Former PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has told a seminar he does not rule out terror as an option if the peace talks fail.

Ahmed Qurei
AP

Ahmed Qurei, a senior PLO official and former Palestinian Authority prime minister, has said he does not rule out the possibility that the Palestinians will launch an “armed resistance” against Israel if the peace talks fail.

Qurei, who was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, was speaking at a seminar that was held in Cairo earlier this week.

An Israeli official said Qurei’s threat was “regrettable.”

“It is indeed regrettable that there are still senior Palestinian leaders in the Palestinian Authority who talk about using the path of violence,” the official told The Jerusalem Post. “It is clear that the path of violence is a dead end and only through direct negotiation can peace be achieved.”

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Qurei, 73, who is better known by his nom de guerre Abu Ala, said that the peace talks, diplomatic efforts and “all forms of resistance” should be among the Palestinian negotiators’ options.

“All options are open to us,” he declared. “Negotiations, popular activities, sit-in strikes, civil disobedience or armed resistance.

We shouldn’t drop any of these options, but what is more important now is to achieve Palestinian unity.”

Notice where he made the comments – in Cairo. His words were intended for the Arab and Muslim world, where palestinian leaders have a habit of being truthful, as opposed to western audiences where they speak with forked tongue.

Nevertheless, none of this should come as any surprise to those who follow the palestinian news and watch the MEMRI and Palestinian Watch clips from PA television.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:25PM: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have supported bolstering security along the border.

“When referring to the Palestinian entity that would be established, Rabin spoke of ‘less than a state’. I don’t know what he meant at the time. Today we speak of a demilitarized state that recognizes the Jewish state.”

“We do not want to take away from the Palestinian the right to self-definition,” Netanyahu said. “We want the Jewish state to be recognized and protected. Our insistence on security is not an excuse.”

“We left Lebanon and now Iran is touching the fence. We left Gaza and now Iran is touching that fence.” Netanyahu elaborated. “We cannot let this happen a third time… There is no doubt that Rabin, as a man of security, would have agreed to this insistence. “

He’s right. From Rabin’s last speech to the Knesset:

We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.

5:54PM: Mandatory reading of the day: The first paragraph of Thomas Friedman’s op-ed in the New York Times.

Some of Israel’s worst critics are fond of saying that Israel behaves like America’s spoiled child. I’ve always found that analogy excessive. Say what you want about Israel’s obstinacy at times, it remains the only country in the United Nations that another U.N. member, Iran, has openly expressed the hope that it be wiped off the map. And that same country, Iran, is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Israel is the only country I know of in the Middle East that has unilaterally withdrawn from territory conquered in war — in Lebanon and Gaza — only to be greeted with unprovoked rocket attacks in return. Indeed, if you want to talk about spoiled children, there is no group more spoiled by Iran and Syria than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia. Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese — and Hezbollah’s punishment was to be rewarded with thousands more missiles and millions more dollars to do it again. These are stubborn facts.

I say the first paragraph, because the rest of his op-ed is poor.

Instead, read this fisking of it.

5:30PM: My latest animated short: Peanuts, starring Jimmy Carter.

2:55PM: Meet Ahmed, the palestinian burning flag salesman.

He’s a riot.

2:45PM: I stand corrected: there are photos of those injured from the Hamashole work accident.

1:45PM: 12 palestinians – including 5 children and 3 women – have been injured in an explosion at a Hamashole training site

Locals said a “huge explosion” occurred in the Tel As-Sultan neighborhood, causing damage to residents’ windows.

No doubt we won’t see any condemnations, UNSC sessions discussing the issue nor photos of the injured people because Israel was not to blame.

1:10PM: Hizbullah to UN: “We would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.”

10:18AM: A senior Canadian official has called the Dubai Police Chief a big fat liar denied the Dubai Police Chief’s claim that Canada had arrested a suspect in the assassination  of senior Hamashole Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

dubai police chiefAccording to The Globe and Mail daily, Canadian officials speculated that the claim was an attempt by Dubai to embarrass Canada amid an ongoing row over airport rights.

One senior Canadian official called Tamim’s claim “baseless,” the newspaper reported, but Canada has yet to issue an official statement on the matter.

Two senior sources at the Canadian Embassy in the UAE told The Globe they did not inform the Dubai police chief about any arrest. “We are trying to verify this information with our colleagues in Ottawa,” one of them told the newspaper. “Tamim said we gave this info to the Dubai police, and we didn’t.”

8:42AM: An Israeli man kidnapped in Nigeria by a local gang was released later in the day, presumably because the $170,000 in ransom had been paid.

I guess the scam mail business isn’t so lucrative any more.

An Israeli man who was kidnapped in Nigeria by a local gang was released later in the day. The assumption is that following negotiations, the $170,000 in ransom that the kidnappers demanded had been paid.

6:12AM: Interview with the mother of Mavi Marmara passenger and terror enabler Ken “KOK” O’Keefe, who like her son, does not look like someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

15 thoughts on “The Day In Israel: Wed Oct 20th, 2010”

  1. 6:12AM: Interview with the mother of Mavi Marmara passenger and terror enabler Ken “KOK” O’Keefe, who like her son, does not look like someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

    Ug! I'd prefer a dark alley than one that's well lit in this case.

      1. i would like to know why he is not on a no fly list

        and had the commandos truly been on a kill mission, he wouldve been the first to go

    1. It says they immediately rebuilt it from materials in a nearby container……sounds to me like they were living in a shack.

      1. Michael Zvi Krumbein

        OK, here's a family that lost a $90,000 home (all of their savings), which they built to prevent the constant thievery of local Arabs from the vinyard. Barak wouldn't sign permits.

        I thought the freeze was over? How high a price must we pay so Netanyahu will not have to depend on the religious parties? I am really developing an extreme personal animosity towards Bibi.

  2. 2:55PM: Meet Ahmed, the palestinian burning flag salesman.

    I bet the Latma gang are crying that they didn't think of this themselves.

  3. Michael Zvi Krumbein

    Definitely LATMA-quality! Can we have some crediting, please? Is it a German outfit that produced the video?

    "It takes a couple of months to roganize a spontaneous demonstration." 😀

    Another 30 shovel-ready jobs!

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