Israel's enemies are stepping up their violent attacks against the Jewish state and must be stopped, Ido Aharoni, Israel's consul general in New York, says in the wake of the Jerusalem synagogue bloodbath.
"What we are seeing now is a direct result of two very disturbing things that you see on the Palestinian side. The first is a streak of incitements to violence, some of them from the direct top leadership of the Palestinian Authority," Aharoni said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"The other, which is more disturbing, is at the very core of the failure to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
"And that is, of course, the ongoing failure on the part of the Palestinian national movement to break the alliance that they formed with Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization."
On Tuesday, Hamas operatives burst into a Jerusalem synagogue wielding meat cleavers and knives and killed four rabbis and a police officer.
Aharoni said that, alarmingly, the Palestinians have attempted to portray their ongoing warfare with Israel as a religious conflict.
"This is not a religious conflict, it's a conflict between two different civilizations, one that is all about granting freedoms and safeguarding our rights and is all about transparency and accountability," he said.
"The other culture wants to take us back to the seventh century . . . One of the things that our neighbors lack is the ability to be self-critical. When you're not self-critical, when you do not examine yourself, you'll never get better, you'll never improve, and that's exactly what we see.
"There are very few voices you hear in the Palestinian media among Palestinian intellectuals that talk about the ongoing failure of the Palestinian national movement," he said.
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