Jews in a Palestinian state?

By Haim Radin

In July, 2009 in Aspen, Colorado, at the Aspen Institute's Aspen Ideas Festival (as reported in the Aspen Daily News July 5, 2009), Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad when questioned by former CIA director James Woolsey, replied that Jews would enjoy freedom and civil rights in a future Palestinian state.

"In fact the kind of state that we want to have, that we aspire to have, is one that would definitely espouse high values of tolerance, co-existence, mutual respect and deference to all cultures, religions. No discrimination whatsoever, on any basis whatsoever."

In December 25, 2010 Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced that when a Palestinian state is established, it will have no Israelis in it.

"We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won't agree to the presence of one Israeli in it," Abbas told reporters in Ramallah.

There is a certain consistency: the Palestinian Authority will never recognize the Israeli State whatever be its borders. Jews of foreign nationality will be allowed to own land inside the established Palestinian State, but Jews with Israel citizenship will not be allowed to own land; because, as the PA does not recognize Israel thus the PA cannot recognize Israeli citizenship. For instance, in the proposed Palestinian State, all 40,000 Israelis living in Beitar Elite located in South Jerusalem will have to cancel their Israeli citizenship or face eviction from their houses.

But even the allowance of non Israeli Jews to own land and live inside of the Palestinian State, is contradicted by the fate of Christian Arabs living in the Christian holy city of Bethlehem, which city came under the auspices of the PA in 1995 in accordance to the Oslo agreements of 1993. The Christian populace accounted for 85% of Bethlehem in 1948 and shrank to 15% today with the major fall coming after the PA assumption of control of the local government in 1995.

Would the fate of any Jewish population, regardless of Israeli or non Israeli citizenship, under the auspices of the PA be any different?

We see that all statements from the PA hierarchy are one big lie.