Palestinian protests won’t swell into mass resistance so long as Arab rulers and Iran see no gain

The Palestinian Hamas finds itself shouting alone for a massive armed uprising, raising only muted echoes in the Arab world and the Palestinian street in protest at the US president’s Jerusalem decision. Most adult Palestinians, when asked, admit they see no point in sending their sons in harm’s way. Yet Israel’s mainstream media astonishingly report with great bombast every Hamas threat as though a world power is threatening World War III.
The Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip have it in their power to unleash a barrage of rockets against their Israeli neighbors that would be damaging and lethal enough to trigger a major confrontation with Israel’s Defense Forces. They have done this before, but not so far now. In the exchange of blows Friday night, Dec. 8, Hamas clearly pulled its punches, showing that its rhetoric was just that. Smaller factions were allowed to fire off a few short-range rockets of low accuracy in the direction of Beersheba, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Israeli locations next door to the Gaza Strip. Most exploded on open ground or fell short while still in Gazan air space; one exploded harmlessly on a Sderot street and one was intercepted by an Iron Dome battery. Two Hamas activists were killed in Israeli retaliatory air strikes against three Hamas military facilities in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas leaders understand that their leeway for extreme action is narrower than ever before. They are a lone voice, are woefully short of funds, have no real backers in the Arab world and their popularity in the wider Palestinian community is waning.
By the time the anti-US, anti-Israel Palestinian protests reached their third day, Saturday, the following picture was taking shape:
The Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) decided against taking up Hamas’ call to arms when together they could have ignited a major conflagration. After all, President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital left in ruins the diplomatic campaign he led for years as his signature for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood.
In the phone conversation he held with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday, shortly after Trump announced his decision on Jerusalem, Abu Mazen briefly considered joining the Hamas call for an extreme response. He pulled back when he realized that Haniyeh’s plan was to use the Jerusalem crisis as his pretext for hanging onto rule in the Gaza Strip. This would have wrecked the “reconciliation” deal in which Egypt invested long months as broker, in the hope of unifying the two Palestinian factions and bringing the Gaza Strip under Palestinian Authority rule. When Abu Mazen saw Haniyeh’s game, he backed away. The anti-Trump rallies in West Bank towns Thursday and Friday were consequently modest, compared with so many convulsions in the past.

Iran too pulled back from putting in its oar for inflaming Palestinian ire, because it has bigger fish to fry – even through Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah pushed hard for Tehran to instruct Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip to escalate the anti-Trump protest. Tehran’s attention is fixed on the turning-point in the Yemen civil war at Saudi Arabia’s back door, generated by the Revolutionary Guards success, in conjunction with Hizballah, to assassinate former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, after he switched sides from the Houthi insurgents to the Saudi-led coalition fighting them. The Houthis were then directed to wipe out the opposition by executing hundreds of officers and commanders loyal to Saleh.

The Palestinians are also small beer in the calculations of most members of the Arab League. Arab foreign ministers convened in Cairo Saturday, Dec. 9, for an “emergency session on Jerusalem.”  But it was summoned by the Palestinian Authority and one other Arab leader, Jordan’s King Abdullah, who has fallen out with most of his colleagues, badly enough for Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, for instance, to cut of financial assistance to Amman.

Abu Mazen found Saudi Arabia and other senior Arab League members otherwise engaged. Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman was busy replacing Adel Al-Jubeir as foreign minister with his brother, Prince Khaled bin Salman, and Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi showed no interest in the session. Abbas quickly saw which way the wind was blowing in the Palestinians Arab hinterland.

In New York too, the emergency UN Secretary Council session on Jerusalem, after hearing the PA’s complaint against President Trump, ended with a joint expression of “disappointment” by the ambassadors of France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. “We disagree with the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” they said. “The status of Jerusalem must be determined through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians leading to a final status agreement.” After that, the “disappointed” powers returned home.
All the same, it would be premature to completely rule out a major escalation being sparked by some unforeseen event. For instance, a cell of Tanzim, the armed wing of Abbas’ Fatah party, may decide to join Hamas, the Iranian-backed Jihad Islami and the extremist Popular Front – all of them with a long record of terrorism – for a spectacular terrorist attack on an Israeli or American target.  For the time being, there is no sign of this building up. The ordinary Palestinian man in the street has a job to go to on Sunday and appears to have settled on a moderate demonstration of protest for Trump’s Jerusalem strategy.

 

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33 thoughts on “Palestinian protests won’t swell into mass resistance so long as Arab rulers and Iran see no gain

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 15:58 at 15:58
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    DON’T CRY FOR ME P∀L∃STIN∀
    I’M JEWISH, AND JEWISH FOREVER I’LL BE

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  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 16:28 at 16:28
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    wrong. Hamas did not call for armed uprising buty a popular unarmed uprisng.
    I wonder how such a respectable site as you makes such an error

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 20:44 at 20:44
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      Well, u better read the English text again, it says of sort “the call to the old rusty Abbas”, not the popular call, AFTER Abbass decision. Read the English page always!

      By the way, the most hienous guy ever, sorry but I have to say his name for u to undestand even if makes me throw up, Yasser Arafat the father of the bark name Black September, died at 75, and this Abbass is 82 already, too much more, how comes?

    • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:06 at 0:06
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      Hamas has called for a new intifada at least 4 times since the Trump announcement on Jerusalem.

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 16:57 at 16:57
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    Hamas, Hezballah, PA, Iran, Muslim Brotherhood, Jihadi terrorist groups, Fatah, would the real Palestinian please stand up? These groups are inviting western media to “events” who will promote their propaganda. They are fixed n the destruction of Israel not the creation of a Palestinian economy and state. They only know self-government through the militarization of their populace and employ their own children in the role of murders of Jews. If they put less energy into justifications to commit murder and more into nation building they would have had a US Embassy in Palestine by now.
    How does Abbas believe with such disparate factions he represents the Palestinian people? Enough that he can unilaterally declare a nation? What would its borders be? And how factionalized would the borders within the borders become? It would devolve into an officially recognized gangland thuggery state. That does not a nation make.

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 17:19 at 17:19
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    Right now we have a stalemate with the Palestinians wanting to kill the Jews and the Jews wanting to survive. Peace will come the old fashion way by total defeat and unconditional surrender of your enemy. Israel keeps winning wars but forced to stop short of victory by “The International Community” . Next time that won’t happen.

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 17:40 at 17:40
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      Personally, . . . I think if someone throws a rock at me, . . . and I have a rifle in my hands, . . . they just brought a rock to a gun fight, . . . and when the sound dies down, . . . their next home will be a body bag.

      THIS is the attitude I would project if I was Israel’s PM. Kill em and pile up their bodies for the buzzards.

      It won’t take long until they either decide to go at it full scale, . . . or knuckle drag back to their caves.

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 17:44 at 17:44
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      Hope you’re right.

    • Dec 10, 2017 @ 6:43 at 6:43
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      Remind us of the wars Hizbollah has lost.

      • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:09 at 0:09
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        If you mean by simply hiding in caves and surviving…then none. They did a good job in beating up ill-armed Syrian rebels and civilians there, and lost a lot of their own members in the process, but didn’t make any tactic or strategic gains against Israel in either 2000 or 2006. In 2006 especially Hizbullah lost infrastructure, members, weapons, and have a foreign UN force on their butt for 11 years. Nasrallah also apologized for his actions and Hizbullah has largely been quiet ever since. Not exactly the actions of a victor, wouldn’t you agree?

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 18:03 at 18:03
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    Little does the deranged world have the ability to recognize, is that the Islamic street, and most Islamic leaders (other than Turkey and Iran) just wants the Palestinians to go away. Every victory of Israel, at this point, they celebrate. It is only the filthy Globalist ex-christian world that want to show they are more Islamic than the Islamists. Jews have to realize that they can settle the Palestinian problem in a moment, by arresting the inciteful leaders, and paying the Palestinians (who don’t want to live in peace with Jews) to leave the Jewish homeland.

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 18:25 at 18:25
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      Sounds good at least fair enough, and you should continue that all peaceful Palestinian(who choose to live with Israel) would be treated equally as citizen and have full right as citizen). In other word this is what was called One-State solutions, hope Bibi and right wingers would agree, since they always opposed this idea, but just opposed, didn’t offer any alternatives.

      • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:31 at 0:31
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        There was a one-state solution offered back in 1947…the Arabs rejected it and launched attacks…and lost. The key term to your point is “peaceful” – well, since 1949, Arabs have absolutely rejected living peacefully in or with Israel. They lost that opportunity and the ship has sailed…at least there were other Arabs who made the right choice and are equal citizens of Israel today.

        The laughable fallacy of dolts like yourself is the claim that if not the 2-State solution, than the 1-State is the only option. Nope – infact, under Oslo Accords, the pallys were not to receive a state but rather autonomy, with security controlled by Israel and neighboring Arab states of Jordan and Egypt. The 3rd option that exists and looks more likely is that built on UNR242 – Israel annexes parts of Judea/Samaria and Jerusalem – and the 98% of Arabs who also happen to hold Jordanian passports will get limited autonomy in federation with Jordan, who will control civil and security issues there. same with Gaza and Egypt.

        and for the record, not only have right-wingers (or more factually “realists”) supported this idea but so have some voices in the PLO and Gaza. I guess they decided that building their future was more productive than the absolute racist terror campaign designed to destroy a sovereign state and her people…for the past 70 years.

    • Dec 10, 2017 @ 6:53 at 6:53
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      On what basis do you speak for the ‘Islamic street’? How many people on that ‘street’ support the right of white europeans to steal land belonging to semitic people?

      • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:10 at 0:10
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        a lot of land has been stolen by brown Arabs, from Atlantic to India oceans. They also led the largest slave trade in human history.

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 18:12 at 18:12
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    This situation isn’t what was expecting by Bibi, it’s should be riots or chaos every where especially in muslims countries. So with latest Jerusalem issues, Bibi have reached third failed projects, first, ISIS project in Syria, second, Kurds in Iraq and third, the one and only US who will move embassy to western Jerusalem with no bold statement(undivided, bla bla), instead got bold statement from UN that Jerusalem is still foreign military occupied area and the final status should reached through negotiations and mutually agreed between Palestinian and Israel.

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 20:58 at 20:58
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      U focking idiot, from hw deep are u pulling out of ur ass this stupid invention on Bibi?
      By the way, for u his name is his excellency Benjamin Netanyahu Prime Minister of Israel with the capital in Jerusalem!
      Take a note, repeat it 100 times, then write it down 100 times, this could help.

      • Dec 9, 2017 @ 21:58 at 21:58
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        Ok then, his excellency Benjamin Mileikowsky,,, upps sorry, Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel with two capitals, one in Tel Aviv(self declared and internationally recognized) and the other one (just recently) in West Jerusalem, with only one country who recognize it.

        • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:14 at 0:14
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          Actually there’s only one capital – in ALL of Jerusalem, as declared by Israel and now acknowledged as a reality by the US and Guatemala. As Trump pointed out this very factual point – it doesn’t matter who else in the world accepts a sovereign’s capital…it only matters to (and is the right of) the sovereign.

          Still tons more legitimacy than the defunct Palestinian Authority in their capital of Ramallah claiming a capital on land they don’t even control.

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 22:19 at 22:19
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      How it taste Jim? Believe me Jim, I just know about fermented Camel prick from you, here at Debka

    • Dec 9, 2017 @ 23:57 at 23:57
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      Typically thoughtful post, Jim. I’m sure glad that Debka is monitoring their board.

    • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:23 at 0:23
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      Well, if that’s the case, then why are Muslims mad at all? It’s all nothing-burger, right? Pallys are still in charge, right?

      Oh, but wait – Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel for 50 years now and it has remain united ever since. Now the US and Guatemala have accepted the reality, where even a Pakistani scholar of Islam has admitted recently that there is no right for Muslims to rule Jerusalem. Hmm – the Pallys find themselves losing across the region, even with a Bahrani delegation visiting Israel recently. African leaders visited two weeks ago. Pallys rejected meeting any of them, but no one really cared. Aid funds for Pallys is drying up and their cause is dropping in priority across the world. UNESCO cares but no one else, really.

      The Iranians tried to move into Syria but Israel sent a message they couldn’t refuse pretty quickly. Russia is pulling out troops used to protect Assad’s butchering. Turkey is now in the hot seat for aiding UN sanction circumvention on behalf of Iran. The Kurds in Syria look like they’re on their way to more autonomy, which will be a boon for Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds will follow.

      All in all, a good 2017 so far.

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 20:09 at 20:09
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    See Zecharya 1, 12

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 21:05 at 21:05
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    Pre-screening candidates for UN secretary
    …………..
    Q: Do you have an islamic surname?
    A: At this time, for complete secrecy, I do not carry publicly an islamic surname, I am only known as Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres.

    Q: What do you think about Israel?
    A: I shall not soil my lips with this devilish name, but I respectfully take as guide the preachings of the rightful imams and ayatollahs for the fate of all infidels.

    Q: What do you think about the American Devil?
    A: The US is a terrible most infidel country, which fact I shall keep secret for now. A lot of Arab suffering comes from only thinking about America. All this is widely preached by all imams and ayatollahs, which makes it absolute truth.

    Q: What about the blessed countries of Britain, France, Sweden, and Italy?
    A: These are islam-like covert countries, which shall also stay a secret, brought to their knees because of the fear of the blessed jihad. We shall count them at least as half trustworthy.

    Q: Are the Arabs settlements on the occupied Jewish territories good, legitimate, and very holy?
    A: Yes, yes, and yes! Moreover, all Jewish holy places on Jewish territories are not holy at all, this is widely accepted by all imams and ayatollahs, plus the Security Council and UN as a whole.

    Q: Are the cities of Mecca and Medina Arab settlements on occupied Jewish territories?
    A: Yes, but there is also the good old sharia law, which takes care, such is the will of Allah, widely accepted by all imams and ayatollahs, plus the Security Council and UN as a whole.

    Q: Is the Black Stone inside the Mecca Cube borrowed from the jews?
    A: In the old jewish city of Mecca, the Kaaba itself was a Jewish temple and the Black Stone inside was placed there by Jews, which could be seen as seemingly Israeli property. However, suddenly Allah made these Arab-holy by miraculous magic, and so there is no rip off, because such is the sharia law, and this is widely accepted as explained above.

    Q: What about the Al-Aqsa mosque, and why has it lost its Qibla value?
    A: This mosque is also built with Jewish property stones, on the place of a Jewish temple, but such a mosque is much smaller than the whole Mecca city, which implies there was much less magic involved.

    Q: What to do if return or compensation is required?
    A: Nothing! This is because all the Jewish holy places are not holy at all, while any holy Arab place is indeed most superior holy, such is the sharia law, and it is widely accepted as explained above.
    ………….

  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 21:30 at 21:30
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    ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??
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  • Dec 9, 2017 @ 22:57 at 22:57
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    I’m going to start referring to the middle east as “greater Israel” from now on to combat what use of the word ISIL implies and to show my support for Israel

      • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:16 at 0:16
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        Syrian rebels and ISIS are not the same. Too bad you’re too simple-minded to figure that one out. It has been public knowledge for 6 years.

  • Dec 10, 2017 @ 7:04 at 7:04
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    Even in the Arab world, the Palestinians are considered to be sewer rats…

    • Dec 12, 2017 @ 0:15 at 0:15
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      I was in Dubai for work and let locals know I was Israeli. I received a warm welcome and yes, they really let loose on what they thought of Palestinians. Infact, I received warm welcomes from Arabs across the region except for Lebanese and Egyptians…all upset for losing against Israel in wars Arabs started. Oh well.

  • Dec 10, 2017 @ 8:43 at 8:43
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    CORRECTION: One rocket fired at Sderot actually hit a kindergarten. Nobody appears to have been injured but that’s still taking things to the next level and requires a massive response to Hamas.

  • Dec 10, 2017 @ 17:33 at 17:33
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    Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel wil be cursed. We shall see…….

    • Dec 11, 2017 @ 4:04 at 4:04
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      Those who bless the good of Israel will be blessed, those who curse the good of Israel wil be cursed.
      And…
      Those who bless Israel crimes will be cursed, those who curse Israel crimes wil be blessed

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