Window on Israel: Competing to establish Palestine? Or to kill it...

Recent expressions coming from the Palestinians reveal a chronic internal competition that does not auger well for their ability to get it together and reach statehood.
 
A week ago the Palestine National Authority, presumably under the direction of Mahmoud Abbas, withdrew its demand that the Goldstone Report move up from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to the Security Council in New York.
 
Leading Palestinian voices accused Abbas of caving into Israeli demands, and say he did it to get Israeli permission to open a second Palestinian cell phone service, in which they claim his son had a financial interest.
 
Abbas responded with a "who, me?" He insisted that he was acting on the advice of the United States rather than pressure from Israel, and that his son was not involved with the cell phone initiative.
 
Egyptian opposition politicians are calling Abbas a traitor to Palestine, and demanding that the Palestinian ambassador leave Cairo.
 
Leading Palestinian figures accuse Israel of taking more and more land in Jerusalem, say that Arabs are not investing enough in their neighborhoods, and recall that it was Benyamin Netanyahu who opened a provocative site for tourists that threatened Muslim landmarks during his previous term as prime minister in 1996.
 
Abbas has joined the chorus, led by Hamas and its Islamic allies, that Israeli extremists are behind the recent incidents of violence in Jerusalem. Palestinians must defend the sanctity of al Aqsa.
 
This is not the first time Palestinians have accused one another of not being sufficiently shrill, and fiddling with sacred causes. Ranking office holders and their relatives have been involved with selling cement meant for Palestinian purposes to Israelis for building apartments in the West Bank, and even for the awful security barrier.
 
What is most worrying is the inclination of religious and political leaders to goad one another for not being sufficiently extreme on issues of national importance.
 
Prime Minister Netanyahu played a role in this current tussle among Palestinians. He has taken a strong position against the Goldstone Report, telling Palestinians, Americans and others that if Israel cannot defend itself without being dragged into a biased court of international censure, then Israel cannot afford to take any chances for peace. Read that as saying: Promote the Goldstone Report and Kill the Peace Process.
 
It appears that Americans urged Abbas to cool it with respect to Goldstone. This might be an appropriate way to keep the peace process alive, but it also led Palestinians to gang up on Abbas. That provoked him to respond by competing in the condemnation of Israel's imaginary attack on al Aqsa.
 
No matter what the Palestinians do, there are always other Muslims to add to the flames.
 
Against Abbas' decision to cool it on Goldstone comes an initiative from Libya to require the UN Security Council to deliberate on his Report.
 
Meanwhile, Israeli justice deliberates with care. The police arrested Sheikh Raed Salah on a charge of incitement to violence for calling on Muslims to become "martyrs" in defense of al Aqsa Mosque. For those unfamiliar with the language, that is code for violence. However, a local court would not agree to continue his arrest. The most it would give the police was banning him from Jerusalem for 30 days. His lawyer claimed that the source of problems was Jewish radicals who were urging Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.
 
Salah has opponents among religious Muslims as well as among secular Arabs. One of his competitors among religious leaders chided that he was leading a race to al Aqsa that would only lead to disaster. Yet an Arab academic who studies such things asserted that a prevailing view among Muslims is that Jews are intent on destroying al Aqsa. 
 
Cultural differences can get in the way of reasoned discussion, here and elsewhere.
 
If this sequence follows the well-established pattern, shouting, incitement, mass demonstrations and manageable violence will escalate in an ongoing competition. There will not only be increasingly extreme claims of what Jews are doing and what Muslims must do, but an increase in drive-by shootings, random stabbings, and suicide bombers seeking their place in Paradise. There will be Jewish funerals and a larger number of Palestinian funerals, rubble where there is now construction in the West Bank, the embarrassment of the Obama White House, and Israelis saying yet again that it is time to say Kadish (the prayer for the dead) for the idea of a Palestinian state.