The time arrived for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to be held responsible by Israel for his involvement in the Munich Olympic Massacre and his long history of sponsoring and inciting anti-Israel terror, just as the brutal terrorist Samir Kuntar, who was killed in Syria in an Israeli airstrike this week, has been held responsible 36 years after personally smashing a 4-year-old Israeli girl‘s skull with the butt of his rifle.  

In December 2015, for the first time, the public discovered the long-hidden cruel, gruesome details of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre. The eight terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organization broke in to the apartments at the Olympic Village where 11 Israeli athletes were staying before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972. They were held hostage for 20 hours during which they were beaten and in at least one case, castrated. Mr. Yossef Romano, a champion weight lifter, was shot when he tried to overpower the terrorists early in the attack. He was then left to die and his genitals were cut off through his underwear while the other 10 athletes were sitting around tied up watching. Other athletes were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones. Mr. Romano and another athlete were killed in the Olympics Village by the Palestinian terrorists while the other nine were killed during a failed rescue attempt after they were moved with their PLO captors to a nearby airport. 

Since then, most of the PLO terrorists who were involved in the Munich attack have been assassinated by Israeli Mossad agents. But Mahmoud Abbas was not held accountable. 

For those with short memories, Abbas, like Arafat, was a founding member of Fatah, the PLO's main faction since 1969. While Arafat was the face of the PLO, Abbas was always number two to Arafat and the main financier of numerous terrorist attacks. In the autobiography of former PLO official Muhammad Daoud Oddeh, published in France in 1999, it was reported that Mahmoud Abbas, also called by his guerrilla name, Abu Mazen, was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. Oddeh, known as Abu Daoud, wrote that he recalled that the plan was concocted in Rome at a meeting he held with senior PLO official Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, and Abu Mazen, who, Abu Iyad said, was to secure the funding.  

For many years the West and leftist Israeli governments and the media chose to play a preposterous game of presenting Abbas as the new, credible, and moderate Palestinian leader whom Israel and the West could trust to bring peace at last through negotiations. In order to achieve this delusional possibility, they chose to ignore, deny, or simply forget the true past of Abbas and give him a different, more wholesome past. They chose to advance the myth that Abbas was a partner for peace who was willing to coexist with the Jews despite the fact that he was second to Arafat when the Palestinian Authority (PA) rejected Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital in the year 2000 and through the subsequent 5 years of Arafat’s war of terror through suicide bombings against Israel which killed over 1000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005. After the death of Arafat in 2004, Abbas became the chairman of the Fatah branch and the PLO, and as a president of the PA he again rejected another offer of peace made this time by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, which would have allowed the Palestinians to coexist with Israel as an independent state. 

For years as president he has continued the legacy of Arafat by inciting and indoctrinating to violence and hatred new generations of young Palestinians through the PA-controlled media outlets and schools, but he did depart from Arafat when he called for an end to anti-Israel violence and a return to peaceful resistance. While never the peace partner that the West or Israel yearned for, he was considered by Israeli officials as useful, nonthreatening, and a violence-abhorring strategic asset.  

But now his usefulness has expired. He has become more a part of the problem than the solution. While Abbas has been repeatedly portraying the current terror campaign as a kind of popular, spontaneous struggle led by Palestinian youth, frustrated by lack of hope, in reality for the last three months Abbas, in coordination with Hamas, chose to copy his former boss Arafat by orchestrating, sponsoring, directing, and inciting the recent wave of stabbings. The Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, is using terror as a tool to achieve its political objective to compel Israel to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem under international pressure without any negotiations or any agreement to end the conflict with the Jewish State. Throughout the past year, Abbas has instigated the violence by telling his people lies that Israel was planning to defile and destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and inflamed them further through social media and mosques preachers by telling them that Israel is committing “war crimes” and “summary executions” of innocent young Palestinians. During the last month the Abbas’ led PA and Hamas officials have been meeting in total and united support to spread the knives terror campaign and the warfare against Israel in the international arena.    

On November 20, 2015, the Fatah Central Committee and Hamas Political Bureau took part in the General Arab Conference to Support the Intifada in Beirut. In the closing declaration of the Conference the participants stated that the Intifada seeks to make it less costly for the IDF to withdraw than to keep fighting both the Intifada itself and international opinion. The committee’s resolutions described Israel as an enemy against which all-out war must be waged until its complete destruction.

On December 6, the Fatah Central Committee headed by Mahmoud Abbas convened in the presidential headquarter in Ramallah and approved a confrontation strategy towards Israel. Based on Palestinian media reports, it seems that the Committee gave its backing to a strategy that combines the terror knives intifada, with diplomatic and legal warfare in the international arena and ending the security cooperation with Israel.

The wave of terror will not stop as long as Abbas and the Palestinian leadership are free to incite, travel and orchestrate terror without personal consequences. Abbas must know that if he continues his instigation, he will be held inside the Mukatta just as his predecessor was, and the sources of income to Abbas, his armies, and the Palestinian people will dry up completely by Israel’s withholding of taxes and aid, preventing Palestinians from working inside or visiting Israel, and preventing nonresidents from entering Palestinian-controlled areas.  

Finally, the Palestinians should know that Intifada I and II did not occur under a Likud government. If they continue, they will see the IDF up close, inside all their cities and homes in Judea and Samaria. Israel is here to stay until a new Palestinian leadership arises that truly wants peace with the Jewish state.

Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli born and raised. Her blog is www.shoularomanohoring.com