By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
If there’s anything that Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, can say has changed over the past three to four years, it’s the large-scale growth of the intense rhetoric to delegitimize Israel and glorify terrorists. What he’s hearing, he said, is similar to the lead-up to the second intifada that began in 2000.
Where not long ago there would be an occasional sports event or TV show dedicated to someone who had been involved in terror attacks, today there are “two weekly programs where they visit the home of terrorists who are sitting in jail,” Marcus said. “They could be serving 35 life sentences for killing 35 people in suicide bombings and direct planning, and these people are honored and glorified and said to be heroes.”
PMW has spent the past 15 years analyzing Palestinian media, most of which is government run, and by extension Palestinian society itself. Marcus made his second visit to Seattle last week as a guest of the StandWithUs Israel advocacy organization.
While he has uncovered instance upon instance of high-level Palestinian officials saying one thing to the world in English while saying different, more incendiary statements to their citizens in Arabic, the rise of the glorification has him more concerned.
“It’s so pervasive and so successful, a poll was done not too long ago asking Palestinians to give positive or negative ratings,” Marcus said. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas got a 55 percent positive vote. But the highest ranking in the country, at 75 percent, went to Dalal Mughrabi, who was responsible for a suicide attack in 1978 that killed 37 Israelis. This past summer, two summer camps were named for her, as was a high school class. “Fatah started referring to all the sorority sisters in all universities of the Fatah as sisters of Dalal,” Marcus said.
In addition, on what would have been her 50th birthday this year, Abbas sponsored a big celebration as well as a TV show about her.
In September, as the Palestinian Authority began its quest for recognition of statehood at the United Nations, Palestinian leaders held a march in Ramallah to the UN offices with the formal letter of request to speak before the Security Council.
“They picked one person to hand over this letter to the UN…. The person they picked was Latifa Abu Hmeid,” Marcus said. “Why was she picked? She has four sons in Israeli jails, one of whom is sitting seven life sentences for seven murders, another one five life sentences, another one three, another one two.
“This was the person that the Palestinian Authority felt represents them for statehood?”
Marcus said he is not opposed to a Palestinian state, but given what he continues to hear, he feels that the rhetoric coming from the highest levels, be it the terror glorification or assertions that Israel performs Nazi-like experiments on its prisoners, is not conducive to a lasting peace.
“It’s keeping violence on the backburner, it’s keeping the anger there, it’s keeping the glorification there,” he said. “We don’t believe a peace treaty will survive, and the polls indicate it won’t survive.”
However, a poll from May of this year by the Near East Consulting Center, cited on the PMW website, stated that 72 percent of Palestinians support an agreement with Israel.
And while she wouldn’t necessarily dispute PMW’s findings, Rabbi Beth Singer of Temple Beth Am in Seattle visited Ramallah earlier this year and said what she saw isn’t wholesale hatred.
“I sense that it’s always more complicated than that,” Singer said.
With Palestinian police forces having been trained by American and Israeli forces, and businesses, at least in Ramallah, being built looking toward a future that serves both peoples, there’s more than just rhetoric on people’s minds.
“Those people that we met who are employers and are busy training Palestinian workers for their enterprises, it doesn’t really wash that that’s what they were basing everything on,” Singer said.
Regardless, PMW has begun taking its findings to members of different countries’ parliaments. Using what he called “endless documentation,” this month the organization has been preparing documentation for The Netherlands’ foreign minister, with more than 50 examples of the minister of prisoners, Abbas, Prime minister Salaam Fayyad, among other top-level officials promoting the glorification.
“We expect the foreign minister will not be able to ignore this documentation because it’s being brought to him by his own MPs and everything we give them is dated,” Marcus said.
He has also presented his findings to about 10 other parliaments as well as the U.S. Congress. If things are going to change, he said, it must come by way of foreign funding.
“I tell these members of parliament, if you’re funding the Palestinian Authority, you have the moral obligation to use that leverage to demand peace education,” he said. “It’s time we didn’t give money generally to the PA, we give it for specific projects.”