[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] Today, the PLO screwed its people yet again

This Jodi Rudoren article in the New York Times is far from perfect, but it echoes things I wrote recently:

Mayor Nir Barkat proudly trumpets the investments he has made over the past five years in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem: about $141 million for roads and infrastructure, $113 million to build 500 classrooms, more than $1 million for a single soccer field in Beit Safafa.

Mr. Barkat, a high-tech multimillionaire who is favored in Tuesday's municipal elections here, did not, however, highlight these accomplishments in the actual Arab neighborhoods they benefit — because he, like his challenger, did not campaign at all in those places.

"You don't focus on the ones that tell you they don't intend to vote," Mr. Barkat said with a shrug last week.

....As part of a broader "anti-normalization" campaign, the Palestinian leadership has for decades warned residents against casting ballots. So a vast majority do not vote, despite the possibility that their large numbers could win a solid blocking minority on the 31-member City Council, if not a winning coalition with sympathetic Israelis.

"The whole thing is not really rational," said Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University, whose family has 1,300-year roots in Jerusalem. "It's not by reason that people are guided; it's by sentiments and feelings and fears and histories."

Mr. Nusseibeh once advocated Palestinian voting, backing an Arab newspaper publisher who ran for mayor in 1987 but withdrew after his cars were burned and his home vandalized. Yet Mr. Nusseibeh himself has never voted here, either. And he said that the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, with the fate of Jerusalem among the contentious questions on the agenda, make people even more wary that voting could be seen as legitimizing Israel's control of the city.

As I noted, at the same time the PLO threatens those who vote, it also complains that Jerusalem Arabs are disenfranchised.

In other words, the PLO is looking to score propaganda points far more than it cares about the welfare of its citizens.

According to early numbers, only about 1% of the Arab residents of Jerusalem across the Green Line voted.

And guess who is celebrating? The Palestinian Authority!

According to Al Watan (Saudi Arabia,) the low turnout was welcomed by the PA, calling it a "referendum."

If doing nothing except for complaining when things don't go your way is a referendum, then the PA has the market cornered.




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Posted By Elder of Ziyon to Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News at 10/22/2013 09:09:00 PM