commentary by stephen m. flatow

Here’s how Obama will handle Iran’s violations

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One of the major issues in the debate over the Iran deal revolves around the question of what will happen if international inspectors want to visit a particular nuclear site, and the Iranians say no.

But an equally important consideration is: What will happen if Iranian violations are actually discovered? The Obama administration’s handling of Palestinian violations of agreements they’ve signed offers an important clue as to how it will respond to Iranian breaches.

Consider the issue of incitement to commit terror. The Oslo Accords obligated the Palestinian leadership to “abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda.” This obligation was reiterated in the 1998 Wye River agreement, which required the Palestinian Authority (PA) to “prevent incitement against the Israeli side.”

 The United States government has never denied that the PA’s anti-Israel incitement is a serious problem. In fact, after the massacre of four rabbis and a policeman in a Jerusalem synagogue last November, Secretary of State John Kerry said the attack was “a pure result of incitement, of calls for ‘days of rage,’ of just irresponsibility,” and “is unacceptable.”

 There is, however, a big difference between talking about incitement and actually doing something about it—as Israel has discovered. Back in 1998, when the Israelis began complaining seriously to the Clinton administration about the PA’s incitement, the administration should have taken Israel’s side and insisted that the PA stop it. But it didn’t. Getting tough with the PA might “endanger the peace process,” the White House reasoned. And maintaining the appearance of a “peace process” became the administration’s priority. So instead of siding with its ally, the U.S. created a committee — the “Trilateral U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee” — which met a few times in 1999 and 2000 and then stopped functioning.

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