Will the Real Obstacle to Peace Please Stand Up?

Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders call for the genocide of the Jewish people; Mahmoud Abbas glorifies terrorists and tells his people to idolize them; the PA abuses its own people, permits honor killings of women, and allows for no freedom of speech or of the press.

The only liberal democracy in the Middle East announces that 988 acres of land in the Judean Hills (all of which is designated for Israel in a two-state solution) is now state-owned land.

Israel’s recent announcement is clearly the obstacle to peace, at least according to the international community and world leaders’ recent outrage over this announcement.

But let’s take a look at the facts. The land Israel announced as state-owned consists of less than 1,000 acres of the nearly 1.4 million-acre West Bank. This means that Israel announced claims to roughly 0.07 percent of the entire West Bank.

Furthermore, the land in question sits in the Etzion Bloc of the Judean Hills, which has been recognized by the Western World as land that would remain in Israel if a Palestinian state is created.

Finally, the land in question sits in Area C, which the Palestinians themselves acknowledged (by signing the Oslo Accords) as under Israeli control.

Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side, PA leaders continuously preach terrorism and an end to the Jewish state. They use international aid to pay terrorists who have killed Israelis and Americans. They write in their charter that their goal is the destruction of Israel. They raise a society of hatred, a society that according to the ADL’s 2014 survey on anti-Semitism, is the most anti-Semitic society on the planet.

The world focuses on Israel’s announcement that it wants to keep land that belongs to it and land that poses no threat to a potential Palestinian state. The world says that this – not the PA’s promotion of genocide and terrorism and its 50-year campaign to annihilate the Jewish state – is the obstacle to peace.

No wonder there’s no peace.