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The American Assumption that the PA Are the "Good Guys" Does Not Tally with Reality
(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - Over the last few weeks, alongside the unprecedented level of support and aid that the Americans have granted Israel in the current military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, they have also been sharing their plan for after Hamas has been defeated: the "good guys" from the Palestinian Authority (PA) will take over the reins of government in Gaza too. This will occur in tandem with a concerted effort to implement the "Two-State Solution" and a far-reaching compromise that Israel will have to make in Judea and Samaria. But the American theory suffers from a key, basic preliminary fault. Their underlying assumption that Judea and Samaria are home to the "good guys" or that Hamas does not represent the majority of the Palestinians simply does not tally with reality. More than 1,000 terrorist attacks planned by both Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations have been thwarted by the IDF and the Israel Security Agency throughout Judea and Samaria in recent years, in those very areas where the "good guys" are. Since the beginning of the war, manifestations of support and identification among the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria with the Oct. 7 massacre and the fighting led by Hamas in Gaza against Israel have been steadily growing. The support for Hamas continues in those very areas where the Americans seek to establish a Palestinian state, even when rockets launched from Gaza fall on them by mistake. In the Aida refugee camp north of Bethlehem, children, youth, men and women celebrated with fragments and shrapnel from the rockets, dancing in joy and chanting cries of incitement against Israel and calls of support for Hamas. Itamar Marcus, the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, noted that in Judea and Samaria after the massacre, "Initially there was tremendous joy there. The feeling was that Hamas had fulfilled a dream that the PA could only ever have fantasized about. You are repeatedly witness to the use of words such as 'joy,' 'pride' and 'heroic.'"