Why Do Palestinian Leaders Oppose Helping Their People?

by Bassam Tawil
July 12, 2018 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12663/palestinian-leaders-gaza-crisis

Translations of this item:

Mahmoud Abbas and his West Bank-based government seek to prolong the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. They want the international community to continue to believe that Israel is responsible for the ongoing, intense suffering of the Palestinians. They are hoping to use the crisis there to pursue their campaign to delegitimize Israel.
Palestinian leaders would prefer to see their people starve than make any form of concessions for peace with Israel. Yet Al-Aloul and Abbas are not the ones who are facing starvation. There is nothing more comfortable than sitting in your fashionable house in Ramallah or Nablus and talking about starvation and humanitarian aid.
The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, who are desperate for jobs and a better life, do not really care about Trump's upcoming peace plan. They also do not really care about a settlement or a checkpoint in the West Bank.
This is the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Palestinians' number one priority -- the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinians in general -- is destroying Israel. They would rather die than give up their dream of destroying Israel.

For years, Palestinian leaders have been complaining that the Gaza Strip was "on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe." Time and again, they have warned that unless the world helps the Palestinians living there, the Gaza Strip will "erupt like a volcano."

Israel and the US are now offering to help improve the living conditions of the Palestinians living under Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip. But guess who is fiercely opposed to any attempt to resolve the "humanitarian and economic crisis" in the coastal enclave, home to some two million Palestinians? Answer: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling Fatah faction.

In the past few weeks, both Israel and the US administration have come up with different ideas to help the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

US envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, who recently visited the Middle East, are said to have presented initiatives that included providing necessities such as electricity, desalinating drinking water, employment opportunities and reviving the industrial zone in the Gaza Strip.

Israel, for its part, has asked Cyprus to consider the possibility of establishing a seaport on the island for shipping goods to the Gaza Strip. According to reports, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has reached an understanding with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to pursue the port plan. Liberman's office said that Israel is working internationally in a number of ways to try to "change the reality" in the Gaza Strip.

One would think that the Palestinian leaders would be extremely happy about these initiatives to alleviate the suffering of their people in the Gaza Strip. The plans to improve the living conditions of the residents of the Gaza Strip should be music to the ears of the Palestinian Authority leadership, right? Wrong.

What, exactly, is behind this mystifying desire on the part of the Palestinian leaders to deny their people a shot at a decent life? Why does the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which claims that it cares about the well-being of all Palestinians, vehemently oppose any plan to create job opportunities and other forms of aid for its people?

Let us take it step by step.

First, Abbas and his West Bank-based government seek to prolong the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip so that they can continue damning Israel for the crisis. They want the international community to continue to believe that Israel is responsible for the ongoing, intense suffering of the Palestinians. Difficult as it appears to for the global community to grasp, however, Israel's maritime blockade on the Gaza Strip is aimed solely at preventing the smuggling of weapons into the coastal enclave. The border between the Gaza Strip and Israel remains open for delivering food and humanitarian and medical aid into Gaza.

The border between Israel and the Gaza Strip remains open for delivering food and humanitarian and medical aid into Gaza. (Image source: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Second, the Palestinian Authority and its leaders are opposed to any humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip because they fear that this would embolden Hamas by encouraging it to maintain its tight grip on the Gaza Strip and absolving it of its responsibilities towards the residents living there. Once others start providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with aid, Hamas would be able to continue investing millions of dollars in building tunnels to attack Israel and smuggling more weapons into the Gaza Strip. Hamas would no longer have to worry about paying salaries to Palestinians or purchasing medicine and food.

The Palestinian Authority is hoping that conditions in the Gaza Strip will get so bad that the Palestinians there will rise up against Hamas. It is worth noting that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah itself has imposed severe sanctions on the Gaza Strip in the past year.

These punitive measures include halting payments to thousands of civil servants and suspending social welfare assistance to hundreds of families. The sanctions have triggered a wave of protests throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip in recent weeks, prompting Abbas's security forces to use force to disperse the protesters.

Third, the Palestinian Authority leadership are assuring us that the Israeli and US plans to help the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip are part of a wider "conspiracy" to force the Palestinians to accept US President Donald Trump's yet-to-be-unveiled plan for peace in the Middle East.

Abbas and his senior officials are using this issue to whip up anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments among the Palestinian population. They are telling the Palestinians that the economic and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip are primarily designed to extract "political concessions" from the Palestinians. Their argument: The Palestinians would be required to give up their "national rights," including the "right of return" for refugees and their descendants to their former homes in Israel proper, in exchange for improving their living conditions.

Palestinian Authority leaders are inciting their people by telling them that the US and Israel are seeking to "blackmail" the Palestinians. Consider, for example, what Abbas's prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, said on July 5: "We won't accept any plan to turn our national rights into humanitarian or financial rights. We have fixed political, historical and legal rights that are non-negotiable."

Another senior Abbas loyalist, Mahmoud Al-Aloul, was quoted on July 2 as saying: "We don't want your flour and wheat; we don't want your humanitarian aid."

And note another recent statement, made by Al-Aloul, who serves as Abbas's deputy in Fatah and is touted as the next Palestinian Authority president: "We are prepared to starve, but we can't, in return for resolving our humanitarian issues, give up Jerusalem and our basic rights."

The message should be obvious – after all, it is being broadcast loud and clear: Palestinian leaders would prefer to see their people starve than make any form of concessions for peace with Israel.

Yet Al-Aloul and Abbas are not the ones who are facing starvation. Life in Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank is pretty good for Abbas and his senior entourage. Unlike the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Authority leaders enjoy freedom of movement and live in luxury apartments and villas. There is nothing more comfortable than sitting in your fashionable house in Ramallah or Nablus and talking about starvation and humanitarian aid.

When Al-Aloul and other senior Palestinian leaders talk about the harsh conditions in the Gaza Strip, they conveniently forget to mention that it is, in part, their own sanctions that have aggravated the crisis there. But the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, who are desperate for jobs and a better life, do not really care about Trump's upcoming peace plan.

They also do not really care about a settlement or a checkpoint in the West Bank. Abbas and his officials seem dead-set to pursue their jihad against Israel and the US at the expense of the last surviving Palestinian. They go on selling their people old slogans about "national rights and principles and Jerusalem" while watching them die in the streets.

The final lesson to be drawn from the statements of the Palestinian Authority leaders against plans to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about economic or humanitarian issues.

By insisting on all Palestinian " national rights," including the "right of return," and by refusing to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, the Palestinians are in fact signaling that their true goal is to see Israel removed from the Middle East. How do we know that they want to destroy Israel? Abbas says he sees Israel as a "colonialist project that has nothing to do with Judaism."

This statement means that he does not see Israel as a legitimate state. Abbas and his officials do not care about the suffering of their people in the Gaza Strip because they are hoping to use the crisis there to pursue their campaign to delegitimize Israel. Hamas, for its part, is clearly stating that it will not give up its dream of "liberating Palestine, from the river to the sea," even if that means the starvation and death of its people. Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas could have ensured a better life for their people a long time ago, but this is not what is on their mind. They care less about their people and more about finding ways to undermine and delegitimize and demonize Israel and Jews.

Abbas and his loyalists are saying in easy-to-understand language: "You can give us as much money as you want, we will not change our stance towards Israel and we will not give up any of our demands." In this regard, at least, they are telling the truth.

This conflict is not about money or economic aid. It is about the existence of Israel, whose presence the Palestinians refuse to tolerate in the Middle East.

This is the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Palestinians' number one priority -- the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinians in general -- is destroying Israel. They would rather die than give up their dream of destroying Israel.

Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East.

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Related Topics: Palestinian Authority

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Comment on this item

15 Reader Comments

Carl Goldberg • Jul 12, 2018 at 23:42

Please stop this nonsense about the Palestinian leaders! The leaders are not responsible for the failure to make peace with Israel. The leaders as well as the population are Moslems, and the sacred doctrines of Islam require that Moslems make war, not peace, on the Jews. In addition, there is the Islamic doctrine that, once any territory has been conquered by Moslems, that territory remains Islamic forever, and Moslems are duty-bound to get it back. Therefore, no Moslem can make peace with Israel without flagrantly violating the sacred commands of his god and his prophet. THAT is the essence of the conflict, not bad leadership.

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Alan Bly • Jul 12, 2018 at 22:42

Articles...columns...UN Resolutions...Foreign Ministry declarations..."Peace Plans"...John Kerry's crying...it goes on and on and on. When? When? will adults understand that the Palestinians, whether they're Hamas or Fatah...or whatever...will not rest until Israel is destroyed? Do we need another 70-years? Do we need another war? How about another intifada? Maybe more pictures of 11-year old children wearing military clothing or old ladies in burkahs telling us how proud they are when their sons or daughters blow themselves up in Tel Aviv. This whole approach that imagines that there might be a "Palestinian State" living side by side with Israel is nauseating. Stop wasting everyone's time with it. They can [ave the streets of Gaza and the "West Bank" with gold and it wouldn't be enough.

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Laine • Jul 12, 2018 at 17:24

If the Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs now called Palestinians were remotely interested in improving their lives through their own efforts, surely we should have seen some counter movement to their present leadership as all other dissatisfied nationalities organize. Why do Gaza Palestinians continue to vote for Hamas and its charter that specifically abjures any compromise with Israel and aims at its destruction? Why are there no Palestinian intellectuals who move abroad out of reach of Hamas and write honestly about what is causing the stalemate and promote co-operation with Israel?

Above all, why are Palestinian children raised in their homes to be Jew haters? Even ones treated in Israel's hospitals sometimes return with the intention of bombing the medical staff that healed them.

Even Golda Meir was naive in her much quoted diagnosis that things would not improve until Palestinian parents loved their children more than they hate Jews. The way Palestinian Muslims love their children is aspiring to an Israel-free Middle East in which to raise them and in many cases encouraging martyrdom so their son or daughter can escape dreary Palestine for Allah's bordello heaven stocked with virgins though what children's reward would be among all the other murderers/martyrs is unclear.

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Ruckweiler • Jul 12, 2018 at 16:10

It's their "rice bowl" and they're not giving it up regardless how many of their people suffer or die. Simple as that, at least to me.

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Bisley • Jul 12, 2018 at 15:39

The Palestinian leaders aren't interested in helping their people, but helping themselves. As long as they can keep their people poor, dissatisfied and incited against Israel (as the supposed source of their problems), to maintain support for the "struggle", they remain in control of most of the aid money that pours in from all over the world, and with dictatorial power over their territories. They would certainly like to eliminate Israel and take over the whole area, but they are well aware that they haven't the power to do it, and that if Israel is ever destroyed, it would have to be by others (and they would not necessarily end up in control).

For the present, they are quite happy with the power and money that the present situation gives them, and their main interest is in keeping control of the power and money. This involves continuing a low-grade terrorism -- enough to keep the public stirred up by providing some martyrs, villains and heroes, but not enough to provoke the Israelis into coming into the Palestinian territories to wipe them out. Helping their people would necessarily reduce the evils that could be blamed on Israel, and if carried too far, could cost them their power.

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Isaac Barr MD • Jul 12, 2018 at 14:39

The "Palestinian" conflict with Israel was never local national. It was always an Islamic and global conflict when radical Muslims in Indonesia or elsewhere will never accept any agreement. So why should Abbas bother?

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Bill Houston • Jul 12, 2018 at 14:24

It's a crime against humanity to hold your own people hostage in order to further a political cause that has failed to materialize. There ought to be a statute of limitations (fifty years?) on how long people can be told that they will get back what was lost in a war. Seventy years is already too long a time to be given promises that for one reason or another can't be kept.

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BillyBob • Jul 12, 2018 at 14:03

A deep-seated naivete underlies this otherwise worthwhile piece. By castigating the Arab "Palestinian" leadership, the writer absolves the rank and file of their thoroughgoing, unremitting, unrivaled Jew-hatred. Let's not pretend that the Arab "street" has convictions different from their bosses. After all, the Gazans elected Hamas over Fatah precisely knowing that Hamas gave absolutely no quarter to the Jews. And why do those "moderate" Jew-haters in Ramallah and environs not throw out Abbas, who's only in, what, the 12th year of his 4-year term? The "little guys," the "oppressed," as the author would have them styled, hate the Jews with all their heart; Hamas and every other jihad group only reflect their hearts' desires. It's dangerous to pretend that "if only" we could get a different leadership that "cares about the people," it would be Kumbaya-time in the Middle East. Puhleeze. Not until realist Daniel Pipes' hoped-for "Israel victory" will we see any peace in the region--and that will last only as long as the loss-shame-humiliation cycle lasts. I'm afraid we're going to have to await Moshiach to end the cycle.

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Dajjal

BillyBob • Jul 12, 2018 at 22:19

Your fear is well founded. Expect peace to break out on the 33rd day of the month of Never.

To Muslims, Israel is the ultimate living blasphemy: proof that Allah is an impotent idol. Muslims will never tolerate it!!

Jihad is existential war; it does not end until Islam no longer exists.

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Stan Lee • Jul 12, 2018 at 13:32

Let us not have illusions of "the concern" Palestinian leaders have had for Palestinian people. Being absolutely frank about it, Israel, U.S.A. have been active in seeking a remedy for Palestinian people, otherwise the result is perpetual war and terrorism. But, for the Palestinian leadership that has emerged as questionable from the very beginning of the battle with Israel, I believe that "people's hero/martyr" Yasser Arafat, set the Palestinian leadership trend. Arafat "milked" the Palestinian "cause," and whomever followed also recognized the personal financial bonus by just stringing the "troubles" along into infinity. If the Palestinian crowds are ready to "martyr" themselves, the goal being Israel's disappearance, then the leadership they will fight for can make their sacrifice of dealing with and misappropriating money from do-gooder sources who actually believe those funds benefit "the people."

The Palestinian people are incited, misled, misinformed, and abused, not by Israel, but by the affiliates which are those Palestinian leaders, who the poor Palestinians have been compromised into electing...mainly because they are completely in the dark concerning the motivations of their leaders. The only similarity between those people and their so-called leaders is that they are Arabs. Then, the other issue is how the Koran advises/directs Muslims to kill Jews...often leading to dead Arabs who are then martyred Muslims. That is the Palestinian Arab Muslim seemingly permanent condition. They cannot improve their lives when those same lives are primarily directed to murdering "unbelievers."

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Benton Marder • Jul 12, 2018 at 13:27

Suppose that, by some obscene miracle, the Jews were driven out of the Holy Land. How long would it be before the land became a Third and Fourth World slum and wasteland? How long would the forests remain in place? The apartment complexes be maintained? I can assure us that much would be destroyed or vandalised out of sheer spite. The land itself would be over-run with goats and quickly defoliated. The Holy Land would be a wasteland as it was before the old Zionists came to redeem the land.

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Steve

Benton Marder • Jul 13, 2018 at 10:32

It was exactly that.

During the ottoman empire's 500 year rule over the region it was a largely ignored backwater of little villages, desert and bogs. Jews still lived there, but under terrible conditions.

Only in the early 20th century when the push for the restoration (very important word there) of the Jewish national homeland and Jews came from around the world, started working the land to restore it and suddenly the land had an alternative history - you know, the one "Palestinian" negotiators can't even agree on but insist is the truth, that one - means, according to their version of events that we are the invaders. That could be funny if it wasn't so stupid.

Muslims/Arabs hadn't thought of calling themselves Palestinian back then. I refer you to the words of Yasser Arafat saying he will make the Palestinian identity through conflict with Israel. That fire needs to be extinguished in a way Arabs (for that is what those itinerants, occupiers of Israeli land really are) will understand and 70+ years after the formation of the State of Israel we could finally have peace in the region?

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b.a. freeman • Jul 12, 2018 at 12:06

nobody should be surprised by the hatred of israel AND jews held deep in the heart by those leading both hamas and fatah (or, for that matter, in the hearts of every muslim "palestinian"), since muslims are taught by islam to hate jews. this evil cult will not be happy until the whole world becomes muslim. and once that happens, the muslims will have to turn on one another to get "booty;" fortunately for them, there will always be some group of muslim people somewhere who aren't muslim enough, or who do something that offends other muslims's sensibilities, and the whold crew will go to war against one another.

no matter how U look at islam, it still looks like a bunch of gang-bangers.

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jill merano • Jul 12, 2018 at 10:21

Thank you for this article. It gives a clear picture of what the leaders of Palestine are doing. This pathetic ambition of theirs only brings their citizens to misery nothing more. They have wasted so many years and so many lives rather than examining the crisis of their country and finding appropriate solutions that will give their citizens better lives.

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Jeff Page • Jul 12, 2018 at 06:32

This is only to be expected. Like most Muslims, they prefer to see their own people suffer rather than come to a common sense conclusion and an end to the fighting and hatred. All because of land, but even if the land situation was to be sorted out, the Muslims would find something else to fight over. The world's leaders need to get with the programme and realise that this particular conflict is never going to end. Muslims kill more Muslims than any other, whether it be in peace or war. They tend to blame other countries and religions for their inability to live alongside others without causing friction or fighting. Muslims are their own worst enemy, they are simply far too thick to see this! The people need to get rid of their warmongering leaders and then they will be able if they want, to enjoy life as others around the free world do. Or be forever the hostage of those willing to use them as human shields!

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