Harper’s Magazine Echoed Palestinian Propaganda Condemning Israel And America

By Published On: June 2, 2020

Writing in Harper’s, Kevin Baker condemns the U.S. Middle East peace plan [“The Striking Gesture,” Easy Chair, May 2020], mischaracterizing it as, “Give up all your [Palestinian] hopes and your holiest places, embark on a terrible civil war with your brothers, hand over all your weapons …”

First, it’s not true that the Palestinians would be giving up their “holiest places.” Nowhere is it indicated in the peace plan that Muslims would lose any holy places.

Furthermore, the writer fails to inform readers why it would be dangerous to fail to limit the arming of a Palestinian state: There were the wars of 1948 and 1973 caused by attacks aimed at destroying the Jewish state by armies of Arab nations allied with the Palestinians. There was the war in 1967 precipitated by the hostile actions of Egypt, an ally of the Palestinians, endangering Israel. This had been preceded by an increase of Palestinian terrorist attacks upon Israelis.

Then, during the 1980s, 1990s and in 2000-2005, West Bank Palestinians perpetrated organized terrorist intifadas which killed over a thousand Jews.

The ongoing violence has been fueled by the Palestinian Authority’s cradle-to-grave incitement of the people. For example, as the Wall Street Journal noted in 2015, “Mr. [Mahmoud] Abbas, the PA president, said the following on Palestinian television on Sept. 16: ‘We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr [murderer of Jews] will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.’”

Hopefully, the next time a Harper’s writer deals with this subject matter or a similar topic, the approach will be more measured.

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