PA ICC Move - An opportunity

Israel should try to convey the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By AVI PERRY
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas heads attends a joint meeting of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas heads attends a joint meeting of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Recent years have seen a great deal of deterioration in international public opinion concerning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs. Lies and libels have fueled anti-Israel indoctrination dipped in anti-Semitic propaganda. They have found their way into the ears of the apprised who constitute the majority of the world population. Israel has been winning in the battle field but has been losing its war for world public opinion. Its voice has been muted by the noisy deceit practiced by the Palestinians and their Arab advocates.
It has grown to be commonplace to refer to Israel as an apartheid state, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. False claims concerning Israeli crimes against humanity are now suitable and fashionable. And Israel has been unable to stem the devious surge, which tries to water board the Jewish State into submission.
But there is hope.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has cracked open a door for the truth to sneak out and be covered by the world media. The PA bid to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), allowing them to pursue war crime charges against Israel should be exploited by Israel as an opportunity to launch a range of charges against the PA.
War crime charges against the PA and its leadership should not be limited to the PA and its unity government’s culpability for terrorist and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza. It should include incitement for genocide in the PA controlled territory of Judea and Samaria as well. Incitement to genocide was defined as a war crime in the immediate aftermath of World War II where on October 1, 1946. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) convicted (and later executed) Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic German weekly Der Stürmer of crimes against humanity in connection with his incitement to the mass murder of Europe's Jewish population. Charges against the PA should also take account of their actions concerning encouragement, praise, glorification and support of terrorists who have butchered innocent civilians, women and small children in cold blood.
Exposing these PA crimes through the ICC or any other court system will bring to light to the truth—Israel is not the instigator of these war crimes. Israel is the victim.
The news media should be encouraged to cover these court cases, and lay bare, for all to see and understand, the struggle for survival the Jewish State has been going through on a daily basis since before its foundation.
In presenting its case to the courts, Israel should try to convey the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s not about the conquest and the occupation resulting from the 1967 six-day-war; it is about the war of independence in 1948. As long as the Arabs refer to the 1948 war as the Naqba (the catastrophe); as long as the current, native residents of the West Bank and Gaza are deemed refugees, 67 years after the 1947-8 war; as long as Palestinian educators continue to brainwash their young, teaching them anti-Semitism, hate and intolerance, making them recite xenophobic poems about the subhuman Jews, about the need for the Jews to be exterminated, about the fact that Israel is a Jew-occupied land that must be cleansed, then all the talk about peace is merely one grandiose wishful thinking.
Court cases exposing this criminal behavior will help change some people’s minds concerning the true face of the hate-mongering Palestinians. These court cases will provide an elevated platform and extensive media coverage that will compete with al Jazeera, BDS, the far-left, and the Islamic propaganda machine.
It’s an opportunity. I hope Israel does not overlook it.
The writer is currently a talk show host at Paltalk News Network (PNN). He served as an intelligence expert for the Israeli government and was a professor at Northwestern University. He is the author of Fundamentals of Voice Quality Engineering in Wireless Networks, and more recently, 72 Virgins. For further information you may visit www.aviperry.org.