The piece has been published in The Aus­trali­an by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

On the last day of April, Yehya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, delivered these instruc­tions to the Palestini­an people: “Let everyone who has a rifle, ready it,” he said. “And if you don’t have a rifle, ready your cleaver or an axe, or a knife.”

On Thursday the following week, two men from the village of Rummanah, on the northern tip of the West Bank, phoned a Jewish-Israeli driver named Oren Ben Yiftah. Ben Yiftah had regularly trans­por­ted the two across the security barrier into Israel where they performed occa­sion­al work as labourers. That day, Ben Yiftah drove the two Palestini­an men to the city of Elad in central Israel. They had told Ben Yiftah they had been hired to carry out urgent repairs at a synagogue. As they neared the synagogue, one man produced an axe, the other a knife and, after a struggle, they hacked Oren Ben Yiftah, a man they knew, to death. The two men then left the car and approached Yonatan Havakuk and Boaz Gol, both easily iden­ti­fi­able by their religious garb as Jewish, and slew the men in the street. Hamas praised the men for their “brave and heroic act”. The victims, fathers in their 30s and 40s, leave behind a total of 16 children.

It is difficult to imagine a more clear-cut link between incite­ment to violence and the act itself; between cause and effect. Nineteen Israelis have been murdered in similar street attacks in the past few months.

Hamas has rightly been des­ig­nated a terrorist organ­isa­tion in Australia, but the Palestini­an Authority, which governs the West Bank, is no less complicit in this process. In a prelude to an earlier spate of lethal stabbing attacks, Palestini­an president Mahmoud Abbas declared: “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre”, and the Jews “have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet”. Soon after, Palestini­an social media was awash with graphics and videos showing how and where to stab a victim to greatest effect.

Official Palestini­an Authority TV broad­casts claims of “Zionist” plots to destroy Islamic holy sites, to “burn mon­as­ter­ies and churches” and “bomb” the Al-Aqsa Mosque”. Such claims have been used to rally the masses to violence since the 1920s. Needless to say, since Israel unified Jerusalem in 1967, the mosques and mon­as­ter­ies have stood unmo­les­ted.

As news of the Elad terror attack broke, young men in Gaza and the West Bank handed out sweets as though marking a festive day. Slain Jewish civilians imme­di­ately brighten the mood. Any visitor to a Palestini­an village in the West Bank will have seen the banners, posters and public squares dedicated to their “martyrs”. Palestini­an pro­pa­gand­ists have even taken to photo-shopping photos of their captured ter­ror­ists, carefully replacing haggard, defeated coun­ten­ances with assured smiles to convince their youth that there is glory even in capture.

Taken together with the PA’s notorious payment of life pensions to the families of ter­ror­ists, Palestini­an society operates under a system of induce­ment and reward that has turned the killing of Jews into an industry.

The violent purging of suspected “col­lab­or­at­ors” is another feature of this system and rein­forces the glory of the res­ist­ance and the perfidy of having contact with Jews. Hamas summarily drags suspected col­lab­or­at­ors through the streets in the the­at­ric­al style of a mid-century junta, and the “moderate” Palestini­an Authority still enforces laws that make the sale of land to Jews pun­ish­able by death, or life with hard labour if the court is moved to leniency.

The paranoia and fan­at­icism are not only projected outward at the Jewish menace, but meted out to the most vul­ner­able in Palestini­an society. A law enabling rapists to evade pun­ish­ment by marrying their victims remained on the books until 2018. “Honour killings” performed by brothers and fathers of sisters and daughters who have brought “shame” to their family occur with a startling reg­u­lar­ity. Only 4 per cent of Palestini­ans believe homo­sexu­al­ity should be accepted.

Needless to say, there is no account­ab­il­ity for, or even great scrutiny of, this crimin­al­ity and gross intol­er­ance. It certainly doesn’t rate a mention at party con­fer­ences or in full-page pro-Palestini­an res­ol­u­tions passed by student unions at ANU and Melbourne Uni­ver­sity. All is shrouded in the solid­ar­ity of slogans or a sort of ori­ent­al­ism that judges Middle Eastern peoples against out­rageously low standards.

To make them worthy of the adulation, the marches, the bumper stickers, the pledges to per­emp­tor­ily recognise a Palestini­an state, the Palestini­ans have been recon­struc­ted as a mythical version of them­selves, cleansed of all sin and stripped of all respons­ib­il­ity. The con­sequence of all of this is that there is abso­lutely no incentive for Palestini­ans to self-examine let alone reform, let alone develop a society that is func­tion­al, just and worthy of a state.

Should our new gov­ern­ment wish to revisit Australia’s position on aspects of the Israeli-Palestini­an conflict, it ought to see the Palestini­an lead­er­ship not as it wishes it to be but as it is, and to hold Palestini­an leaders to the same standards as in every other society. Otherwise, we will see poli­cy­mak­ing founded in delusion and more lives lost to a system of violence and impunity.