While President George Bush and the rest of the “Quartet of Powers” met this week to discuss the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli war of attrition, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has continued to act as if the situation was “business as usual,” winking at terror attacks while expecting the United States, Russia and Europe to force Israeli concessions.
Arafat and his aides barely deigned to condemn, in anonymous form, three Arab terror attacks on Israeli targets in the last three days that left at least ten civilians murdered and more than 60 wounded.
“An official Palestinian source issued the following statement”: ‘The Palestinian National Authority condemns the operations which led to the death of innocent civilians such as what occurred tonight in Tel Aviv—whether they be Israelis or Palestinians or foreign laborers, stressing the danger this poses to the national interests of the Palestinian people.’
The Palestinian Authority (PA) did not condemn the Islamic Jihad terror organization that committed the attack, and it also did not publish the “condemnation” in most Arab media outlets—several under its direct control. For example, the pro-Palestinian Al-Jazeera satellite tv channel made no mention of PA condemnations of attacks.
Instead, on its own WAFA website, Arafat’s PA made it clear that it was criticizing the attacks on Israeli targets—which it never called “terror”—only for political convenience.
“Further,” the Palestinian statement continued, “the Israeli government links a great portion of its continued occupation of our cities, our camps and our Palestinian territory to these dangerous practices (i.e. the attacks on Israeli targets).”
Nevertheless, the two-paragraph statement in Arabic published Wednesday night by WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, on its web site, was more of an effort than the PA expended after Monday’s (July 15) attack on ultra-Orthodox residents of Emanuel, a Jewish suburb considered a “settlement on occupied land” in the northern part of the West Bank Israelis call by its biblical name, Samaria.
That attack murdered seven Israelis—mostly women and children—and wounded more than 20, when at least three members of the HAMAS Islamic terror group, wearing mock Israeli army uniforms, blew up the armor-plated bus.
The terrorists then climbed the roof the bus and began strafing the passengers like fish in a barrel as they tried fleeing the smoldering vehicle.
After that attack, the PA, also through WAFA, issued a one-sentence statement mildly criticizing the mass murder, citing the PA’s disapproval for “targeting civilians whether they be Arab or Israeli.”
A picture of the destroyed bus appeared on the front page of the Jerusalem daily Al-Quds, which gets some of its financial backing from the PA, and in the more directly-PA-controlled Al-Ayyam newspaper, but neither paper cited any PA criticism of attacks on Israeli targets.
Rather, the top story was PLO Executive Secretary Mahmoud Abbas denouncing attempts to unseat Arafat as leader of the Palestinian people.
“Arafat is our chosen president, and we will not accept having him replaced,” declared Abbas, who is more commonly known by his “kunya”—Arabic nickname—“Abu Mazen.”
Abu Mazen himself has been touted as a possible successor to Arafat by Leftist Israeli politicians and some officials from the United States Department of State, among others.
But the Palestinian papers stressed that President Bush was having no success in swaying the European Community and the “Quartet of Powers” to depose Arafat.
Rather, WAFA, Al-Ayyam and Al-Quds reported that there were strong indications that Bush would be pressed into pushing for an Israeli troop pull-out.
Michael Widlanski, senior analyst at The Media Line, lectures at the Hebrew University’s Rothberg School.