An unnamed \u201cPalestinian official\u201d has told various media outlets that during the recent Trump-Abbas meeting in Bethlehem, Trump said, \u201cYou lied to me in Washington when you talked about commitment to peace, but the Israelis showed me you were personally responsible for incitement.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the report, Trump \u201cmade it clear to Abbas that he must curb anti-Israeli incitement in the Palestinian education system, saying Abbas cannot turn a blind eye to Palestinian incitement and pay stipends to terrorists\u2019 families while simultaneously setting conditions that hinder any progress in the peace talks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abbas\u2019s reported response is very important, because it gives us a clue as to how he may try to wiggle out of the controversy. The unnamed Palestinian source said Abbas replied that \u201cin the past, there was a joint Palestinian-Israeli committee that sought to deal with incitement on both sides, but it has not met for years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what Abbas was talking about. In 1998, Israel began complaining seriously to President Bill Clinton that the PA\u2019s incitement to violence and hatred was a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords. So Clinton created a committee called \u201cthe \u201cTrilateral U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee.\u201d Its purpose would be to decide the validity of complaints from either side.<\/p>\n
That formula seemed to make sense. Obviously, each side has a very different view of what constitutes \u201cincitement.\u201d So there needed to be a neutral, reasonable-minded third party to judge them. Presumably, the U.S. could serve that role. But after meeting just a few times in 1999 and 2000, the committee stopped functioning. Fifteen years later, the public was given a glimpse of what went wrong.<\/p>\n
In an op-ed for The Washington Post in December 2014, Prof. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, who was one of the American members of the committee, pulled back the curtain. Telhami, as a Middle East scholar, superficially seemed to be impartial and therefore qualified to be one of the American delegates to the committee. But in fact, he was deeply biased.<\/p>\n
Telhami explained in his op-ed that the committee reached an impasse because the Israeli and Palestinian representatives \u201ccould not agree how to define incitement.\u201d The Israelis, he wrote, \u201cwould present, for instance, a statement by a Muslim religious figure against Israel, and Palestinians would respond by citing settlement construction or episodes of Palestinian humiliation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Telhami\u2019s self-serving description did not actually tell the whole story. The Israeli delegates didn\u2019t present just \u201ca statement by a Muslim religious figure.\u201d According to one of the Israeli representatives, Palestinian Media Watch Director Itamar Marcus, he and his colleagues presented multiple statements that were by paid PA officials (some of whom were Muslim religious figures), as well as statements that were broadcast by the official PA media.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the Palestinian position was ridiculous and illogical. \u201cSettlement construction\u201d and \u201chumiliation\u201d do not qualify as incitement. The fact that the PA doesn\u2019t want Jews building homes in Jerusalem or having Palestinians checked for weapons at security checkpoints doesn\u2019t make those situations incitement.<\/p>\n
But for Telhami and the other American delegates to the committee, who were operating on instructions from the Clinton White House and State Department, the real goal was not to stop incitement. Their goal was to keep the \u201cpeace process\u201d going. Confronting the PA on incitement might cause a crisis in the \u201cpeace process.\u201d So instead of siding with the truth, the U.S. representatives chose to be \u201cevenhanded\u201d and not take sides.<\/p>\n
This is where the Trump administration needs to be very careful. Reviving the Trilateral Committee on Incitement is no solution unless the American delegates clearly do not have a pro-Palestinian bias.<\/p>\n
And the committee needs to start its work with a clear definition of what constitutes \u201cincitement.\u201d American policymakers can find a precedent by checking the criteria used in the Nuremberg Trials, when Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, was convicted of incitement to mass murder, or in the 2003 case of the Rwandan newspaper editor and two radio broadcasters who were convicted by the International Criminal Court of incitement to genocide because they used dehumanizing language and encouraged violence.<\/p>\n
I thank Shibley Telhami for being (unintentionally) honest about his bias and about the reasons for the failure of the anti-incitement committee. Now that we know what went wrong and why, the Trump administration can fix it\u2014if it is committed to actually stopping Palestinian incitement, instead of just talking about it.<\/p>\n
(Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")