sided with the United States in the international arena. By contrast, the PA and its parent body, the PLO, have consistently sided with America’s enemies. They supported the old Soviet Union. They defended the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. They sided with Iraq in both Gulf Wars. They have close relations with Iran, China, North Korea, and the Putin regime in Russia.<
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Pro-American democracies and anti-American dictatorships are not the same. The Biden administration shouldn’t treat them as if they are.
The third problem with falsely blaming both sides is that it encourages the PA to continue its violent and extremist behavior. Seeing that there are no consequences—that the U.S. will continue to heap blame on Israel—tells the PA that it can continue to get away with murder. Literally.
The final problem with the Biden administration’s approach is that it has no chance of actually “de-escalating tensions.” To really reduce tensions, the U.S. would need to demand that the PA fulfill its Oslo obligations to arrest terrorists, disarm and outlaw terrorist groups, honor Israel’s requests for the extradition of terrorists, stop payments to terrorists, and halt anti-Jewish incitement in the PA news media and schools. That would certainly go a long way toward reducing tensions.<
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Instead, the Biden administration is demanding—according to reports in the Israeli media—that Israel should allow the PA not to pay its debts on time; that Israel should establish yet another industrial zone for the PA; and that the Israelis should make it easier for PA officials to travel through Israel. It appears that not a word has been spoken by the administration concerning what it wants the PA to do.
So, Israel is expected to go above and beyond what was agreed upon in the Oslo Accords, while the PA is not expected even to honor the commitments it already made in those agreements, thirty years ago.
One might reasonably conclude that this situation is actually worse than even-handedness—it’s evidence of a blatant pro-Palestinian slant.
Stephen M. Flatow is President-elect of the Religious Zionists of America. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995 and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.
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