(JNS) Earlier this month, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government announced that PLO Executive Committee chairman Saeb Erekat has been hired as a senior fellow for the school’s Future of Diplomacy Project for the 2020-2021 school year. This week, former senior Justice Department official attorney Neal Sher sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf asking that Erekat be denied a visa to the United States.
Sher noted that Erekat’s long record of supporting terrorism as a senior PLO official includes numerous acts of inciting, facilitating and soliciting terrorism. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act, Sher argued, Erekat is legally barred from setting foot on U.S. soil.
The timing of Sher’s letter was noteworthy.
Twenty years ago this week, the PLO’s Palestinian Authority launched its terrorist war against Israel. It was two months after Erekat’s longtime boss PLO chief and P.A. chairman Yasser Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace summit.
Arafat called the terrorist war “the al-Aqsa Intifada.” The name sent a signal to the Islamic world that the Palestinians were the advance guards of the global jihad.
Despite the P.A.’s acts of slaughter and incitement, despite its complete abrogation of all of its commitments to live at peace with Israel, and its embrace of the global jihad, no one disavowed the P.A. Israel continued to seek peace through appeasement. Washington continued to treat P.A. leaders as credible peacemakers even as they oversaw the massacre of hundreds of innocent Israelis. So did the wider international community.
Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak learned neither from Arafat’s cold shoulder at Camp David nor from the terrorist offensive he launched in September. Barak continued to beg Arafat for peace even as the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv ran red with the blood of Israelis. At Taba, Barak’s negotiators made even more lavish offers for Israeli surrenders of land for peace than the offer he made at Camp David.
