Renewed Attention to Palestinian Incitement

CAMERA has long highlighted the pernicious effect of Palestinian incitement, which, though too-often ignored by the American press, is a central obstacle to peaceful coexistence.

The importance of (ending) this phenomenon was raised this month in separate publications by David Pollack of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and David Horovitz of the Times of Israel.

One interesting passage from the former:

A different but related and very frequent Palestinian assertion is that incitement is a predictable, understandable, and perhaps even inevitable response to the conditions of occupation under which Palestinians now live. As such, they say, incitement is impossible to stop—even if, ironically, that makes it harder to convince Israel to end the occupation. If, however, the occupation were to end somehow, then incitement would arguably cease of its own accord.

This may seem logical, but only until two complicating factors are considered. First, it begs the question of “how to get from here to there”—that is, how to end the occupation while incitement continues. Second, it ignores the historical evidence from all the other cases in which Israel withdrew from an occupation but anti-Israel incitement raged on or intensified, tolerated and even abetted by the Arab governments in charge: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and most recently Gaza. This record suggests that even after a compromise peace deal with the PA, incitement could well continue from a new, more powerful vantage point—unless the deal itself includes some kind of built-in corrective measures against that possibility.

And from the latter:

And nine years after his death, incitement against Israel’s very existence remains widespread — in Palestinian schools and summer camps, newspaper articles and caricatures, TV shows and advertisements, where Israel has no place, where Israeli cities have Arabic names, where the Jews have no Middle East history.

Arafat told president Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000 that he couldn’t sign a peace deal then because he would be assassinated by his own people for doing so. But that was a consequence of the uncompromising climate that he had most deliberately created.