• What is commonly called the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” is, in fact, the “Arab-Israel conflict.”Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank in 1950, and from that time Palestinian nationalism has been deadly for the Kingdom.

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• “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror… to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts…. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempts to preserve the status quo.” — President George W. Bush, 2002.
• “There’s no way a deal can be made if they’re not ready to acknowledge a very, very great and important country.” — President Donald J. Trump, 2017.
• The burden, then, is on the Arab states and the Palestinians.

• If one person can stand at the UN and unilaterally declare a state, I advise the leader of the Kurds, the Catalans, the Druze and any other ethnic groups that feel entitled to have their independence to make their way to the building and do so.

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• It is, therefore, the European Union and several European governments, including France and the Netherlands, that are complicit with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in knowingly and purposefully violating their own, signed agreements. Moreover, according to the Oslo Accords, the PA was designated as an interim body, not a permanent one.

• If one really wants to help the Palestinians, one will try to help rid them of their corrupt and repressive leaders; not reinforce them. The Palestinian people deserve better than this.

The “bombshell” that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas threatened he was going to drop on the United Nations during his speech did not materialize.

This bombshell turned out to be a planned announcement of a Palestinian state “under Israeli occupation.”

If one person can stand at the podium of the UN and unilaterally declare a state, then I advise the leader of the Kurds, the Catalans, the Druze and any other ethnic groups that feel entitled to have their independence to make their way to the building and do so.

Apparently the U.S. Administration advised Abbas against the announcement, and Abbas backed down.

Abbas has had limited success playing the official forums of the United Nations and the European Union. They seem aligned with his agenda, but with no thought to the regional devastation that supplanting Israel — the region’s only democracy that that grants full human rights and equality with to all its citizens, including its Arab ones — with a corrupt and repressive regime would entail.

Polls repeatedly show that Israel’s Arabs — about a fifth if its population, and with their own political parties and members of parliament — would evidently, if secretly (for communal loyalty), rather remain in Israel than be in any Arab country, including one of their own. The international community also does not seem to take into consideration what displacing Israel would do to furthering the agendas of political Islamists and creating even more instability in the area.

Had Abbas gone ahead and made his announcement, not only would it have been an empty gesture, it would also have been a clearly illegal breach of the Oslo Accords and other internationally approved agreements that gave validity to the Palestinian Authority in the first place.

Abbas made three false claims in talks with UN officials during his New York visit.

He blamed Israel for ongoing tensions on the Temple Mount, when the violent riots were, in reality, perpetrated by Palestinian Muslims; they have been desecrating their own mosques by wrecking the furniture and using it for barricades to hide behind, while hurling rocks, firebombs and other missiles at non-Muslims on the Mount.

Abbas also accused Israel of not reviving peace negotiations when it was Abbas himself who continually stalled and walked away from consecutive Israeli Prime Ministers and declined to respond to repeated pleas by Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to meet with him “anytime, anywhere.” Netanyahu, in fact, invited Abbas to meet him while they were both in New York this week. The invitation was again declined.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the United Nations General Assembly, on September 26, 2014. (Image source: UN)

Abbas also complained about Israel’s alleged failure to implement agreements with the Palestinians, but without specifying which agreements.

Ironically, it is only the constant protection by Israel’s security forces that is keeping Abbas alive while rivals from Hamas and defectors from his own party attempt to kill him and take over the territories under his control.

At bottom, it is the European Union as well as the Palestinian Authority that are in violation of the many signed international agreements. Everyone is invited to come to Israel to witness the illegal construction of buildings in what, under the Oslo Accords, is known as “Area C.” Area C means, according to the official Oslo Accords, that Israel has full administrative and military control of that area until such time as a permanent peace agreement is signed between the two parties. In other words, during that interim period, neither the PA, Israel, nor anyone else, has the right to construct or plant a flag anywhere designated as Area C. There have been, regrettably, countless breaches of this protocol. It is, therefore, the EU and several European governments, including France and the Netherlands, that are complicit with the PA in knowingly and purposefully violating their own, signed agreements.

It is Abbas’s Palestinian Authority with the collusion of European governments that are failing to implement signed agreements with Israel. Moreover, according to the Oslo Accords, the PA was designated as an interim body, not a permanent one.

Lately, Abbas has been saying repeatedly that he will resign — an empty threat directed at the international community, to suggest that without him, there would be chaos. The international community would do well not to fall for this or other ruses, often echoed by the BDS and other movements, which care more about hating Israel than helping Palestinians.

If one really would really like to help the Palestinians, one would try to help rid them of corrupt and repressive leaders; not reinforce them. The Palestinian people deserve better than this.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of “Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.”

• “The establishment of such a [Palestinian] state means the inflow of combat-ready Palestinian forces into Judea and Samaria … In time of war, the frontiers of the Palestinian state will constitute an excellent staging point for mobile forces to mount attacks on infrastructure installations vital for Israel’s existence…” — Shimon Peres, Nobel Laureate and Former Prime Minister of Israel, in 1978.

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• The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964; three years before there were any “occupied territories.” Exactly what, then was the PLO planning to “liberate”?
• Both Fatah and Hamas have always considered, and still consider, Israel as simply part of “Palestine.” On their current official maps, all of Israel is identified as “Occupied Palestine.”
• “You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel, and establish a purely Palestinian state. … I have no use for Jews; they are and remain, Jews.” — PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, January 30, 1996 (2.5 years after signing the Oslo Peace Accords).
• In view of these repeatedly intolerant Arab views on Israel’s existence, international law should not expect Palestinian compliance with any agreements, including those concerning use of armed force — even if these agreements were to include explicit U.S. security guarantees to Israel.

• There is a small but undeniable number who are willing to kill and sometimes die in the cause of imposing their idea of blasphemy on non-Muslims around the world.

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• The editors signalled that they had had enough of the threats and enough of the danger. They censored themselves.
• Today there might be thousands of people willing to publish cartoons of Mohammed on their Twitter accounts, but most of them hide behind aliases and complain about the cowardice of others.
• Our societies like to think that terrorism and intimidation do not work. They do — or can — but only if we let them.

Ten years ago, one of the editors of a Danish newspaper called Jyllands-Posten had heard that that no cartoonist in Denmark would depict Islam’s prophet for a set of children’s books on the major world religions. Did such self-censorship really exist in modern Denmark? He sought to find out. So he published a spread of twelve cartoons intended to depict the founder of Islam.

Attacks on the newspaper followed — the most outspoken attempt at enforcing censorship since the death threats against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988, and the murder of Theo van Gogh for his film, Submission, in 2004. The knife in van Gogh’s back also went through a note demanding death threats for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch MP at the time, and the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders.

Some of the cartoons printed by Jyllands-Posten led to attacks on the newspaper for having printed them. Some of the cartoons did not even feature Mohammed at all. One, of a Mohammed-like figure with a bomb in his turban, became famous. Local Danish Imams, disappointed at the relative beigeness of the cartoons, added more offensive cartoons of their own to a portfolio, and toured the Middle East with this, trying to whip up anger against Denmark. As many remember, the incitement worked. For a time, aside from all the looting, burnings and murders, the whole world seemed transfixed on these cartoons and what the reactions to them might mean.

Across a number of countries, there were independent outbreaks of mini cartoon-crises. The decision of Ezra Levant to stand alone and publish the cartoons in Canada led to a North American branch of the cartoon crisis. The decision of a number of Norwegian newspapers to print the cartoons, in solidarity with their neighbours, led to a Norwegian cartoon crisis. And, of course, in Paris, the decision of a single magazine — Charlie Hebdo — to continue depicting any and all historical figures, led to the slaughter of ten journalists and two police officers in the magazine’s Paris offices in January this year.

Stéphane Charbonnier, the fearless editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7 along with many of his colleagues, is shown here in front of the magazine’s former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.

Now is probably as good a time as any to ask a few questions — not least, whether we have learned anything at all. Certainly, non-Muslims around the world have learned a great deal more about Islamic sensibilities when it comes to depictions of their Prophet. From within Muslim communities in Europe and elsewhere, there has been a demonstration that there is a small but undeniable number who are willing to kill and sometimes die in the cause of imposing their idea of blasphemy on non-Muslims around the world.

Aside from the attempts on the lives of the staff of Jyllands-Posten, there have been attempts on the life of the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the Swedish cartoonist who drew a Mohammed cartoon in solidarity after the first Danish cartoons, Lars Vilks. There have been countless other knocks on the door by the blasphemy police. In London, the publisher of a fawning book about the love life of Mohammed (The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones) narrowly survived an attempt to firebomb his offices. If there was a single place on earth that one might have thought could be immune from a visit by the Islamic Blasphemy Police it would probably be somewhere in Texas. But earlier this year, when a display of Mohammed cartoons in took place in Garland, the assassins turned up anyway, and were, fortunately, shot.

So, one lesson is that perhaps nowhere on earth is now safe from the Islam’s most stringent enforcers. They can crop up in remote parts of Scandinavia or in the heartland of America. They can show up at a newspaper office or at an individual’s home. And it is in this realization that the clearest lesson of the last decade has been learnt.

Last week, on the anniversary of the publication of the first Mohammed cartoons, Jyllands-Posten republished the original spread. The page and texts were laid out as they had been on that famous day ten year earlier. But one thing was missing: the cartoons. Where the original images had been — even the ones that did not depict Mohammed — there were only blank spaces. What had been possible in 2005 was no longer possible in 2015. One can hardly blame the publishers. After ten years of paying for security, and staff having to work in perhaps the most threatened newspaper office on earth, the editors of Jyllands-Posten signalled that they had had enough of the threats and enough of the danger. They censored themselves.

It took only ten years for most people across the West to learn about Islamic blasphemy — and in the end to abide by it. Today there might be thousands of people willing to publish cartoons of Mohammed on their Twitter accounts, but most of them hide behind aliases and complain about the cowardice of others.

A few days before the Mohammed cartoons’ anniversary, Mark Steyn, Henryk Broder and the Norwegian editor Vebjoern Selbekk addressed a conference in Denmark to commemorate the anniversary of the cartoons. It was held in the Danish Parliament, the only building there now deemed safe enough to withstand the now-traditional attack from the Islamic Blasphemy Police. Anticipating a terrorist attack, the UK Foreign Office and U.S. State Departments both warned their citizens to stay away from the area of the Parliament building that day. The restaurant in which we were meant to be having dinner cancelled the booking; they realized, when police and security officers scouted out the building in advance, who the guests might be.

Ten years ago, you could publish depictions of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. Ten years later, it is hard for anyone who has been connected with such an act to find a restaurant in Copenhagen that will serve them dinner.

It is not just artists and writers who have learned the lesson; it is everyone — from newspaper conglomerates to the people who serve food in restaurants. Our societies like to think that terrorism and intimidation do not work. They do — or can — but only if we let them. Over the last ten years, a couple of brief eruptions of sanctimonious point-missing aside, it turned out to be fear — not Mohammed cartoons — that went viral.

Freedom, however, was never defended by more than a handful of people. Most prefer their comforts and a quiet life to anything that looks like a fight. But there are still more than a few good people across the world, and more than a handful of them in Scandinavia. If, in previous conflicts, one looked to pilots or statesman to lead the way, in this war against the new “Islamic Inquisition,” it is journalists, cartoonists, writers and artists who find themselves on the front lines and who need to lead. Some of them might be surprised to be in this position. They should not be. Freedom of expression and thought have always had vicious enemies. But the truth has always seen them off, and shall do again.

• Name a single person or organisation you trust to control your speech. Whom would you trust to control what you can read, or make decisions on what is true and what is false for you? Whom do you trust to police what you think?The German government thinks it knows exactly who should be the arbiter of truth and what articles you should be allowed to post. Itself!

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• This would lead to a monopolisation of the media industry. One or two large platforms would dominate the public debate; fringe voices would be ignored or cast aside.
• Who is to police the police? Facebook, caught out, already had to dismiss those compiling their trending stories, when it was revealed that they had a runaway political bias and were routinely suppressing (conservative) material with which they did not agree.
• The whole censorship industry is open to abuse; presumably, that is what censorship is for in the first place.