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Obviously, the charm offensive didn’t work. Abbas spat on the hospitality and left the reception frothing at the mouth.
It began just last week or so, with congratulations all around. What was the big deal?
Benny Gantz, Israel’s Defense Minister, had extended the welcome mat to PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas even so far as inviting him to his home. For the personal touch.
Nobody saw the snake in the carpet?
Indeed, Putin and Biden and other leaders around the world, even some within Israel, were effusively in support of Gantz’s gesture…so full of warmth, love, peace.
What’s wrong with peace? Nothing…if both sides want it.
Did Gantz know he was being played? He cannot have expected his extended hand to be met with such a blistering tirade, a rant running on with blood libel followed by blood libel.
“Ethnic cleansing,” says he, Abbas, the man who pays his people to murder Israelis.
All that only hours after Gantz’s come-on-a my house, I’m-a gonna give you candy.
What’s it all about?
Abbas, the old pro at terror-diplomacy, is still smarting at being ignored all those years during the Trump era.
How it galled when one (mostly Sunni) Arab country after another, the UAE, Sudan, Morocco, Bahrain, all signed on for peace/nominalization with Israel, leaving the PA out in the cold.
For once, a Domino-effect that favored Israel.
All Abbas could do was watch from the sidelines as his dream of a united Arab front against Israel collapsed so suddenly and so spectacularly.
All those years of terror from the PA, the PLO, Fatah, Hamas…and Israel still lives…still thrives…and, with new Arab friends.
Abbas had been outmaneuvered. He did not see that coming.
Now it’s different. No more Trump. Now it’s Biden in the White House, and it’s time to play Biden when your name is Mahmoud Abbas and the game is Israel.
Nothing big so far, but for Abbas, the signs are to his liking.
The Biden administration keeps dangling a US embassy for Arabs in East Jerusalem as one sign that it has cooled for the Israelis and warmed for the Arabs.
Abbas will take that for starters.
His outburst was studiously purposeful. To the world, he wants its attention. To the Israelis, it’s a warning that he can make trouble, anytime, anywhere.
This time, he is certain, Washington will take his side.
He can make up stories about Israeli interference on the Temple Mount, knowing how well this sells.
Together with Hamas, he can stage confrontations that yield headlines that blast the Jewish State to an audience of willing readers.
This too, global anti-Semitism, has him emboldened.
The spike in anti-Semitism, troubling for Jews and good people everywhere, is a boon for this warlord terrorist, Mahmoud Abbas.
Between a more pliant DC, and a part of the world feasting on Jew-hatred, he’s got a one-two-punch that he figures for a knockout.
Israeli leaders need to be prepared for what’s coming, and going soft appears to be a mistaken strategy.
Whatever Benny Gantz had planned…it backfired…terribly.
This should be a lesson learned…all over again.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
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