All the attempts at normalization won't change the reality. There is no place for the (Israeli) enemy on the map. The people are sending an angry message to all those who are normalizing (with Israel)," said Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on October 29, 2018.
Haniyeh was referring to the stunning developments in recent weeks when Israeli ministers paid official visits to Arab Gulf states and Israeli athletes participated in an international Judo competition in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
The Hamas leader, who Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said was a dead man walking a long time ago, “denounced the acceleration of normalization with the Israeli entity, especially in light of the increasing crimes of the occupation and its daily violations against the Palestinian people and their sanctities through the Judaization of Jerusalem and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.”
Haniyeh wasn’t the only Palestinian leader who condemned the re-approachment between Israel and the Sunni Arab Arab Gulf states.
Fatah leader Mounir al-Jagoub also strongly condemned the unprecedented Arab-Israeli contacts and said “the normalization with the occupation without Israel's recognition of the Palestinian and Arab rights (to the land of Israel), the return of the occupied Arab territories and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of June 4 with East Jerusalem as its capital” was unacceptable.
Daoud Shihab a spokesman for the Iranian-backed Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad went a step further and claimed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Oman was a “stab in the back of the Palestinian people” and “tantamount to acquittal and washing the hands of this criminal of the blood of innocent children who shed their blood every day on the land of Palestine.”
The Palestinian boycott campaign stressed that “all forms of normalization with the Zionist occupation” were rejectable “after its crimes against the peaceful demonstrators in the Great March of Return.”
The three Palestinian movements disagree on virtual all issues concerning the deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip and are engaged in a war about control of the impoverished enclave in southern Israel.
But when it comes to Israel “the two sides lay aside their differences and see eye to eye” and “one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between Fatah and Hamas,” according to Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.
“The daily attacks on Israel by Hamas and Fatah have radicalized Palestinians to a point where many of them would not consider any form of compromise with it”, Toameh wrote on Thursday.
The Palestinian journalist claimed the “Palestinian rival parties fear that once the Arabs sign peace treaties with Israel, they (the Arabs) will forget about the Palestinians and focus on bringing prosperity and stability to the Arab countries,” and said they “want to play the victim card to the bitter end.“
Toameh’s honest analysis of the current state of affairs in Israeli Palestinian relations came a few days after the Israeli broadcaster MAKO aired a report by journalist Ohad Chemo who toured the Gaza Strip last week and interviewed ordinary Palestinian Arabs there.
Chemo discovered evidence Iran is fueling the violence emanating from the Gaza Strip and spoke to people who said they were afraid to rise up against Hamas which is deliberately causing a humanitarian disaster in the coastal enclave.
Here’s what Chemo discovered.
A serious injured Arab who got hurt during the violence at Israel’s border with Gaza gets $500 and a moderately wounded person $200.
The family of a ‘Shahid’, a martyr, gets $3000 from Iran while Hamas is paying $100 a month to youths who show up at every ‘demonstration’ which have now become a daily occurrence.
Bus drivers who bring the rioters to the border with Israel, furthermore, get about $25 for a one-way trip while Hamas is encouraging mothers to participate in the violence together with young children in the hope they'll get hurt or worse.
Hamas’ military wing Izz-a-Din al-Qassem is organizing the violence along the security fence and brings equipment to the border with Israel such as lasers to blind IDF soldiers and angle grinders to cut the fence.
Chemo spoke to participants in the so-called Great March of Return who told him that if there would be enough work in Gaza nobody would show up at the violent demonstrations while others even called for an Israeli takeover of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli reporter later spoke to entrepreneurs in Gaza who said there was plenty to buy but most people don’t have any money after employment hit a staggering 53 percent while 70 percent of the young Gazans are without work.
UNRWA the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, the body which takes care of roughly 5 million Palestinian refugees and all their descendants is now only providing people in Gaza with flour, one Arab told Chemo.
The Israeli journalist then explained how Hamas is making money to finance its terror activities and the digging of terror tunnels.
A truck driver who crosses into Gaza at the Keren Shalom border crossing is forced to stop as soon as he enters the coastal strip after which he has to pay about $140 in fees.
Hamas also imports gasoline from Egypt for which it pays $0.23 per liter to the Egyptians after which the fuel is then sold for $1.62 per liter at gas stations in Gaza.
The same is true for cigarettes which are taxed with almost $1.20 per box by the Islamist terror group.
“We are living dead,” an Arab interviewee told Chemo while adding that the only thing which people are still able to do in Gaza is “breathing”.
The Israeli reporter filmed squares in Gaza where Hamas has erected ‘monuments’, giant placates of M75 rockets which are pointed at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Chemo’s report was broadcasted shortly before Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Nadav Argaman told the Knesset Committee for Defense and Foreign Affairs that over the past year alone the Israeli security services foiled 480 terror attacks in Israel and arrested 219 Hamas squads.
Hamas is feverishly trying to carry out terror attacks in Israel from Judea and Samaria where it is trying to rebuild the terror infrastructure which existed before and during the Oslo War, the so-called Second Intifada, Argaman reported.
In Israel, meanwhile, female peace activists staged demonstrations at junctions in the northern Jordan Valley.
They held up placates with the famous picture of the handshake of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at the lawn of the White House after they signed the Oslo 1 Accord in 1993.
The women belonged to the organization “Women Wage Peace” and demanded the Israeli government “immediately” signed a “political agreement” with the Palestinian Arab leadership.
Their action triggered heated debates with Israeli motorists who were on their way home after a long working day.