The One-State Solution… Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing.

Andrew C. McCarthy:

The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed, this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”).

Abbas is a longtime terrorism enabler, the right hand of Yasser Arafat, by whose intercession he rose to the top rank of the PLO and, ultimately, the Palestinian Authority. Naturally, the Obama administration has hallucinated him into a “moderate” Muslim “peacemaker” — just as the Bush administration did.

The ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab Left — those in the Nasser-Arafat mold — are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic, a coveted distinction in their culture. Abbas and his Fatah party must compete with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch, whose charter explicitly frames the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as dictates of Allah. As Caroline Glick perceptively explains, Abbas has more to gain from the perversely named “peace process,” which keeps the West invested in him, than from a peace settlement, in which an influx of Hamas sympathizers would likely drive him from power. Thus, he does his bit to stoke the violence.

Over the past few weeks, he has incited rioting at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, falsely accusing Jews of defiling and attempting to seize the site. Among his gems is the admonition that Jews “have no right to desecrate [the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Temple Mount sites] with their filthy feet.” The purported secular moderate went on to out-Hamas Hamas, lauding Muslims who physically attack Jews attempting to tour the area:

Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid [i.e., martyr] will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded by Allah’s will.

For good measure, Abbas libelously accused Israel of “executing” a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.” In fact, Mansara and his older brother were caught on video stabbing Jews, including a child riding a bicycle. When they tried to slice and dice the Israeli police who responded to the crime scene, Mansara was shot. But he was not “executed in cold blood”; he is alive and well and recuperating thanks to Israeli doctors and nurses who immediately gave him medical care.

Abbas’s diatribe can have had no purpose but to ignite yet another round of attacks — not a “cycle of violence,” as the State Department describes it, but a unilateral terror campaign. Indeed, Abbas is merely repeating his performance of a year ago, when he exhorted Palestinians to prevent Jews “from entering the holy site in every way possible” — a summons to jihad that was broadcast repeatedly on Palestinian television and, Ms. Glick recounts, led to a similar spate of attacks on Israeli civilians.

To describe as utter nonsense the claim that Israel is trying to seize the Temple Mount would be an insult to utter nonsense.

Jordan invaded East Jerusalem in 1948. During the 19 years of Jordanian occupation that followed, the world did not seem to mind that Palestinians were not given their own state. Nor did it much notice the enforcement of sharia: thousands of Jews and Christians driven from their homes, Jews denied access to holy sites, centuries-old synagogues destroyed, and severe restrictions placed on Christians — including limits on visits to holy sites and a requirement that the Koran be taught in Christian schools.

In 1967, against Israel’s warnings, Jordan joined the Six-Day War of aggression waged by Arab-Islamic states, to disastrous effect for themselves. Their goal then, like the Islamist-Leftist goal now, was to annihilate the Jewish state — as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser put it about a week before the war, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” with which, he later added, “we will not accept any . . . coexistence.” It was the Arab-Islamic states, though, that were routed. Jordan’s foolish decision to attack West Jerusalem resulted in its being throttled and pushed out of East Jerusalem by the Israeli Defense Forces.

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