Don't Shoot at the Truth, Mr. Secretary General

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon came under heavy criticism last week from Israel and its supporters for remarks he delivered to the UN Security Council regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His critics, including yours truly, considered his remarks a one-sided takedown of Israeli policies and a justification for Palestinian violence against defenseless Israeli civilians. The Secretary General answered his critics with an op-ed article in the New York Times entitled "Don't Shoot the Messenger, Israel." First, Ban Ki-moon accused his critics of "twisting my words into a misguided justification for violence." He sought to clear up any misunderstanding of his true intentions by declaring that "Nothing excuses terrorism. I condemn it categorically." So far so good. And, to Ban Ki-moon's credit, he did issue a condemnation over the weekend of Hamas's renewed building of terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel, which he repeated in his op-ed article.

However, the Secretary General is trying to have it both ways, leading him into a rhetorical morass. While condemning terrorism "categorically," he used the phrase "resist occupation" in his op-ed article, the same buzzword Palestinians and their apologists frequently employ to try and distinguish their violent actions from terrorism. Ban Ki-moon proceeded to double down on the very justifications for violence that the Palestinians use to cast their terrorists as heroes and martyrs. "No one can deny that the everyday reality of occupation provokes anger and despair, which are major drivers of violence and extremism and undermine any hope of a negotiated two-state solution," wrote the Secretary General. Whether he consciously meant to or not, the Secretary General is implicitly supporting the Palestinian narrative that the ends justify the means, when right after noting the "unacceptable levels of violence," he said that "History proves that people always resist occupation." In an article entitled "Palestine: Legitimate Armed Resistance vs. Terrorism," appearing in The Electronic Intifada in 2004, the author pointed to UN General Assembly resolutions reaffirming, as one of the resolutions put it, "the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle.” The Palestinians have taken the UN General Assembly's imprimatur of "armed struggle" against "foreign occupation," which Ban Ki-moon reverts to "history" for support, to its most virulent extreme.

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For example, back in 2014 a Palestinian Authority minister justified the murder of a one year-old Israeli baby as legitimate "resistance" against Israel. In the midst of all too frequent stabbings of Israeli civilians last year, a Gaza-based cleric Sheikh Muhammad Sallah exhorted Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to attack Jews and “cut them into body parts.” Is this the kind of "resistance" that the UN General Assembly and the Secretary General are comfortable with as long as it directed against "foreign occupation"? Palestinian leaders are promising more bloodshed in the name of "resistance" in 2016. Hussam Badran, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, proclaimed that “The year 2016 will witness a development and escalation of the intifada and all forms of resistance operations.” Fatah’s armed wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, distributed leaflets in the West Bank declaring that “We remain committed to the option of an armed struggle. We will continue in the path of the martyrs until the liberation of all of Palestine.” "All of Palestine" is defined by the Palestinian "resisters" as all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. "Occupation" is defined by the Palestinian "resisters" as the existence of an independent Jewish state on any part of the land they claim.to be part of "all of Palestine." They do not distinguish between pre-June 1967 Israel and the Palestinian territories. Neither Hamas nor the Fatah Party leaders are interested in a real, lasting two-state solution that leaves Israel securely in place as a Jewish state. The only difference is that Fatah is willing to be more patient to achieve the true end objective of their "resistance." As Fatah Central Committee member and former Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Tawfiq Al-Tirawi told the Maan News Agency during a January 19, 2016 interview: “Palestine stretches from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” He added that “a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, is just a phase. I challenge any Palestinian to say that the map of Palestine is limited to the West Bank and Gaza.” [As translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)] On July 19, 2013, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, invoked the actions of Prophet Mohammed as justification for breaking a treaty. He said in a sermon in front of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Palestinian Authority TV that reaching an agreement with Israel was “exactly like the Prophet [Muhammad] did in the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, even though some opposed it.” Mohammed entered into this treaty with the Quraish Tribe of Mecca, but broke it two years later when his forces attacked and conquered Mecca. “This is the example, this is the model," the Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs proclaimed. Indoctrinated with constant messages of hate from their leaders, including on television and in their schools, two-thirds of Palestinians support the current wave of stabbings against Israelis, according to a poll published last December. The same percentage would favor an even more violent intifada. Only 45% of Palestinians support a two-state solution. If Secretary General Ban Ki-moon truly wants to serve as the "well-intentioned critic" and express his "heartfelt concerns about shortsighted or morally damaging policies," as he represented in his op-ed article, he needs to confront the truth about the Palestinians' intentions. He needs to study carefully the Palestinian leaders' oft-repeated threats, praise of murderers of Israeli civilians, including babies, and rejectionist policies. He needs to reflect on the fact that the Palestinians, encouraged by their neighboring Arab countries, rejected the UN's original two-state partition solution in 1947. He needs to acknowledge that the Palestinians - not the Israelis - have also walked away from peace negotiations on several occasions since that would have given them virtually everything they claimed they wanted. In 2008, for example, Palestinian Authority President Abbas demonstrated his lack of interest in a negotiated peace fair to both sides when he rejected a peace proposal from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that would have given the Palestinians approximately 94% of the West Bank. Abbas's own chief negotiator admitted during a television appearance in March 2009, as transcribed by MEMRI, that "Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Abbas] could have accepted a proposal that talked about Jerusalem and almost 100% of the West Bank" but didn't because "There will be no peace whatsoever unless East Jerusalem – with every single stone in it – becomes the capital of Palestine." Nothing has changed on the Palestinian side. We have essentially the same cast of characters espousing the same take-it-or-leave it position that would undermine Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Moreover, Abbas is as incapable now, as he was in 2008, of delivering a unified Palestinian proposal for peace even if he truly wanted to. So the message to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is not to concentrate his verbal ammunition at Israel when the Palestinians are largely responsible for their own plight.