On July 23, Tawfiq Tirawi, security adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said on Palestinian television:

I am saying these things so that we understand that words are ineffective. Action is effective. … Jerusalem needs thousands of martyrs. If we live to see the day, and you become the leaders of the future, mark my words: It is impossible for Jerusalem to be restored to us without thousands of martyrs.

At a high-school graduation ceremony on July 27, speaking under a sign that read “Tribute to high school graduates under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah,” a speaker commenced his remarks: “In the name of Palestine — Haifa, Acre, Jaffa [these are all Israeli cities], and our Arab Jerusalem.” Raed Radwan, the secretary of Fatah in Ramallah, said, “This is the Palestinian people that said and will continue to say that we are all seekers of martyrdom.”

As Khaled Abu Toameh reported at the Fatah general conference currently underway in Bethlehem, “Many Fatah operatives, including some of Abbas’s closest allies in Ramallah, have made it known that they would oppose any move to abandon the ‘armed struggle’ option.” At the conference, “Fatah leaders responded with loud applause when two terrorists who committed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history were referred to as heroic martyrs by former PA Prime Minister Abu Alaa.”

Arab member of Knesset Ahmed Tibi declared that the West Bank must be completely cleansed of Jewish residents and senior Fatah official Jibril Rajoub said that “resistance [terrorism] was and is a tactical and strategic option of the struggle [sic] are part of Fatah’s policy.”

The public Fatah charter discussed at the conference is intended for Western consumption and is, by Palestinian standards, moderate-sounding — although it does leave open the option of “armed struggle” if talks fail. But there is a second charter, this one intended for internal consumption, which is barely distinguishable from the Hamas charter. The media, of course, has fallen for this Arafat-inspired ruse. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has published Fatah’s “internal order” document:

Article 22 calls for: “objection by force to all political solutions that are offered as an alternative to the extermination of the occupying Zionist entity in Palestine and all the projects that aim for the elimination of the Palestinian problem, or seek to internationalize it or put an outside custodian on its people from any possible party.” This article is in contradiction to the call in the Political Program for greater international involvement in the problem and its welcome for the involvement of international forces in Palestine.

Article 9 states clearly that “the liberation of the Holy Land and the defense of its holy sites (that are forbidden to infidels) is an Arab, Muslim, and humanitarian duty.” . . .

Article 12 calls for “the liberation of Palestine completely and the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally.” . . .

While the Political Program lists the “one-state solution” as an option in case the “two-state solution” fails, the Internal Order document mentions the “one-state solution” as the only solution.

Article 17 says: “The armed popular revolution is the only inevitable way to the liberation of Palestine.”

Finally, Article 19 notes: “The armed struggle is a strategy and not just a tactic and the armed revolution of the Arab Palestinian people is a decisive factor in the war of liberation and the elimination of the Zionist existence, and the struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine.”

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has twice been summoned by the Obama administration to be lectured, first about an apartment building in East Jerusalem owned by a Jew and then about an Israeli court decision on the legal ownership of two East Jerusalem houses. Jews living in East Jerusalem are treated by the administration as a crisis with the potential to destroy the peace process; the repeated declarations over the past two weeks by high-level Palestinian officials endorsing the destruction of Israel, celebrating terrorism, and vowing “armed resistance” merit not even the slightest protest. Obama remains perfectly silent as this wave of hatred and incitement gains strength. At this juncture, a little evenhandedness would be a refreshing development.