Weekend long read

Our weekly round-up of Middle East related background reading.

1) As has been the case in past years, BBC audiences did not see any coverage of the events earlier this month marking the anniversary of the founding of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. The ITIC has published a report on some of those events.

“January 1, 2018, was the 53rd anniversary of the founding of the Fatah movement. Various events were held in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip to mark the day. Among the participating institutions were universities and colleges in Judea and Samaria. Events at academic institutions were mainly organized by Fatah student movements, which held marches and demonstrations, and put on presentations. […]

The Fatah movement, on which the PA is founded, integrated unambiguous themes into events marking the anniversary, among them the glorification of shaheeds who died in suicide bombing and mass “self-sacrifice” attacks and encouragement for suicide bombing attacks.”

2) At the Times of Israel, Yaakov Lappin takes a look at the security challenges facing Israel in 2018.

“According to figures released in December by the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, security forces foiled no fewer than 400 significant planned terrorist attacks in 2017. These include 13 planned suicide bombings, 228 gun attacks, 50 bombings, eight kidnappings, and 94 vehicle and knife attacks. The Shin Bet was able to disrupt 148 Hamas terrorist cells that were operating in the West Bank in 2017 alone. Many of these attacks were planned by local Hamas cells, with the assistance and funding of Hamas’s headquarters in the Gaza Strip, and the newly established Hamas presence in Lebanon, which is under Hezbollah’s protection.”

3) Writing at the Algemeiner, Ben Cohen discusses the academic cited by Mahmoud Abbas in the recent speech that was grossly under-reported by the BBC.

“Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s angry speech on Sunday castigating the US and Israel drew on the work of an Egyptian academic who dedicated his career to denying the existence of an independent Jewish people with political rights.

In his speech, Abbas described the late Egyptian academic Dr. Abdel Wahab Elmessiri as “one of the most important people that spoke about the Zionist and Jewish movement.”

On Israel, Abbas said, Elmessiri “described this entity with these words: ‘The significance of Israel’s functional character is that colonialism created it in order to fill a specific role; it is a colonialist project that is not connected to Judaism, but made use of the Jews so they would serve as pawns, and they were, under the motto ‘the Promised Land’ and ‘the Beloved Land,’ and they brought them here.’””

4) The Times of Israel’s David Horovitz addresses the significance of that speech by Abbas with regard to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

“Unsurprisingly, Abbas made no mention of Olmert’s extraordinary peace proposal during his two-hour-plus anti-Israel, anti-Trump and anti-peace ramble before members of the PLO leadership in Ramallah on Sunday. Yet that appalling speech nonetheless provided the dismal explanation of why the man charged with leading his people to statehood had, nearly a decade earlier, rejected the best chance he would ever have to achieve that declared ambition.

Out of Abbas’s embittered 82-year-old mouth came the truth: He himself believes the vicious propaganda disseminated first by his late and unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat and then maintained during his own 13 years at the helm of the Palestinian Authority.”

 

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