Obstacles to peace
Ilan Manor and Marcus Holmes (“Online Palestine is advocating peace,” Comment & Features, August 1) display a surprising gullibility regarding Palestinian propaganda tactics.
They describe the PLO’s “Palestine in Hebrew” Facebook page as “an important shift in Palestinian policy” because it “rarely publishes posts denouncing Israeli policies, the Israeli occupation or the Israeli security forces.” They assert that this might “signal a desire to create a positive and empathetic image of Palestine among Israelis, and to signal a sincere desire for dialogue .... ”
The obstacle to peace is not Israeli unwillingness to communicate with Palestinians. Rather, it is the PLO’s and the Palestinian Authority’s unwavering refusal to prepare the people for peaceful coexistence with their Jewish neighbors.
“Palestine in Hebrew,” aimed solely at the Israeli public, is entirely consistent with other duplicitous practices of PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts. While they speak of reconciliation and good-faith negotiations to their English-speaking audiences, they lionize terrorists and incite their people to further violence in Arabic. The Palestinian leadership will demonstrate a true change in policy and honest desire for peace when it makes exactly the same conciliatory statements in all languages.
Manor and Holmes also echo classic Palestinian obfuscation when they refer repeatedly to the “current cycle of violence, which has been linked to the Israeli government’s decision to post metal detectors outside the Temple Mount’s entrance .... ” In truth, there is no “cycle of violence.” The recent upheaval sprang from the murder of two Israeli police officers guarding the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. It intensified when Israeli efforts to prevent a repeat of such brutality were met with violent demonstrations and the monstrous slaughter of an innocent Jewish family.
The authors’ silence regarding the origins of the recent savagery is disingenuous, to say the least.
ARYEH SHAPUNOW Skokie, Illinois