Buoyed by the latest United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, Palestinian leaders are now threatening to step up their diplomatic warfare against Israel — a move that is sure to sabotage any future effort to revive the moribund peace process. Other Palestinians, meanwhile, view the resolution as license to escalate “resistance” attacks on Israel. By “resistance,” of course, they mean terror attacks against Israel.

The UNSC resolution sent the following message to the Palestinians: Forget about negotiating with Israel. Just pressure the international community to force Israel to comply with the resolution and surrender up all that you demand.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians are not wasting any time by waiting for the international community to act against Israel on their behalf. Rather, they are thinking of ways of taking advantage of the UNSC vote to promote their campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel, especially in the international arena. One thing is certain: Abbas and his Palestinian Authority cronies are not planning to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In fact, they are more belligerent, confrontational and defiant than ever.

In the days following the UNSC vote, the voices emerging from Ramallah and the Gaza Strip clearly indicate that Palestinians have put themselves on a collision course with Israel. This bodes badly for any peace process.

Earlier this week, Abbas convened the PLO Executive Committee — a decision-making body dominated by his loyalists — to discuss the implications of the new resolution. The declared purpose of the meeting: to discuss the decisions and strategy that the Palestinian leadership needs to take in the aftermath of the resolution.

The decisions announced following the PLO meeting are a clear sign of the new approach that Abbas and the Palestinian leadership have endorsed. The Palestinian leaders have chosen the path of confrontation, and not direct negotiations, with Israel. They see the UNSC resolution, particularly the US abstention, as a charge sheet against Israel that is to be leveraged in their diplomatic effort to force Israel to its knees.

The PLO decisions include, among other things, an appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an “immediate judicial investigation into Israeli colonial settlements on the land of the independent State of Palestine.” Another decision envisages asking Switzerland to convene a meeting to look into ways of forcing Israel to apply the Fourth Geneva Convention to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949, defines “humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone.”

The appeal to the ICC and Switzerland is part of Abbas’s strategy to “internationalize” the conflict with Israel, by involving as many parties as possible. In this context, Abbas is hoping that the UNSC resolution will ensure the “success” of the upcoming French-initiated Middle East peace conference, which is slated to convene in Paris next month. For Abbas, the conference is another tool to isolate Israel in the international community, and depict it as a country that rejects peace with its Arab neighbors.

In addition, Abbas and his lieutenants in Ramallah are now seeking to exploit the UNSC resolution to promote boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel:

“The PLO Executive Committee renews its call to the world countries for a comprehensive and full boycott of Israeli colonialist settlements in all fields, as well as all companies working in or dealing with these settlements.”

One of Abbas’s close associates, Mohamed Shtayyeh, hinted that the UNSC resolution should be regarded as a green light not only to boycott Israel, but also to use violence against it. He said that this is the time to “bolster the popular resistance” against Israel. “Popular resistance” is code for throwing stones and petrol bombs and carrying out stabbing and car-ramming attacks against Israelis.

The UNSC resolution has also encouraged the Palestinians to pursue their narrative that Jews have no historical, religious or emotional attachment to Jerusalem, or any other part of Israel. Sheikh Ekrimah Sabri, a leading Palestinian Islamic cleric and preacher at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, was quick to declare that the Western Wall, the holiest Jewish site in Jerusalem, belongs only to Muslims. Referring to the wall by its Islamic name, Sheikh Sabri announced: “The Al-Buraq Wall is the western wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Muslims cannot give it up.”

While Abbas and his Palestinian Authority consider the UNSC resolution a license to proceed with their diplomatic warfare to delegitimize and isolate Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two groups that seek the elimination of Israel, are also celebrating. The two Gaza-based groups see the resolution as another step toward achieving their goal of replacing Israel with an Islamic empire. Leaders and spokesmen of Hamas and Islamic Jihad were among the first Palestinians to heap praise on the UNSC members who voted in favor of the resolution. They are also openly stating that the resolution authorizes them to step up the “resistance” against Israel in order to “liberate all of Palestine.”

“Resistance is the only means to end the settlements,” said a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip. “We appreciate the position of those countries that voted against settlements.” He also seized the opportunity to renew Hamas’s demand that the Palestinian Authority stop all forms of cooperation with Israel, first and foremost security coordination.

When Hamas talks about “resistance,” it means launching suicide bombings and rockets against Israel. The Islamist movement does not believe in “light” terrorism such as stones and knife stabbings against Jews.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who is based in Qatar, reacted to the UNSC vote by saying that the world should now support his movement’s terror campaign against Israel:

“We want the world to stand with the Palestinian resistance because it is just… The armed resistance is the path to liberate Palestine and Jerusalem. Hamas is continuing to manufacture and smuggle weapons in preparation for a confrontation with Israel.”

Mashaal did not forget to praise the US Administration’s abstention as a “correction of some American policies.”

Islamic Jihad, for its part, characterized the UNSC resolution as a “victory” for the Palestinians, because it enables them to “isolate and boycott Israel” and file charges against it with international institutions. Daoud Shehab, one of the leaders of Islamic Jihad, added that the resolution means that Arabs should stop any effort to “normalize” relations with Israel or conduct security cooperation with it. The Arabs and Muslims should now work toward confronting and deterring Israel, he said.

Clearly, Hamas and Islamic Jihad see the UNSC resolution as a warning to all Arabs and Muslims against seeking any form of “normalization” with Israel. The two groups are referring to the Palestinian Authority, whose security forces continue to conduct security coordination with Israel in the West Bank, and to those Arab countries that have been rumored to be moving toward some form of rapprochement with Israel. The UN’s highly touted “victory” is a purely Pyrrhic one, in fact a true defeat to the peace process and to the few Arabs and Muslims who still believe in the possibility of coexistence with Israel.

Thus, the UNSC resolution already has had several consequences, none of which will enhance peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Apart from giving a green light to Palestinian groups that wish to destroy Israel, the resolution has prompted Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to toughen their stance, and appear to be more radical than the radicals.

Far from moving the region toward peace, the resolution has encouraged the Palestinians to move forward in two parallel paths — one toward a diplomatic confrontation with Israel in the international arena, and the other in increased terror attacks against its people. The coming weeks and months will witness mounting violence on the part of Palestinians toward Israelis — a harmful legacy of the Obama Administration.

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist, is based in Jerusalem.

UN Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted on December 23, 2016, politically reinforces UNESCO’s resolution that erased the history of Israel in its historical homeland in order to replace it with the Koranic version of the Bible.

A vote at the UN Security Council (illustrative). [Image source: U.S. State Department]

This UN resolution once again proves that there is Islamic control over the politics and culture of international institutions. Led astray from their primary mission, these international organizations have become tools of corruption or terrorism, reinforcing global Islamic power. But let us not forget that those who vote are Heads of State, fully conscious and responsible individuals, motivated by interests and ideologies that are often criminal, and not all of which represent the opinions of their people whom they tyrannize, including those from European “democracies”. Their latest resolutions not only confirm the victory of jihadism and illiteracy: they also express the success of the years of effort made by this post-war Europe that continues to destroy, defame and delegitimize the Hebrew State in the name of Islamic justice. The beginning of this long journey dates back to 1967, in France.

So what are these Israeli “settlements” that obsess nations so much? Are they vast territories thousands of kilometers from Israel, across seas and oceans? How did this so few people “conquer” them? Let us remind ourselves of the facts: in 1948, the Arab League declared jihad to destroy the Jewish State. The armies of five Arab States crossed the borders of Palestine, where the San Remo Resolution (1920) had recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish National Home. Egypt seized Gaza, Syria stood their ground on the Golan, and Transjordan colonized the Judea and Samaria Area and the old city of Jerusalem. Their Jewish inhabitants were killed or driven out by the Arab colonists, who seized their belongings and homes and destroyed their synagogues and cemeteries. Fighting ceased on armistice and cease-fire lines (1949), there was no peace and no international borders were recognized. But, to the great disappointment of millions of Nazi Europeans and their collaborators, Israel was not wiped out. It also welcomed most of the million Jews who had been robbed and driven out of Arab countries. No European nation protested against the Islamic colonization of Jewish-Palestinian areas, the expulsion of their Jewish inhabitants and the seizure of their belongings, or against the persecution of Jews in Arab countries. Between 1949 and 1967, the Israelis who had been brought together in a confined area without any international borders endured endless jihadist attacks from their neighbors.

In 1967, once again, the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Transjordan invaded Israel to destroy it, but this time Israel took back all the land that had been seized in 1949, and that had become cleansed of Jews [Judenrein], Arabized and Islamized. These were areas from which the Palestinian Jews had been driven out, and to which Europe referred as Jewish “settlements” when in reality they became Arab colonies. They are called Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

The 1967 war ended with an Arab defeat. Once again, the Arab camp refused peace, and armistice lines separated the fighters. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967) recommended the solution of two waves of refugees – both Arab and Jewish – and the conditions of a peace, to be negotiated between Israel and the Arab States that had occupied and colonized Palestinian territories, expelling or killing all its Palestinian Jewish inhabitants in 1949. It did not mention the Palestinians Arabs as a distinct people: they did not exist at that time. The Arabs, determined to destroy Israel, rejected this resolution.

Israel’s lightning victory in 1967 humiliated France, which, after its deadly decolonization wars and the loss of countless Muslim colonies, was keen to move closer to the Arabs by playing the anti-Semitic card. Resolution 242 had been written in English, and France translated it into French, falsifying it in the process, by inserting the word “the” before “territories”, a word that had been bitterly fought against during the negotiations to make explicit that not all of the disputed land was to be included. It is this French mistranslation that has now been imposed.

France had close links with the Palestinian leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and an ally of Hitler and the Vichy government. This alliance created the “Palestinian people”, invented by Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, the nephew of the Mufti and the representative of the PLO. France, which had saved the Mufti from the Nuremberg trials by hiding him, was the first to recognize Arafat in 1969 and impose him on the still-reticent European Community. To secure recognition on an international stage, the “Palestinian people” used terror – by innovating airplane hijacking, by taking civilians hostage and by terrorist attacks in Europe.

In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel once again and sustained another defeat. But this time the OIC declared an oil boycott on all countries that did not recognize Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and that would not support Arab causes (Declaration of the Arab Summit Conference at Algiers November 28,1973). Europe rushed to adopt the French position in December 1973 and, along with the OIC, planned an agenda of political measures designed to destroy the Jewish State by denying its sovereign rights and its cantonment on an indefensible territory. Resolution 2334 is now the icing on the cake of this policy, which has developed in several stages and forms the basis for a Euro-Islamic policy to merge in all European Union political and social sectors, as well as in promoting globalism and the enforcement of the UN’s supranational decision-making powers.

To begin with, an artificial Palestinian Arab “people” was created in order to replace the people of Israel. A European army of forger historians and Arab Christian dhimmis [non-Muslims who have surrendered to living under Islam] transferred the historic characteristics of the Jews onto them. Made the symbol of salvation from the purported Occupation and the Colonization symbolized by Israel, the Palestinians were compared to Jesus, crucified on the cross of a supposedly “Zionist Nazism.” The French Islamophiles and anti-Zionists, Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, were the promoters of this role-reversal between the Jewish victims of Nazism and the Nazi persecutors, assisted by their Muslim allies on the battlefields and in the extermination camps, under the guidance of the Mufti.

Names of towns and regions were Islamized: Jerusalem was called Al-Quds and the West Bank replaced Judea and Samaria. Jihad and dhimmitude became taboo words. The OIC and its satellites, including Europe, had ordered the planned elimination of Israel. No argument could hinder its condemnation and the hateful campaign, by subverting words and language, that justified it. There was no point in pleading. Neither truth nor morality would change this verdict: Israel was the cause of the war, the terrorist attacks, injustice, all the evils suffered by the Islamic world and Europe, victims of jihadist terrorism – which it attributed to the existence of Israel. The fight to eliminate Israel was referred to as a just cause, a fight for peace.

The Euro-Arab alliance did its best to criminalize the Israelis for having restored their State to their historic homeland. The Israelis’ national sovereignty, their cultural and historic roots, their survival, their successes and spectacular military victories earned them reproaches and denigration. Reinvigorated by Palestinian hatred, the post–war Nazi-Islamic alliance did its best to neutralize the success of the Jewish State on a political level, to make sure it remained unstable and insecure. Endlessly harassed by European governments and their armies of dhimmis, the Israelis, guilty of existing, were shamed for it, forced to apologize for it, and expected humbly to maintain their enemies and suffer their terrorism without protesting or defending themselves. Their crime? They refused to mingle with and disappear into dhimmitude by giving up their rights and their history to the people created by the Euro-Arab alliance (Eurabia) to replace them.

The PLO was the jihadist arm of the Ummah [the Islamic community], the embodiment of its theological ideology which justified Islamic expansion and its appropriation of all spaces, while wiping out the previous cultures and people, imposing its law, its customs and its beliefs everywhere.

Heads of state, European ministers, the clergy, dhimmi Christians who had become its courtiers, offered it their help, more than happy to collect its gold, while sweeping away the debris of people and history before its feet, obstacles to its progress as they finally managed to rid it of Israel. And – so they believed – they would rid them of nothing but Israel, and thereby achieve a Holocaust that began in Europe so that at last a world, a humanity, would emerge, without Israel. The dream of Hitler and the Mufti would be realized.

The European governments, allies of the Palestinian anti-Israeli terrorists, whom they called a “just cause” – thus feeding them spiritually and funding them – believed that they were safe. But guess what? This Ummah policy against Israel, actively supported by its European and dhimmi courtiers, was unleashed against the people of Europe. Did terrorists attack Israelis during their festivities? Now it is the Europeans who have to celebrate their festivities protected by an army of soldiers. It is the Europeans’ turn to see a replacement population being created in their own countries, with all the rights that are now being taken away from them. It is the Europeans’ turn to be forced to renounce their national, historic, cultural and religious identity, to apologize and take the blame for existing as they are. It is the Europeans’ turn to be forced to monitor their borders and guard their airports, their schools, their trains, their streets and their cities with soldiers. Ironically, the European governments that contemplated the destruction of Israel worked together with the enemies of Israel to destroy their own people, their own sovereignty, their own security and their own freedoms. The OIC pandered to their unconfessed hatred of Israel, blinding them with its gold and unwaveringly led the cowards and the fainthearted, under the whip of terrorism, towards dishonor and oblivion.

Resolution 2334 is the culmination of this policy, but it is not the last chapter of the story. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Libya no longer exist, Egypt is scarcely hanging on. In its cauldron, jihad is burning Muslims who once dreamed of carrying it out against Jews and Christians. Arab dhimmi clergy and intellectuals, who inspired the Euro-Arab alliance against Israel and the Palestinian falsification, are seeing their communities decimated by their own lies. In a ruined Europe, butchered by hostile “sectarians,” the people are rising up to send the zealous servants of the OIC to the scrap heap of history. Worried about popular anger, ministers no longer dare to lie and are forced to recognize jihadism and blame the terrorism on it instead of on Israel.

The future may well include the reconciliation of populations based on the recognition of the legitimacy of Israel’s return to its homeland. Because this recognition will bring with it the quashing of the jihad against Christians and all non-Muslims. The recognition of the legitimacy of Israel’s return to its homeland is the essential condition of Islamic peace with the world because it will abolish the jihadist ideology. Peace with Israel guarantees Islam’s peace with the world’s diversity. Maybe this is the mission of Israel’s return to its birthplace as it battles alone at the bloody crossroads of nations.

Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, and of Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate (winner of a price in London, 2012) received a prize in Israel (1986) for her study on Oriental Jewry, and a price for the Courage of Free Speech in Paris (2015) and in Bologna (2015) for her book Comprendere Eurabia (2015). Her forthcoming book, Understanding Eurabia, will be published by Gatestone Institute and RVP Publishers in 2017.