ABBAS’ CYNICAL GAME

PRESIDENT Joe Biden is determined to reverse everything President Donald Trump did — not least, what many Democrats consider his misguided tilt toward Israel. Yet this week the world got a good look at what overturning Trump’s policies there means, with the eruption of fresh violence in Jerusalem, missile attacks and fires in south Israel.

Democrats are hard-pressed to dispute Trump’s historic achievement in brokering the Abraham Accords. But liberals despised his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, his demand for accountability from the Palestinian Authority for supporting terrorism and his cuts in funding for UN agencies hopelessly biased against the Jewish state.

They wanted a return to an Obama-era “even-handed” approach that would signal to the Palestinians that, once again, they have a friend in the White House. And Team Biden has been moving in that direction. The result: emboldened Palestinians, from their leaders on down.

For several days, Palestinians have resorted to violence in the streets of Jerusalem, supposedly over concerns about the mosques on the city’s Temple Mount and a controversial property dispute. The Biden administration responded in exactly the way its predecessor would not have: with statements calling for restraint on both sides, plus an indication that it was taking sides in the property case in favor of the Palestinians.

The lawsuit involves Arabs who have been squatting in homes from which Jordanian forces evicted Jewish residents in 1948 when they invaded and sought to destroy the newborn Jewish state. Since the city’s reunification in the 1967 Six Day War, Jews have sought to reclaim property in which Arabs have been living for years without ownership rights or paying rent.

With Israel’s Supreme Court about to give a final ruling on the case, Palestinians are trying to ramp up pressure to prevent the squatters from being evicted — by threatening to make the optics bad and by providing a pretext for Palestinians

to engage in violence.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority and its Hamas rival are also demanding that as Israel celebrates the anniversary of the city’s unification, Jews be prohibited from even visiting the city’s Temple Mount, the holiest spot in Judaism as well as the site of mosques that are important to the Islamic world.

All this has brought down on Israel condemnations from politicians like Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who both think it is “abhorrent” that Jewish property rights be respected in Jerusalem. It’s also sparked moral-equivalence noises from the Biden administration.

“It is absolutely critical that all sides exercise restraint,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.

Yet no one should be fooled about the biggest reason for the violence: PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wants to divert attention from his decision to postpone elections again as he serves the 17th year of a four-year term. He fears defeat at the hands of Hamas or more militant members of his own Fatah Party.

Distracting Palestinians from the misrule and corruption of their leaders by fomenting hate against Jews is an old trick. Hamas’ firing of rockets into Israel, including toward Jerusalem, and launching incendiary balloons in the south is its way of competing with Abbas.

When Americans fall for these tactics by condemning Israel, they aren’t promoting a two-state solution (which Abbas and Hamas have proven they don’t want in any case). They’re just validating rejectionism, and so making any possibility of peace even more remote.

It’s no coincidence that this is happening in 2021 rather than on Trump’s watch. Abbas is hoping to leverage this violence to win concessions from Biden. But the president needs to understand that the clashes and rockets are, at bottom, signs of Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s existence, not a need for a more even-handed US policy.

Washington needs to tell the Palestinians, as Trump did, that they must stop the violence and accept Israel. Biden’s moral equivalence will only prolong the agony of Palestinians who are again being misled and betrayed by their leaders.

is editor in