PA antisemitism machine behind teen terror attacks

Recent deadly Palestinian terror assaults that killed seven Israelis including a 14-year-old boy in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighbourhood, and in the City of David just outside the Old City, shocked the Israeli public to its core. The attackers, a 21-year-old Arab resident of Jerusalem’s Shuafat neighbourhood and a 13-year-old from the Old City’s Silwan neighbourhood, struck within 12 hours of one another. These fatal terror atrocities are the latest indications that Jerusalem’s generally quiet status quo between Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods can explode without warning.

Even more shocking to many Israelis were the attackers’ extemporaneous actions, unaided by organisational affiliation, planning, and assistance. Labelled as “lone-wolf terror” by Israeli security officials, the Palestinian teen and youth terrorists acted of their own accord. These apparently sudden, unplanned outbursts of terror have markedly increased public fear.

However, these and other “lone-wolf” terrorists didn’t work alone. They have been backed and directed by decades of institutionalised radicalisation by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Following these latest deadly assaults, Israel’s government, media, and the public pointed a collective finger at the PA’s role in the intensifying incitement to murder Jews via its official media. The PA has also spread virulent antisemitic conspiracy theories on social networks, and incentivised young Palestinians to commit terror acts with its “pay to slay” policy, which budgets several hundred million dollars a year for financial allocations to killed or captured Palestinian terrorists and their families.

Further stoking Israeli outrage, PA Chairperson Mahmoud Abbas blamed Israel for the recent Palestinian terror attacks, saying they were caused by Israel’s counter-terror operation in Jenin several days earlier in which eight Palestinian terrorists were killed by Israeli special forces in a pinpoint attack.

This post-attack shift in Israel demanding PA accountability for shaping a longstanding culture of Jew hatred and inciting and financially incentivising terrorists, marked a pivot for the Israeli discourse. It had followed the Netanyahu government’s withholding of 138 million shekels (R696.6 million) of PA funds, which were mandated to be paid to victims of Palestinian terror.

The shift in Israel to hold the PA to account and demand it reform reflects a slow and steadily growing consensus. Since the establishment of the PA in 1995, most Israeli governments, Knessets, media, and non-government organisations had largely avoided shining a spotlight on the PA for its role in fostering a radical political, media, and public culture that lionises terrorists as “shahids” (martyrs), fuelling further terror assaults. In fact, immediately after the Israel Defense Force’s pinpoint counter-terror operation in Jenin that prevented an imminent attack, the Palestinian ministry of religious affairs issued an official briefing sheet for religious leaders across PA-controlled territories that was a de-facto call to kill Israelis. It read, “The massacre that the Zionist enemy has perpetrated in the Jenin refugee camp represents the way in which the occupation regards our people. The occupation will disappear. Allah has promised to destroy anyone who has done injustice.” In PA-speak, familiar to experts and observers, “the occupation” is code for Jewish sovereignty.

In addition to its official directives, the PA educational system has been a breeding ground for engendering hatred of Jews, Israelis, and fostering violence and terror. For decades, the PA’s curriculum has featured textbooks filled with antisemitic themes in egregious violation of the Oslo Accords. The PA’s education ministry has inculcated this hatred even in the sciences and mathematics.

The PA’s policy of Jewish erasure has employed “lawfare” – legal warfare – in international courts to sanction Israel or to arrest Israeli officials visiting European nations for “war crimes” allegedly perpetrated in Israel’s defensive operations against Hamas’ rocket wars, which were indiscriminately aimed at Israeli civilian population centres. PA lawfare has also targeted Israel’s counter-terror security barrier by fraudulently transforming them into “apartheid walls”. What has amounted to a PA disinformation machine has also weaponised unrelated events as warfare: the 2022 accidental death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was transformed by the PA into a circus of demonisation, charging Israel with “systematically targeting Palestinian journalists in violation of international humanitarian law”.

PA radicalisation, incitement, and incentivisation of terror and international lawfare are outgrowths of decades of Palestine Liberation Organization and PA conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish blood libels. In July 2022, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh accused Israel of defiling the bodies of “martyrs” – terrorists – in Israeli university medical laboratories for experimentation. Several weeks later, on 17 August 2022, PA Chairperson Mahmoud Abbas, standing next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a Berlin press conference, charged Israel with committing “fifty Holocausts against the Palestinian people”. The same Abbas had written his doctoral dissertation on alleged Nazi-Zionist collaboration at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, known as a Soviet indoctrination centre.

Abbas conspiracy literature continued unchallenged by the free world. In 2016, Abbas accused Israeli rabbis” of “poisoning” Palestinian water sources at a packed European Union Commission assembly, earning him a standing ovation. In 2020, former Palestine Liberation Organization official Hanan Ashrawi retweeted an accusation that an “Israeli settler” had murdered an eight-year-old Palestinian child who it was quickly confirmed had slipped and drowned, also failing to mention that Israeli paramedics tried to save the child’s life. United States congresswoman, Representative Rashida Tlaib, subsequently retweeted Ashrawi’s tweet.

Israel’s renewed focus on the PA’s incitement and financial incentives to carry out terror assaults and long-running antisemitic conspiracy theories has finally captured broad government and public attention in Israel. The Jewish diaspora must now stand shoulder to shoulder with the democratic nation state of the Jewish people, and together, hold the PA to account, demanding its fundamental reform.

• Dan Diker is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he served as its director of the centre’s counter-political warfare project. He’s former secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress and research fellow of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism at Reichman University.