EU will defund UNWRA for using PA textbooks inciting Jew-hatred

 

The European Parliament has threatened to block €20 million in aid to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — unless “substantive positive” changes are made by the next academic school year to Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks used in UNWRA schools.

EU funding will instead go to organisations that “have a proven track record of promoting educational initiatives in school settings for children designed to foster tolerance, coexistence and respect towards the Jewish-Israeli ‘other’.”

Many PA textbooks currently:

• incite Jew-hatred, 
• prefer Jihad to peaceful resolution of the Jewish-Arab conflict and 
• do not recognize Israel on any of their maps 

The May 2021 Report of the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has highlighted hundreds of examples of intolerance and hatred in current PA textbooks—pointing out:  

“Schools are one of the most powerful tools to mitigate extremist influences. They are key to achieving the tolerant and open-minded societies of the future. But they can also be where negative influences—skewed historical narratives, hatred of others, gender inequalities and even political violence–can take root.” 

The Report looked at 222 textbooks used in the 2021 Palestinian School Curriculum Grades 1-12. Of those—105 textbooks had not changed at all and remained as they were in 2019—finding: 

• there were no substantive positive changes made to the current Palestinian curriculum
• the curriculum had moved further from meeting UNESCO standards and 
• newly published textbooks were more radical than those previously published 

The Report concluded:

“There is a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects. Extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies are widespread throughout the curriculum, including science and math textbooks. The possibility of peace with Israel is rejected. Any historical Jewish presence in the modern-day territories of Israel and the Palestinian Authority is entirely omitted from the textbooks.”

Specific examples provided in the IMPACT-se Report substantiate:

Jew-hatred

•  An eleventh-grade Palestinian history textbook implies that Jews control the world, using imagery of an arm with a Star of David holding a globe 
• Grade 10 students are taught that Jews control money, the media, and politics and use them for their own benefit 
• Jews are characterized in a Grade 5 textbook as sinful liars and fraudsters for turning their backs on the Prophet in early Islam 

Rejection of Peace and the two-state solution 

• All peace agreements, summits and proposals with Israel post-1993 Oslo Accords — previously included in PA textbooks — have been completely removed from the curriculum. 
• Peace advocacy as a universal ideal appearing in a 2018 social studies fifth grade textbook was deleted from the 2019 edition and not reintroduced for 2020. 
• The peace treaty with Jordan is absent after appearing in pre-2016 editions of a Grade 12 textbook.

Encouragement of martyrdom and Jihad

• A fifth grade textbook chapter glorifying Palestinian martyrs describes dying as better than living
• A tenth grade textbook presents Jihad “for the liberation of Palestine” as a “private obligation for every Muslim”

Absence of Israel on maps

• Out of more than two hundred maps across the PA textbook curriculum — not one mentions the name “Israel”.
• Most maps illustrating Palestine’s current borders show the word “Palestine” written across the entire territory — without demarcation lines — entirely disregarding Israel’s existence. 
• Palestine’s territory is mostly described as from "the river to the sea”

Jerusalem

Third-graders learn that Jerusalem is an Arab city holy to Muslims and Christians alone — without learning about its historical connection to Jews or Judaism

Any peaceful resolution of the 100-years old Jewish-Arab conflict seems further away than ever whilst PA textbooks inciting Jewish-Israeli hatred continue to poison young peoples’ minds. 

Author’s note: The cartoon—commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”— one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.

Islamic Lifelines Can Prevent Islamic State Dead Lines

[Published 14 October 2015]


Australia was introduced to a high school chaplain and Muslim community leader Sheikh Wesam Charkawi on one of Australia’s most widely viewed TV shows - Q and A - last Monday evening.

Australians were still trying to come to terms with the shooting murder of a 58- year-old police department accountant by a 15-year-old Muslim youth dressed in black robes shouting “Allahu Akbar” outside NSW Police Headquarters in Parramatta some 10 days earlier.

Indeed the Parramatta murder was the third such instance involving Muslims in Australia in the last year - culminating in the loss of three innocent lives and the deaths of the three perpetrators.

Yet Sheikh Charkawi told his audience:

"Our faith teaches to withhold our hands from the breaking the branch of a tree, let alone taking the life of a human being, which equates to taking the life of humanity and saving the life of one amounts to saving the life of all. These are bedrock principles"

The Sheikh’s viewpoint was a revelation - considering the widely held belief that Islam with its Koranic concepts of jihad, martyrdom and forced conversion of non-Muslims was anything but the sanctity-of-life faith portrayed by him.

Sheikh Charkawi in seeking to explain the circumstances of the Parramatta murderer opined:

"I’m seeing a lot of identity issues with the young men and women and I keep hearing from many on the streets and in the schools that I visit that they tell us that we don’t belong. They say that we’re not part of the Australian society, we’re not part of the Australian community, that we’re terrorists, that we’re extremists, that our religion is one that is of destruction and loss of life and so on and so forth. Now, you’ve got to remember that these people were born into the age of terror and they’re being told that they don’t belong. What that leads to is to marginalisation and isolation, and if you add that to the mix of the propaganda that is being put forward by the groups like ISIS, it’s a very dangerous mix and so you see that it requires a whole of society effort and that’s the reality of it."

Left unanswered by the Sheikh was why such marginalisation, isolation and propaganda could lead a 15-year-old Muslim boy to take the life of another human being had he been properly instructed in the bedrock principles of Islam as enunciated by the Sheikh.

Instead the Sheikh tried to pass the buck - stating:

"If we take this issue and we restrict it to the Muslim narrative and we say that this is a Muslim problem, what happens is you can’t then step back and look for other empirical evidence as to any underpinning or driving forces that may be at hand here."

With the greatest respect to the Sheikh it is indeed a Muslim problem resulting from failing to properly educate its adherents from an early age that:

1. the taking of life is contrary to the principles of Islam

2. negative attitudes or grievances held by a Muslim cannot be resolved by taking the lives of other Muslims or non-Muslims

3. If the religious instruction afforded Muslims is faith-based on the bedrock principles espoused by the Sheikh — then attempts by Islamic State or other groups to recruit Muslims to their murderous ranks will surely fail.

Let the Australian Muslim community condemn those who seek to violate the sanctity of life in mosques and madrassas as this video recently taken in a mosque in Gaza so chillingly demonstrates.

The silence so far has been deafening.

Remembering Australia's First Jihadist Attack - 1 January 2015

[Published 30 December 2014]


The Department of Veteran’s Affairs announced last March that the centenary of the Battle of Broken Hill on 1 January 2015 would not be formally commemorated by the Australian Government.

That decision will now be seen in hindsight by many as a wise one indeed — following the fallout resulting from the horrific Martin Place siege perpetrated by self-styled Islamic cleric Man Haron Monis just two weeks ago - that claimed his life and those of two innocent civilians.

However Nicholas Shakespeare has written a novella — ”Oddfellows” - based on this little known event — to be published by Random House in January - ensuring this centenary will not pass unnoticed.

Shakespeare has written a poignant article - “Outback Jihad” - in which he graphically describes what the locals call “The New Year’s Day Tragedy”:

“The tragedy was a desperate response, in the least likely spot, to a jihad announced on the other side of the world. On 11 November 1914 — 100 years ago this month — the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V, and caliph of all Muslims, who had earlier signed a treaty with Germany, declared a holy war against Great Britain and her allies, “the mortal enemies of Islam”. The Turkish sultan’s call overlooked the Christianity of his own allies in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and was virtually ignored by Muslims, save for some small-scale mutinies in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Broken Hill where two disaffected “Turks” decided to launch a suicide mission under a homemade Turkish flag. Their target: a train of 40 open ore wagons carrying more than 1200 holiday-makers…

At 10 am on 1 January 1915, the long and crowded train pulled away from the Broken Hill platform. It had been a town ritual since 1901: on New Year’s Day, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, a friendly society founded to embrace education and social advancement, held a picnic 25 kilometres away at a shady creek in Silverton…
Less than ten minutes after leaving the station, the train slowed down, the driver having been warned that sand had drifted across the line. The engine stoker was standing out on the footplate when he noticed a red cloth fluttering above a white cart. His first thought: someone’s exploding defective ammunition. But he dismissed it. No one would be venturing out with a powder magazine on New Year’s Day…

... They chugged past. The driver noticed what looked like an insignia on the red cloth. What this was, he couldn’t make out. Then a breeze sprang up, the cloth unfolded, and the driver saw a yellow crescent, like a banana, and a star.

At that moment, a pair of white turbans bobbed up from the trench—dark faces, the tips of rifles—and the driver heard two gunshots. One bullet hit the sand, spitting dust against the engine. The second bullet struck the brake van, embedding itself in the woodwork…”

In the ensuing melee and mayhem that followed for the next three hours—six people (including the attackers) were killed and seven injured.

Shakespeare records:

“The two soldiers of Allah were not Turks, but British passport-holders from India’s north-west frontier, a region now divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

One was Badsha Mahomed Gül:

“Born in the mountainous Tirah region, Gül had come to Australia as a cameleer. When the camel business declined, he had worked in a silver mine until the outbreak of war, and was laid off after all contracts with the German smelters were cancelled…

Three days after the tragedy, a confession was discovered, tucked under a rock and written in a mixture of Urdu and Dari, in which, astoundingly, Gül claimed to have visited Turkey four times — and even to have enlisted in the sultan’s army…"

Gül’s accomplice was Mullah Abdullah:

”.. a disgruntled old cameleer with a limp. Aged 60, he had lived in Broken Hill for 15 years. Different skin colour, strange clothes, not Anglo-Saxon —boys laughed when he hobbled by and chased him down the street, throwing stones. He never retaliated, but several times complained to the police, who failed to act.”

Eerily reminiscent of Man Haron Monis and his numerous brushes with the legal system:

“He (Abdullah) was not trained as a priest, but he had priests in his family. In the absence of a religious leader, he had begun to take on that role in “Ghantown”, as the North Broken Hill camel camp was known.

As well as acting as imam, he served as the butcher of his community, slaughtering animals in the manner stipulated by Islamic law. The fact that he was not a member of the butchers’ union in the most unionist town in the country brought him into conflict with those who needed little excuse to treat a Pathan from north-west India as an enemy alien. The most aggressive of his persecutors was the local sanitary inspector, a short, mournful-looking Irishman called Cornelius Brosnan.”

Broken Hill’s current mayor — Winston Cuy — acknowledges there are sensitive issues in the incident such as religion and civilian deaths.

“Broken Hill will be recognising it. What are the words you use and how do you commemorate it?”

Christine Adams — Curator of the Broken Hill Sulphide St Railway and Historical Museum — provides a sensible pointer:

“We think that it needs to be treated with a certain amount of tact. It was two people, what they did was a terrible terrible thing, it wasn’t a nation”.

Palestine - Abbas Flirts With Political Suicide

[Published 21 November 2011]


Palestinian Authority President - Mahmoud Abbas - is inviting political suicide and an end to the two-state solution - should his planned meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo this coming Friday lead to the creation of a new unity government to end the division of power between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza.

Luckily for him the chances of that happening are virtually non-existent.

False hopes of such a reconciliation occurring have been prompted by the current Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stating he would resign his position should Hamas and the Fatah faction of the PLO - both of which Abbas also leads - reconcile their six long years of internecine struggle.

Fayyad’s position has been jealously guarded by Abbas up to now - and Palestinian gazers see his intention to resign as removing the greatest obstacle to reconciliation.

They are mistaken.

Far more serious divisions exist between Fatah and Hamas as can be gleaned from a report prepared by the Cairo Institute For Human Rights Studies in December 2009 titled:
"Bastion of Immunity, Mirage of Reform” :

“Under the cover of the war in Gaza, Hamas embarked on several repressive measures targeting Fatah members, figures who oppose Hamas’ rule, and suspected collaborators with Israel, and it is suspected that dozens of people were killed, either shot to death or as a result of torture. Hamas personnel also broke the legs and arms of dozens of other people to compel them to stay in their homes. Also, some government employees in Gaza were replaced with Hamas loyalists.

In the West Bank, under the authority of Fatah, hundreds of Hamas sympathizers remain in detention; it is thought that at least two of the detainees have died as a result of torture. The West Bank authorities fired civil servants and teachers suspected of Hamas sympathies, while the salaries of thousands of employees of the Palestinian authority inside the Gaza Strip were suspended. Licensing for associations and companies in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip is now preceded by a security check,and those organizations that have affiliations with the “wrong” party are refused Licenses.”

Rectifying this reprehensible conduct on both sides is virtually only mentioned in passing in Article 4B5 of the 4 May reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas in these bland and impersonal terms:

“To resolve the civil and administrative problems that resulted from the division.”

An unknown number of political prisoners held by both sides continue to languish in prisons as a result of Hamas and Fatah being obviously unable to agree on their release.

Matters such as compensating families for the loss of their family members murdered and tortured or who lost their jobs will also need to be resolved if true reconciliation is to be achieved.

Other fundamental doctrinal issues also indicate the unrealistic possibility of reconciliation.

They centre around the provisions of Article 13 and Article 27 of the Hamas Covenant 1988

Article 13 declares:

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours.”

Hamas could hardly agree to be part of a Government seeking to create a Palestinian Arab State in only 5% of former Palestine. Abandoning its stated goal of securing sovereignty in 100% of former Palestine would defeat the raison d’etre for its very existence.

Article 27 poses even bigger problems for the mooted reconciliation by making it clear that Hamas is opposed to a secular State of Palestine as endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization - of which Fatah is the controlling factional member - whilst Hamas is not even a member:

“Secularism completely contradicts religious ideology. Attitudes, conduct and decisions stem from ideologies.

That is why, with all our appreciation for the Palestinian Liberation Organization - and what it can develop into - and without belittling its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are unable to exchange the present or future Islamic Palestine with the secular idea. The Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion and whoever takes his religion lightly is a loser. The day the Palestinian Liberation Organization adopts Islam as its way of life, we will become its soldiers, and fuel for its fire that will burn the enemies.”

The struggle for the hearts and the minds of the Palestinian Arabs is set to continue for a long time - whilst these fundamental differences of philosophy divide Hamas and Fatah. Reconciling these two conflicting viewpoints in a united Government seems impossible to achieve.

Officials in Israel and the United States have also greeted news of the meeting with Mashal with trepidation. Israel has warned that an agreement with Hamas would have grave consequences for its relations with the Palestinian Authority, both in terms of security and the transferral of funds.

Speaking anonymously, an Israeli official stated:

“The prime minister [Binyamin Netanyahu] has said repeatedly, the Palestinian Authority must choose between peace and Hamas. They cannot have both. Our security co-operation with the Palestinian Authority, for example, has been based on the commitment of both sides to fighting terrorism. If Hamas is in the government, what will this mean?”

America has already threatened to cut funding should the reconciliation proceed. The US is one of the Palestinian Authority’s most significant donors, having invested more than $3.5bn (£2.2bn) since the authority was established in the mid-90s

Abbas is grasping at straws and putting the two state solution in jeopardy in going to Cairo to meet Mashal - rather than travelling to Jerusalem to resume direct negotiations with Israel.

Abbas is lucky that his last attempt at moving unilaterally to join the United Nations ended in ignominy. Success would have had serious repercussions for the two state solution.

He seems set to have his luck continue by failing to achieve anything in his meeting with Meshaal this Friday.

Palestine - Will The UN Endorse Ethnic Cleansing?

[Published 5 September 2011]


Two of the many intriguing matters facing the United Nations in dealing with any proposal to seek recognition of a Palestinian Arab State along the 1967 lines - are:

1. Who will make such application on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs?
2. What conditions will the United Nations demand to ensure that up to 500000 Jews living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will not ultimately face arbitrary expulsion as a result of its decision?

Palestinian Authority President and PLO Chairman - Mahmoud Abbas - has stated that the PLO - not the Palestinian Authority - will be making the approach to the UN - telling a press conference:

“ Going to the UN does not mean the end of the PLO. It’s the PLO that will submit the application to the UN for recognition of a Palestinian state. The PLO will remain the protector of the rights of the Palestinians until the establishment of a Palestinian state and the complete end of occupation.”

Hamas is not a member of the PLO - but both are sworn to eliminating the State of Israel - the former by jihad, the latter by acquiring territory in stages as a prelude to a final assault on the Jewish State.

The PLO has made it abundantly clear that it is not prepared to accept the rule of international law - openly declaring in Article 20 of its Charter:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void.”

Will United Nations members support such blatant and continuing disregard of international law by the PLO and fail to demand the PLO amend its Charter?

The PLO has also refused to acknowledge the connection of the Jewish people with their ancient biblical and legally sanctioned homeland by stating in Article 20 of its Charter:

“Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."

Will the United Nations endorse any PLO approach whilst it exhibits Jew-hatred on such a scale?

The “complete end of the occupation” referred to by Abbas - even in the context of any two-state solution - means the ethnic cleansing of all Jews living in the newly recognized Palestinian State by forcibly expelling them from their homes where tens of thousands have lived for more than thirty years.

Their right to live there has been sanctioned in international law by Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

Member States of the United Nations cannot close their ears or avert their eyes to what Abbas has made very clear:

“We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it,”

Like Hitler - he is being truthful. Will the world be listening and responding this time round?

To make sure there was no misunderstanding or misinterpretation Abbas repeated his blunt warning:

“But when a Palestinian state is established, it would have no Israeli presence in it.”

Jews were ethnically cleansed from the West Bank and East Jerusalem following Jordan’s conquest of both areas in 1948 - until their return after the Six Day War in 1967.

Abbas has made it clear that he wants to return to the 1948 position - by doing as the Jordanians did - eliminating all signs of Jewish life in East Jerusalem and the West Bank by ethnic cleansing and by destroying Synagogues, desecrating holy sites and trashing Jewish cemeteries.

As the United Nations deliberates on a Palestinian State along the 1967 lines - it might do well to remember what happened the last time the Arabs occupied East Jerusalem from 1948-1967:

“After the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem was captured, the destruction, desecration and systematic looting of Jewish sites began and continued. 57 ancient synagogues (the oldest dated to the 13th century), libraries and centers of religious study were ransacked and 12 were totally and deliberately destroyed. Those that remained standing were defaced, used for housing of both people and animals. The city’s foremost Jewish shrine, the Western Wall, became a slum. Appeals were made to the United Nations and in the international community to declare the Old City to be an ‘open city’ and stop this destruction, but there was no response. This condition continued until Jordan lost control of Jerusalem in June 1967.

On the Mount of Olives, the Jordanian Arabs removed 38,000 tombstones from the ancient cemetery and used them as paving stones for roads and as construction material in Jordanian Army camps, including use as latrines. When the area was recaptured by Israel in 1967, graves were found open with the bones scattered. Parts of the cemetery were converted into parking lots, a filling station, and an asphalt road was built to cut through it…

The Hurva Synagogue, attributed to Rabbi Moses Ben Nahman (Ramban), was the main synagogue in Jerusalem in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and possibly much earlier), until the Ottomans closed it in 1589 because of Muslim incitement. It was burned by Arabs in 1721 (Hurva = destruction in Hebrew), but again rebuilt by Zionists in the 19th century, becoming the most prominent synagogue on the Jerusalem skyline. For that reason, when it was captured by the Arab Legion during the battle for Old Jerusalem in 1948, they dynamited it to show that they controlled the Jewish Quarter. When the Jews in New Jerusalem saw the Hurva burning, they knew that Jewish life in the Quarter had ended (again).”

The Hurva Synagogoue has now been rebuilt - and Israel is certainly not going to allow it to fall into hands that would seek to destroy it once again.

The United Nations faces yet another moment of truth as it is asked to replace direct negotiations by passing a resolution that does not have the approval of the conflicting parties - as last occurred in 1947.

Is the United Nations prepared to signal its willingness to endorse the expulsion of Jews from their current homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in flagrant violation of the decisions of the League of Nations and the United Nations Charter?

Those in the United Nations who would support such an outcome should hang their heads in shame.

Palestine - Hamas And Fatah Seal Unreal Deal

[Published 6 May 2011]


The announcement this week in Cairo of the long awaited reconciliation between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah has turned out to be to nothing more than an agreement to continue negotiating on a range of so far unresolved - and apparently irreconcilable - issues.

Two years of intense and fruitless mediation by Egypt to end the internecine conflict between the two warring factions over the last four years seems set to continue.

The lack of confidence in hoping to achieve a satisfactory outcome may have well motivated both Fatah Chairman - Mahmoud Abbas - and Hamas Chief - Khaled Meshaal - to appoint deputies to sign the agreement on their behalf whilst they merely looked on.

Certainly the claim by Abbas that they had turned forever the “black page of divisions” appeared to be very premature. Meshaal seeking to strike a historically resonant note, declared that Hamas’s bitter rift with Fatah was “behind us”.

In fact however the signed document comprises no more than heads of agreement calling for the parties to form an interim government by consensus, iron out a number of fundamental issues between them and set up the mechanism for the calling of elections to be held on 3 May 2012.

The fulfilment of the document’s stated objectives promises to be impossible to achieve - given the intense and long running hatred and acrimony between Hamas and Fatah - which has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries sustained by the civilian Arab populations in Gaza and the West Bank caught up in this long running struggle for power and control over both suffering populations.

The first hurdle can be found in Article 3A of the signed agreement which states:

“Both Fatah and Hamas agree to form a Palestinian government and to appoint the Prime Minister and Ministers in consensus between them.”/i>

How this consensus is expected to be achieved is left unanswered. Given the peremptory dismissal of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya as democratically elected Prime Minister by Abbas in June 2007- one would imagine there is no way Haniya would agree to Abbas’s current unelected replacement - Salman Fayyad - still continuing to fill that role in the run up to the new elections.

The idea that Hamas would agree to a Fatah appointed Prime Minister being in control at the time of the proposed elections is fanciful thinking. The idea that Fatah would abandon Fayyad to the wind is equally unrealistic.

Fayyad and Abbas’s difference of opinion with Haniya regarding their perceptions of America and Islamic terrorism will no doubt create further problems in reaching any workable consensus.

Haniya was strident in his anger at the announcement that al Quaeda head Osama Bin Laden had been found and killed in Pakistan and his body consigned to the bottom of the ocean by an elite American strike force:

“We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs. .. If the news is true, then we consider it a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and bloodshed against Arabs and Muslims,”

At the other end of the spectrum, Salam Fayyad - was saying exactly the opposite:

“The man killed in the operation engaged in terror and destruction his entire life. I hope his death is the beginning of the end for this dark era.”

Fayyad was backed up by Abbas’s spokesman - Ghassan Khatib - who commented:

“Getting rid of bin Laden is good for the cause of peace worldwide but what counts is to overcome the discourse and the methods—the violent methods—that were created and encouraged by bin Laden and others in the world,”

How any Government - no matter how temporary - can marry these views and hope to gain American and European Union support - remains a real mystery

Some of the other issues requiring to be resolved under the signed document include:

1. supervising and addressing the prevalent issues regarding the internal Palestinian reconciliation resulting from the state of division.
2. resolving the civil and administrative problems that resulted from the division
3. unification of the Palestinian National Authority institutions in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

It is sobering to realize that the resolution of these long running and festering core issues have not even got to first base. Believing these apparently irreconcilable differences can be resolved in the next few months is the stuff dreams are made of.

Throw into the mix that Hamas

1. has been declared a terrorist organization by both America and the European Union
2. will have won no friends in the American administration following Haniya’s denigration of Obama and America
3. will be keen to even scores with Abbas and cause him as the leader of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its largest faction Fatah maximum loss of face, authority and power before the next elections

- then you have a recipe for ongoing disagreement and further conflict.

Hamas has always set itself apart from the PLO by seeking to create an Islamic state and not a secular state - and this surely will prove to be a major impediment to establishing even a temporary unity government between them.

Article 27 of the Hamas Charter explicitly declares:

“...the PLO has adopted the idea of a Secular State, and so we think of it. Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought. Thought is the basis for positions, for modes of conduct and for resolutions. Therefore, in spite of our appreciation for the PLO and its possible transformation in the future, and despite the fact that we do not denigrate its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot substitute it for the Islamic nature of Palestine by adopting secular thought. For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.”

Given the violent Jihadist philosophy of Hamas and its call for the destruction of Israel - one can predict that the PLO and Fatah will be the losers in this latest attempt at reconciliation - as will be the hope of ever creating a Palestinian Arab State by peaceful negotiations.