State of Endless War

Daniel Greenfield

In his UN speech, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority used the word “peace” twenty-eight times. “We believe in peace,” he said. But what sort of peace he believes in is another matter.

Abbas began his statehood campaign with the “Mother of Martyrs,” a mother of seven imprisoned terrorists, four of them murderers, two of whom were involved in suicide bombings, one of whom was a member of Hamas.

One of her sons, Nasser Abu Hmeid, specialized in decapitating fellow Arab-Muslims who were enemies of Fatah. Hmeid had been jailed for murdering nine Arabs, and was released in 1999 as part of a peace deal. He joined the Palestinian police forces as an “interrogator” and then moved on to the notorious Tanzim unit, which was responsible for numerous murders of Israeli civilians. Two years later, Israel finally arrested him and shoved him back into prison. This is the real face of the proposed Palestinian state. A brutal totalitarian regime funded by US money and dedicated to the murder of political opponents and the genocide of the Jewish people.
Abbas speaks of peace at the UN — “We extend our hands to the Israeli government and the Israeli people for peace-making” — but to the home crowd, the message is quite different.

On Al-Jazeera, Fatah Central Committee Member Abbas Zaki explained the reasoning:
When we say that the settlement should be based upon these borders, President Abbas understands, we understand and everyone knows that the greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go. If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, evacuates the 650,000 settlers, and dismantles the wall — what will become of Israel? It will come to an end.
If we say that we want to wipe Israel out… it’s not acceptable policy to say so. Don’t say these things to the world. Keep it to yourself.

But many of his compatriots aren’t keeping it to themselves. A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion showed that while Hamas’ popularity isn’t as high as it used to be, the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs agree with its genocidal charter.

80 percent of respondents agreed with the statement:
For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave… reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

73 percent agreed with the genocidal Hadith quoted in the Hamas charter:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

While a majority was in favor of diplomatic negotiations, it was also against two states for two peoples. The majority favored a one-state solution that would destroy Israel and opposed a two-state solution that would allow them to coexist side by side. And by a factor of two to one, they agreed with the statement that: “The real goal should be to start with two states but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.”
When three quarters of the population believes that there is a religious mandate to kill the Jews, it follows that two thirds will believe that negotiations are only a means of achieving the destruction of Israel.

Despite all the hype, the majority of Arab-Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza have no strong feelings about the statehood bid at the UN and the majority do not think that it will bring a state into being. A UN vote is not their endgame, the stones and the trees of the Hadith are.

It is impossible to understand the conflict without seeing it through the eyes of the Koran. There is no room for a permanent peace agreement with non-Muslims in Islamic theology. Such agreements are temporary measures until the “greater goal” of destroying them and subsuming their lands into the Ummah is achieved.

For the Muslim believer, the conflict with Israel is one phase of an apocalyptic struggle that began in 7th century Saudi Arabia and will conclude in the end times. And the vast majority of Muslims in the region are believers in that long struggle that will eventually end when Islam rules over the entire world.
While Israel and the West see hope for an agreement, the other side sees only one phase in a prolonged war. It doesn’t really matter what Israel puts on the table– the other side expects to get everything anyway because Allah promised it to them.

How do you negotiate peace with members of a genocidal belief system that permits deceit in pursuit of its goals? You make offers to them; they accept your concessions and continue the violence. That is what nearly two decades of negotiations have looked like. Across the administrations of three presidents, five Israeli prime ministers and two Palestinian Authority leaders– the same story has repeated itself again and again.


Those numbers hold their own clue. America and Israel change governments, but the PA’s leaders only leave when they die. The same poll cited before showed that Palestinian-Arabs don’t see themselves as part of the Arab Spring. Seventy-four percent agreed that they are not part of the Arab Spring revolutions. Sixty-four percent worry that the revolutions will bring instability to their territory. Fifty-nine percent disagree that the revolutions offer them new opportunities, and 47 percent disagree that they offer strong positive examples for change at home.

That brings us back to Hmeid, once imprisoned for beheading Arabs, now imprisoned for murdering Jews– and to the nature of what a Palestinian state really is. It’s not aspirational or democratic; it’s a giant refugee training camp for the next generation of cannon fodder in the genocidal wars of Islam.

The Palestinian Muslims have always recognized that there can be no end to the conflict as long as Israel continues to exist. Poll after poll has told the same story, the tale of a permanent war whose blood and charred metal is scattered across the sand and dust. UN statehood is just another phase in a long war which ends in mass murder. The Muslim world howls for genocide and the ranks of the US- and EU-funded militias, the Iranian-funded thugs and the rest of their ilk, are the cunning tools that they have selected for the task.

The state of Palestine is a state of war. The state of war will not end at the UN or the negotiating table. It will only end when the Muslim world stops believing that it has a right to kill in the name of its religion.