Fatah to Back Violence, Reject Israel as Jewish State
Fatah, which heads the PA, will meet in Bethlehem this week and call for “restrained violence" against Israel, a Saudi Arabia newspaper reported.

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, Arutz Sheva
August 2, 2009

Fatah gunmen
 

The Fatah party, which leads the Palestinian Authority, will meet in Bethlehem this week and call for “controlled violence” against Israel, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Watan reported. The French news agency AFP also confirmed an Al Watan statement that Fatah will reject the idea that Israel is a Jewish state.

The proposed Fatah platform in effect puts on ice any chance for negotiations over the establishment of a PA state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that talks with the PA must be predicated on its acceptance of Israel as the home of the Jewish people, which would provide an obstacle to an Arab plan to flood Israel with foreign Arabs.

Instead, Fatah, headed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, is digging in its heels for a new PA state based on the 1949 Armistice Line borders that existed until 1967 as well as a “just solution” for several million Arabs living in foreign countries and claiming ancestry in Israel. It also demands that they be compensated.

The proposed document threatens a unilateral declaration of an independent PA country if Israel does not accept it through direct talks.

The encouragement of violence, which is a violation of the Roadmap agreement that calls for an end to incitement against Israel, is based on a claim that Israel wants a situation of “no peace [and] no war.”