The Palestinian leadership must be held accountable for continued incitement and
failure to stop the glorification of murderers, a senior aide to Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday as the Fatah faction named a town square in
El-Bireh after the leader of the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre.
“The PA
refused to issue a clear and unequivocal condemnation on Saturday, after a
Jewish family, including three children, were savagely murdered by Palestinian
terrorists,” Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer said. “Today, the PA allowed
a public square to be named after a mass murderer who perpetrated one of the
worst attacks in Israel’s history.”
RELATED: Palestinians honor leader of 1978 terror attack This Week in History: Israel’s deadliest terror attack As Israel on Sunday was mourning the
slaughter of the five members of the Fogel family in Itamar, members of
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction named a town
square after Dalal al-Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 bus hijacking in which 37
Israelis were killed and 71 were wounded.
“We stand here in praise of our
martyrs and in loyalty to all of the martyrs of the national movement,” Fatah
member and Abbas adviser Sabri Seidam said at the unveiling of a plaque showing
Mughrabi cradling a rifle against a backdrop map of Israel, the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip. The square was festooned with Palestinian flags.
Around a
dozen people attended the ceremony.
The square’s inauguration had
originally been scheduled to take place a year ago, coinciding with a visit by
Vice President Joe Biden, but the PA – under pressure from the US – canceled
that ceremony.
The naming of the square after Mughrabi was one of the
examples of continuous incitement that Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the
director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, brought to the cabinet on
Sunday. After months of the government largely confining discussion on
Palestinian incitement to internal meetings and private discussions with
international leaders, Kuperwasser brought a PowerPoint presentation of the
“incitement index” he formulated to the cabinet, and the Prime Minister’s Office
– in response to the terrorist attack in Itamar – issued a paper documenting
recent acts of PAauthorized incitement.
Kuperwasser told the cabinet that
incitement against Israel and Jews was not on the margins of Palestinian
society, but very much in the center of the consensus. He said that the
incitement in the media, on television and in the textbooks was the fertile
ground that bred atrocities like Friday night’s attack in Itamar.
Last
spring, government officials announced on a number of occasions that a new
mechanism has been established that would monitor and quantify incitement on a
quarterly basis.
For the most part, this index has been kept behind
closed doors. On Sunday morning, however, just hours after Kuperwasser told
reporters Israel would ask the West to stop funding the Palestinian educational
system and Palestinian television until there was a significant supervisory body
overlooking those bodies, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a paper documenting
recent acts of incitement.
The paper, based on information provided by
Palestinian Media Watch, a research organization that monitors the PA’s media
and schoolbooks, gave recent examples of incitement inside the
PA.
According to the document, incitement against Israel, which
periodically spills over into anti-Semitic incitement, is “an integral part of
the fabric of life inside the PA. Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages are
heard regularly in the government and private media and in the mosques and are
taught in schools books.”
Terrorists are given an honored status and held
up as role models in the Palestinian society, both in the media and in
ceremonies organized by the PA, the paper read. This incitement never stopped,
even during the height of the diplomatic process in the mid 1990s.
The
document presents the following examples of incitement culled from the past few
months: • On March 9, Seidam called during a speech to turn Palestinian weapons
on Israel, “the main enemy,” and that internal differences should be set
aside.
• On March 6, the PA’s official newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida
published an announcement stating that the Ramallah youth center had decided to
name a soccer tournament after Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber who
killed one and wounded more than 150 when she blew herself up in Jerusalem in
January 2002.
• On January 24, the governor of the Jenin area awarded a
$2,000 presidential grant to the family of Khaldoun Najib Samoudy, a terrorist
who was killed trying to detonate two pipe bombs against IDF soldiers at the
Bekaot crossing • Al-Hayat al-Jadida reported on December 30, 2010, that Israel
wanted to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount in order to build the Third
Temple.
• Palestinian television broadcast a children’s program in June
2010 saying that the Jews were “our enemies” and IDF soldiers were “wild
animals.
The same television network, in a program from September,
broadcast a clip saying that Jewish prayers at the kotel were “a sin and
impure.”
Kuperwasser, who screened a number of these clips for the
cabinet ministers, said the incitement index from the last quarter of 2010
showed a continuation of incitement against Israel in the PA, with the familiar
patterns reappearing: the glorification of terrorists and jihad as part of the
national ethos; anti-Semitic stereotypes in the official Palestinian media; and
the denial of any connection between the Jewish People and Israel.
Among
the material the index surveys on a quarterly basis are the Palestinian media,
the education system, leaders’ statements, sermons and Internet
advertisements.
The index is divided into four main areas: explicit
incitement toward violence and terrorism, encouraging an atmosphere of violence
and terrorism, incitement towards hatred and demonization, and “not preparing
hearts for peace.”
Netanyahu said he spoke about the incitement with
Abbas in a conversation they had on Saturday night, and that he said Israel
expected the PA to stop allowing – and even leading – the
incitement.
When Abbas said that the PA security apparatus does not even
allow the “shooting off of fireworks,” Netanyahu said he was concerned about
“fire-words.”
Reuters contributed to this report.