As Israelis go to the polls peacefully on Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority, which hasn’t held an election in 21 years, called on the Jewish state on Tuesday to “bring an end to its unlawful occupation.”
“The contrast couldn’t be more striking,” Rabbi Steven Burg, CEO of Aish, told JNS.
“There was this approach that the Palestinian Authority would have elections and they would take charge and they would try to be partners,” he said. “Nothing’s been further from the truth.”
“The terrorism we’ve seen is coming from Gaza, and we’ve literally watched one of the most corrupt governments where the rich have gotten incredibly richer,” the rabbi told JNS.
Mahmoud Abbas was elected to head the Palestinian Authority in 2005. On Oct. 10, he issued an official decree postponing elections, which were originally slated for Nov. 28.
Israel, which held elections twice in 2019, and again in 2020, 2021 and 2022, saw about a 74.3% turnout—5,449,277 voters—by 8 p.m. local time on Tuesday in its first election since Oct. 7, 2023. At the same time in prior elections, 66.4% of Israelis had voted, the Central Elections Committee said.
“Is Israel’s democracy messy? Yeah,” Burg told JNS. “Everyone’s fighting, because there are different parties. But that is, by definition, democracy. Democracy is discussion, is arguing, is coming to a place where finally you hit the ballots and you come out with a stronger republic.”
“What’s going on in the Palestinian Authority is nothing short of a dictatorship,” he said. “It’s nothing short of a place where terrorists thrive.”
Burg told JNS that, with the absence of the authority holding elections, “the overwhelming majority of Israelis understand that the two-state solution has died a long time ago, because there is no partner.”
“Abbas certainly hasn’t been a partner, and he’s been someone that’s denied the Holocaust and has turned a blind eye to terror and pay-for-slay,” Burg said. “He’s literally been paying the families of people that killed Jews.”
“It can’t be more striking,” he told JNS. “Israel is a thriving democracy, and the Palestinian Authority is just another dictatorship in the Middle East.”
Mort Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that “the fact that the Palestinian Authority refuses to have elections and pays Arabs to murder Jews or Christians proves it is a subhuman, corrupt, terrorist dictatorship, thoroughly foreign to American and Western values.”
Abbas “bragged” about Palestinians being paid for carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks, Klein said.
“This ‘occupation’ issue is nonsense. The Palestinian Arabs rejected generous offers of a state eight times in the last 80 years,” he told JNS. “The Arab, Islamic war against the Jews is not about land or statehood. It is a religious war about murdering Jews and destroying the Jewish state.”
In its statement on Tuesday, the Palestinian “observer” mission to the United Nations in Geneva condemned the Jewish state for refusing to cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council.
It also said that Israel was “trying to deflect attention away from its crimes by attacking and attempting to discredit U.N. mechanisms and their representatives, who are mandated to monitor and report on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
“Israel held a free and fair election today,” Mark Goldfeder, CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS. “Its accuser has not held one since 2006.”
“Before anyone demands deference to a U.N. mandate holder, they might try getting a mandate of their own,” he said.
