Incitement and inflammatory language against Israel in the Palestinian Authority
is at the worst level since Jerusalem began systematically measuring it in 2009,
Strategic Affairs Ministry director-general Yossi Kuperwasser told the cabinet
Sunday.
Kuperwasser was asked to give a briefing on the “incitement
index” following PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly
on Thursday. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu termed that speech, where Abbas
painted Israel in demonic colors, as “dripping with poison.”
Commenting
after Kuperwasser presented his quarterly findings, Netanyahu said, “This is
additional proof that we are not talking about a disagreement over territory,
rather about the rejection of Israel’s existence.”
Netanyahu said the
failure of the Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence within any border is
the “root of the conflict.”
He noted that Palestinian maps consistently
showing “Palestine” as the entire area from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean illustrate a lack of acceptance of Israel’s right to
exist.
“The Palestinians are not prepared to enter a process that will
come to grips with the existence of Israel,” Netanyahu said. “It is poisoning
the Palestinian public. As long as the Palestinian Authority educates the
younger generation to hatred, how is it possible to even speak about peace?” The
prime minister said the Palestinians want to “use the diplomatic process to
bring about the end of the State of Israel.”
“Going to the UN [on
Thursday] is part of this,” he said, adding that the Palestinians were raising a
generation of children on hatred of Israel and terrorism.
“There is no
discussion that paves the way to coexistence,” he said. “The discussion is about
hatred and the destruction of the State of Israel.”
Kuperwasser presented
the cabinet with a PowerPoint presentation, called “Culture of Peace and
Incitement index in the PA.” The presentation provided examples – including
those culled from Abbas’s speech on Thursday to the UN, as well as the one he
gave to the same body on September 27 – showing that the PA, through its
institutions and spokesmen, is sending out three messages: the area between the
river and sea would eventually be restored to the Palestinians; the demonization
of Jews and Zionists in general, and Israelis and settlers in particular; and
that all forms of struggle, including the use of terrorism, are
legitimate.
Kuperwasser told the ministers that monitoring the Facebook
pages of PA schools shows the degree to which the narrative that all of Israel
will be restored to Palestinians has traction. He brought a number of examples
of maps in textbooks and on the Fatah Facebook page that do not show a State of
Israel in any borders.
As evidence of the demonization and dehumanization
of Israelis, the presentation included a quote from the Abbas speech in which he
said that the creation of Israel represented “one of the most dreadful campaigns
of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history.”
This section
also included a Facebook page of an elementary school in Kalkilya where the
sentence “I hate Israel” was written in 16 different languages, and another
Facebook page from a high school in Tulkarm that included a picture of Adolf
Hitler over the words, “I could have killed all the Jews in the world, but I
left some of them so you will know why I killed them.”