Are the Palestinians Ready for Peace? Palestinian Incitement as a Violation of International Legal Norms

by Alan Baker

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Published March 2011
Vol. 10, No. 32 March 22, 2011




- Genuine peace between peoples requires far more than signed agreements. It requires bona fide mutual trust, respect, and a psyche of peace to prevail throughout all levels of society, and must emanate from the leadership.

- Tragically, the extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic indoctrination that is so pervasive in all levels of Palestinian society has inevitably led to violence and terror, and serves to undermine any hope for peaceful relations between the two peoples.

- Officially-sanctioned and encouraged incitement against Israel and against Jews has become a central theme in all spheres of Palestinian society, whether religious, cultural or in the education field. This inevitably results in violence and terror against Israel and its citizens.

- The Palestinians are committed in the agreements with Israel to act to prevent incitement. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership continues to glorify terrorists as role models for Palestinian youth and encourage hostility and hatred toward Israel.

- The Palestinian leadership cannot come with clean hands to the international community to ostensibly call for peace while at the same time undermining any hope for peace through incitement to terror.

One of the central and essential requirements for achieving and sustaining meaningful, peaceful, and trusting relations between peoples is the mindset, the will, and the psyche of peace - the mutual trust and respect that must exist between peoples at all levels, both among the leadership as well as among the general public.

Peace cannot be made through the signing of treaties and agreements only. It has to be ingested into the public psyche and nurtured in every tenet of day-to-day life.

Tragically, the extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic indoctrination that is so pervasive in all levels of Palestinian society has inevitably led to violence and terror, and serves to undermine any hope for peaceful relations between the two peoples.

The extent of such incitement has been aptly summarized in a document published by Israel's Foreign Ministry:

The Palestinian education system, media, literature, songs, theater and cinema have been mobilized for extreme anti-Israel indoctrination, which at times degenerates into blatant anti-Semitism. This incitement to hatred and violence is pervasive in Palestinian society, particularly in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. It exists in nursery schools and kindergartens, youth movements, schools, universities, mosque sermons, and street demonstrations.

Incitement against Israel has many faces. It begins with the complete denial of the very existence of the State of Israel. Maps in schools and universities do not even bear the name of Israel, nor a large number of its cities and towns.

Palestinian officials and religious leaders frequently deny the thousands of years of Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. By repudiating Jewish history (and the New Testament as well), the Palestinian leadership is promoting a narrative that disavows any Jewish rights to the Jewish historical homeland. Peace cannot be achieved as long as the right of the Jewish people to their own nation-state in their native land is denied.

Incitement is also characterized by the hero worship of terrorists. Inciters extol the deeds of suicide bombers, name schools and football teams after them, and hold them up as models to be emulated.1

One can only assume that such an atmosphere prevailing in Palestinian society would produce individuals who would willingly and willfully take their hatred to the active level of terror acts against Israelis, as indeed happened recently in the bestial killing of an entire family, including a four-month-old baby, in Itamar on March 11, 2011.

What mindset, context, or circumstances could possibly have driven a person to carry out such acts of blatant murder, homicide and infanticide? Sheer blinding hatred? Religious fervor overriding any sense of decency or humanity? Or perhaps some other driving force that turns a human being into the basest of animals? How, in any possible prevailing background scenario of hostility, rage, hatred or religious fervor, could a person be driven to go to such inhuman extremes?

In attempting to answer such questions in the context of the Palestinian reality and within the realities of Muslim society, one need only reflect on the long and sad history of the use of incitement in such societies as a means of manipulating the masses, the "believers," the "faithful," or any other social or religious grouping against the "infidel," the "non-believer," or the Jew.

Incitement in the Arab world has played a central part over the years in directing the opinions of society, molding the actions of the community, whether in the local village context through calls by religious and civil leaders, or in the more modern and wider national context of the electronic media, television, and the internet.

(Read full "Are the Palestinians Ready for Peace? ...")

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