To please the Americans, the government normally praises Fatah police’s activities.

Too late. The PA has been honoring Mughrabi for many years, with schools and a stadium named after her— just as Israel honors its own terrorists.

What is bizarre is the fact that Israel complains to the Americans instead of cutting off tax transfers, reducing the water and electricity supply, or withdrawing Abbas’ transit privileges.

Abbas has remained in office illegally since his presidential term expired last winter. He was to have passed the authority to Hamas’ spokesman of the Palestinian council.

Fayad remains undeterred by the fact that Israel pays his salary and funds his government through tax transfers. After Israel refused to release Barghouti, the allegedly moderate terrorist took off his mask and called on Palestinians to kidnap more Israeli soldiers.

Fayad also criticized Israel for stalling the peace process by refusing to abandon Jerusalem to the Palestinians. In the same way, the Nazis accused Czechoslovakia and Poland of torpedoing German peace efforts by refusing to cede Sudetenland and Danzig.

The Americans are unlikely to allow Abbas to resign because his only potential replacement is Dahlan, a Palestinian strongman with no support in Netanyahu’s cabinet. It would take a leftist government in Israel to negotiate with Dahlan or release another possible leader, Marwan Barghouti, from jail.

Even if the Palestinians accept a demilitarized state, nothing precludes them from changing their minds later. The world has already tried the scenario of a demilitarized Rhineland.

The Israeli government is afraid to state unequivocally that we will not accept a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas is in a tough bind. Obama does not care about the report and the Hague: the potential benefit, that the ICC’s investigation would make Israelis more amenable to his peace demands, is balanced by the possibility that Afghanis might drag US soldiers to the ICC for similar actions.
But Abbas faces a problem with the Israelis, who promised to make public the tapes on which he can be heard pushing Olmert and Barak to continue the war in Gaza to topple Hamas.
Palestinian public opinion is pushing Abbas in the opposite direction, to support the Goldstone report. Not that common West Bankers really care about Israeli “atrocities” in Gaza, but their leaders, who dislike Abbas, are fueling the outcry.
Hamas benefits by heating the public outrage against Abbas. If Israel releases the tapes, Hamas will be able to brand Abbas as a collaborator—which is no big news, since everyone knows that he is. Hamas is using the Abbas-Goldstone issue to extract more concessions from Fatah at unity talks in Cairo.

By threatening Israel with a Third Intifada, Abbas puts pressure on Obama to press Israel to accede to Palestinian demands. Obama does not want an intifada to wreck his peacemaker’s credentials.

Israel continues tax transfers to the PLO.

In a twist of logic, it became “necessary” for Israel to stop construction rather than for a defeated terrorist entity to accept the terms.

While the PLO upholds the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance against the Jews, Israel finances Abbas’ administration through tax transfers, paid ultimately by Israeli consumers.

In fact, hygienic conditions in Israeli jails are better than in stench-ridden Muqata, Arafat’s presidential bunker. Palestinians dump untreated waste into the West Bank rivers and into the Mediterranean.

The Arab murderers enjoy free medical care on the account of the very taxpayers they attempted to murder.

This agrees with our often-voiced suspicion that IDF intercepts such an astonishing percentage of terrorist attempts only because terrorist chiefs cooperate with Israel. Intercepted attempts are good enough for them to prove to the Palestinian people that they operate against Israel.

Qurei used to be one of the top Palestinian collaborators with Israel since Abbas sent him to lead the Oslo negotiations. As the years passed, that honest enemy assumed an increasingly hardline position against Israel to differentiate himself from Abbas in Palestinian politics.

The good thing is that Fatah today is just as insignificant in the West Bank as it was before Oslo, when Peres’ clique brought the terrorists from Tunis as a puppet force.

What would a normal government do if an enemy terrorist organization openly proclaimed violent intentions twenty miles from the prime minister’s office? The mad Jewish government, which has no sense of self-respect, allowed the Fatah conference to proceed.

Fatah’s hard stance is excellent PR for Abbas. Compared to these big-mouthed terrorists he looks a dove. Fatah’s rejectionist stance also provides Abbas with a way out: he can sign anything, and Fatah can claim later that it did not subscribe to the agreement, just as it now refuses to acknowledge the Oslo Accords.

Abbas is on a crash course with Dahlan and Barghouti, whose loyalists were forced out of the conference. Abbas thus is not supported even by his own party, but Israel insists on negotiating with this empty man, who won’t be able to implement any treaty.

Whatever the investigation’s result, the resolution places the responsibility on the Jews. Which is correct, in a sense: the government must be held responsible for not killing him decades earlier.

Abbas confirmed our belief that the Palestinians are taking Olmert’s promises of the Temple Mount and Judea as starting points to extract further concessions from Israel.

The conference’s draft resolution includes armed resistance against Jews, liberating the entire Palestinian homeland, and the return of Arab refugees to Israel.

Israel continues to fund Fatah with tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority.

Such lenience prejudices the outcome of the Israeli-Hamas negotiations over Shalit: the Israeli government has become soft on Jew-murderers.

It truly takes a Jewish lack of self-respect to allow a conference of Jew-murderers who refuse to recognize Israel.

Never mind—Jews continue to subsidize Fatah through tax transfers to the PLO.

Fatah’s radicalism means nothing. The terrorist group was similarly bellicose in 1993, yet its representatives in the PLO Council voted for the Oslo accords.

No moral equivalence is implied, but hundreds of Israeli streets are named after Jews such as Begin, Shamir, and Raziel, all of whom killed Palestinian civilians.

Each group of people claims to be retaliating for the other’s offense.

After being banned in the Palestinian-occupied territories, Al Jazeera will continue operating from Israel, whose leaders lack the guts to shut down the terrorist mouthpiece.

The sentence is much more lenient than the life sentence imposed on Pollard by our ally the United States.

Heavy machine guns are useless in any operation against terrorists, and are likely to cause significant collateral damage. IDF soldiers routinely risk their lives to arrest Palestinian terrorists with light weapons, but Fatah cares not about their brethren.

The APC itself is useless in anti-terrorist operations, as it is an offensive weapon with only three to ten people inside.

The chief judge receives his salary from Israeli tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority.

Manufacturing explosives in relatively open areas remains okay. Israel continues with tax transfers to the PA.

In what could become a landmark decision, the judge put a lien on $2 million of the tax transfers to satisfy the claims of the victims’ relatives, Sharon and Ben Shalom. A few days earlier, another court satisfied the case against the PA for the Park Hotel bombing.

Obama’s administration has earmarked for the PA four times more money than what is provided by the Israeli tax transfers.

Fatah bets on American money while Hamas counts on Iranian support. Both reject Israel.

Israel would do well, and help Palestinians observe the boycott, by expelling all Arab migrant workers.

Fatah is still far behind Israel, which holds 11,000 Palestinian prisoners.

In the years since the Oslo Accords, Israeli leftists and Fatah terrorists have played a game with the Western public: Arafat, and Abbas after him recognized Israel (as if we need the thugs’ recognition)—but on behalf of the PLO rather than Fatah.
The PLO is a discredited, amorphous umbrella organization for Palestinian terrorists. Fatah, the actual political party, has never recognized Israel.

Dahlan is Abbas’ likely successor in next year’s elections. He is an Israeli and American darling, commissioned two years ago to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. This was the plan that prompted Hamas to preempt and oust Fatah.

Dahlan ended his two-year personal feud with Hamas by calling on them to follow Fatah’s lead in never recognizing Israel.

Fatah is becoming increasingly militant in order to compete with Hamas for votes.

The Israeli establishment have lashed out against Lieberman for less-than-friendly remarks about Mubarak, but they ignore Abbas’ denigration of IDF. No wonder: for the likes of Peres, Mubarak is more a friend than a typical Jewish soldier.

Just today, police arrested several Jews, including some teenagers, who dared to speak impolitely about an army official. But Arabs enjoy a very different treatment.

The EU Parliament, where Abbas spoke about Israel, lauded his speech.

Fatah fights Israel just like Hamas does: both groups act through their armed wings rather than directly. But the Israeli establishment closes its eyes to Fatah’s attacks in order to continue the peace process. After the Fatah-Al Aqsa attack, Ben Eliezer and other ministers called for a tough response against Hamas. But we should ask ourselves: what does Hamas have to do with Fatah’s attacks?

Palestinians fired 4 rockets, one of them hit close to kindergarten. IDF patrol on Israeli side of the border with Gaza came under fire. Israeli intelligence confirmed that Hamas did not perpetrate any of the attacks.

Fatah burned its bridges by alienating the local population. Fatah police routinely arrest student protesters, disperse Palestinian crowds, and beat journalists. But the scope of violence against Hamas is small; during the Gaza operation, Fatah merely arrested a few dozen Hamas supporters and banned overt sympathy with Hamas such as hoisting its flags. Fatah alienates Palestinians without extirpating Hamas.

Fatah’s leaders threw their lot in with Israel because they expect to lose to Hamas in any transparent elections.

It is highly unlikely that Fatah can prevail against Palestinian popular opinion. Fatah relies on Israel and doesn’t push for Palestinian statehood.

The Israeli operation in Gaza prompted a squall of domestic criticism against Abu Mazen for colluding with Zionist enemies to return to Gaza. Scores of Fatah officials and thousands of members—paid with US and Israeli money—voiced support of Hamas against Abbas. Hamas now enjoys across-the-border support from Palestinian factions and gains electoral popularity at Fatah’s expense.

Though an option existed to bring Fatah battalions into Gaza a week ago, by now Fatah militants would have joined their Hamas counterparts against Israel. After Hamas’ victory over the IDF (which rejected a massive invasion), the terrorist group would be so popular that Abbas wouldn’t have refused a unity government. Israeli ineptitude strengthens Hamas to the point that it is slated to take over the Palestinian government the way Hezbollah did in Lebanon.