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The Palestinian Leadership Has Lost Support in the Arab and Muslim World

(JNS) Dan Diker interviewed by Israel Kasnett - Dan Diker, director of the Political Warfare Project at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS, "20 years after the deadly 'Al-Aqsa intifada,' the Palestinians find themselves cornered or 'checked' with limited possible moves on the Arab Muslim majority Middle East chessboard." He noted that the Second Intifada was Arafat's "Hail Mary pass" using violence and terror "to try and bury Israel, and drive it into submission. It represented the end of Arafat's acceptance of the Oslo presupposition of staging peace with Israel and was a return to the 1968 charter which called for the liberation of Palestine. It was all framed in an Islamic context. It was called the 'Al-Aqsa Intifada.' Arafat's goal was to mobilize the Muslim world against Israel." Diker said a former member of the Tanzim, a militant faction of the Fatah movement, told him Arafat ignited the Second Intifada in order to try to overcome the popularity of Hamas "and that internal Palestinian story is the story that many people do not know. The Palestinian war with Hamas got played out in an intifada against Israel." Having been mostly defeated in their effort to terrorize Israel into submission, the Palestinians "moved from violence and physical terror to ideological warfare. Abbas and the PA actively supported the delegitimization and dehumanization of Israel as an alternative to all-out suicide-bombing warfare. The Palestinians now aimed to internationalize the conflict and move towards ideological warfare through complete delegitimization and defamation of Israel as a recognized Jewish nation-state." But "they overplayed their cards and lost three main audiences they had won over in the early '90s: the Palestinian public, the Israeli public and the Arab world." "The recognition of and normalization with Israel is the key. It is highly unlikely for there to be any progress unless the Palestinians do what the UAE did, which is to recognize that there is a Jewish people and Jewish civilization. That's why the agreement was called the 'Abraham Accords.' The Abraham Accords uprooted the Palestinian ideological narrative and strategy."
2020-10-08 00:00:00
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