Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday once again reiterated that incitement is behind much of the tension in Jerusalem and the region, and that the bulk of this incitement comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its chairman, Mahmoud Abbas.
“We are witnessing increasing efforts in recent months and days to incite violence and terror, and we are acting responsibly and with determination against the attempts to enflame Jerusalem,” said Netanyahu, who spoke at a gathering of the Likud Central Committee.
He added, “The incitement we experience comes not only from radical Islamic forces, it also comes from the Palestinian Authority and its leader. They claim that the people of Israel never lived in Israel. You have to see it to believe it. [According to them], everything you read in history books and in the Bible never happened. A complete distortion of the facts. In the wake of this incitement we must stay calm and call for calm, but also take determined action against violent lawbreakers.”
Many cases of incitement by the PA have been exposed in recent years, including the glorification of Nazism and the lionization of Adolf Hitler, as well as programs on official PA television featuring heavily-stereotyped Jews as villains (and encouraging violence against them), and various TV and radio shows which literally wipe the Jewish state off the map.
The Israeli government several months ago released its annual “Palestinian Incitement Index”, which showed that incitement against Israel and the Jewish people is continuing on official media channels including – inter alia – by bodies that are very close to the PA Chairman and in educational and religious networks.
Both Abbas’s Fatah as well as Hamas publicly praise terrorist acts against Israelis. The latest examples of this came less than a week ago, when both factions welcomed hit-and-run attacks in Jerusalem and in Gush Etzion.