The Palestinian Authority is threatening to take action against Israel if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wins the elections in January.
A senior official in the PA said Thursday that if Netanyahu wins another term in office, the entity would take a series of measure in order to isolate.
The official, Hussam Zumlot, told The Associated Press that the PA would make use of its new non-member status at the United Nations to file a complaint against Israel for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.
“2013 will see a new Palestinian political track. There will be new rules in our relationship with Israel and the world,” Zumlot said.
Besides going to the International Criminal Court, the PA is also examining the options of holding huge demonstrations against Israel in Judea and Samaria, ending the security cooperation with the IDF and demanding that the international community impose sanctions on Israel.
“We have to prepare ourselves for a long and tough battle,” added Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “We will use all the political tools available.”
The PA is blaming Netanyahu for the impasse in the peace talks, ignoring the fact that it is PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas who has repeatedly rejected Israeli calls to resume negotiations and has continuously tried to impose preconditions on talks.
Abbas is demanding that Israel accept the indefensible pre-1967 lines as final borders, release all Arab terrorists from its jails, and halt construction in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem for a second time before talks begin. At the same time, he has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Even when Israel imposed a ten-month freeze on Jewish construction in an attempt to bring Abbas back to the negotiating table, he refused, choosing instead to impose more preconditions.
Meanwhile, a new poll by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has found that the vast majority of Israelis are opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria.
The poll, taken in November, showed that 76% of all Israelis (83% of Israeli Jews) do not believe that a withdrawal to the 1948 armistice lines will bring Israelis a secure peace.
Abbas is also being threatened at home. A new independent poll in the PA, released this week, found that Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are rejecting Abbas in favor of Hamas’s de facto Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
The results of the survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research are a sharp reversal from three months ago, when respondents gave Abbas a 51-40 percent lead. Haniyeh now leads by three percentage points.
