You believe the Palestinians?

The statement did not include even one word condemning the murder for being a murder. The opposite is true. It stresses the struggle’s legitimacy, preferring it to be undertaken via other means.

A few hours later, three masked gunmen fired at a a truck traveling in the western Binyamin region. The incident ended with no casualties, and Fatah also claimed responsibility for it. Yet have you heard any reference to that incident? And why would you?

Rabbi Meir Avshalom Hai from Shavei Shomron was also murdered by some senior al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades members. This terror group belongs to the Fatah faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The same organization that called for Israel’s destruction in the last Fatah conference in Bethlehem.

Abbas did not invent this technique. He inherited it from Arafat, the leader who created the “political movement,” Fatah, and established its “military” terrorist arms, the Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Brigades.

However, the PA boasts another “decent” military army, in the form of its security forces trained by US General Dayton. The State of Israel, with naivete bordering on suicide, supports these forces, hands weapons over to them, and expects them to “fight terror,” while ignoring the fact that these people are the same people, only each time they receive a salary from someone else.

Fatah is the main organization throughout the Palestinian establishment in Judea and Samaria; it is the main component in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that signed the treaties with Israel, it controls the PA, yet some people still delude themselves into thinking that its military arm will be fighting its terror arm; as if its right hand will be beating up its left hand. You really made them laugh now.

Yet the above-mentioned information is not new to Defense Minister Barak, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and other senior officials who are deluding us. After all, they know all of it well. Yet how will they establish the Palestinian state otherwise? They have to somehow wrap this monster, which will threaten Israel’s existence, in shiny cellophane.

After all, these leaders already stated that without the establishment of a Palestinian state, our state will not have a Jewish majority. The problem is that with such Palestinian state, which includes the messy combination of Tanzim, al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and the Dayton forces, we won’t have a state at all.

After Abbas took part, about a month ago, in a ceremony to name a Ramallah square after a female terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the Coastal Road, PM Netanyahu told the government that “words too can be dangerous, and on this front we’ve seen deterioration in the PA as of late." The prime minister explained that “those who declare that the murderers of rabbi Meir Hai are martyrs push peace further away” – well, he uttered those words, and moved on as usual to approve the transfer of funds to terrorists.

Try to think about what a young boy at the Kalandia refugee camp or in the village of Yaabad near Jenin understands when he sees his leader taking part in the inauguration of the above-mentioned Ramallah square. Would anyone be surprised when this boy grows up to be a senior police officer like Muhammad Khatib, and proceeds to murder Jews? After all, Muhammad must have told himself: "I’ll become a martyr, they’ll be building a monument in my honor, and Salam Fayyad will attend the inaugurating ceremony. While at it, he will say that it’s better to hurl stones at the Jews rather than to slaughter them with a knife.”

On the other hand, can you imagine PM Netanyahu arriving for the inauguration of a monument for Baruch Goldstein in Hebron?

The most ridiculous thing is the praise we recently heard being lavished at PA forces, even by our own officials, in respect to their cooperation in the war on terror. Is this good news? Are they fighting against the al-Aqsa Brigades, the Fatah’s terrorist arm? Certainly not!

They sometimes fight, in a murderous fashion as is their custom, against Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, yet this is not a war on terror; it is a bloody war for power. A gang war that creates delusions under our security establishment’s patronage, as if the Palestinians are fighting terror. well, only as if.

Adi Mintz is Yesha Council’s former director-general