“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” and “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” Harvey Rachlin reports that, after much searching, he has found no solid evidence that Golda Meir made either of these statements, though variations of both are regularly attributed to her:

In investigating the veracity of a historical occurrence or quote, one also wants to consider whether the event or statement in question is consistent with the personality, habits, or disposition of the public figure connected to it. . . . [The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser was an avowed enemy of Israel who desired, along with Egypt’s Arab neighbors, to destroy the country. With so much Jewish blood having been spilled to preserve the nation’s very existence, would the iron-willed and resolute Meir really have said something that has such an abject ring of supplication and liberal political correctness to it?

In the chapter in her autobiography on the Yom Kippur War, Meir wrote: “For years we not only had seen our sons killed but had tolerated a situation so grotesque that it is almost unbelievable: the only time that Arab states were prepared to recognize the state of Israel was when they had attacked it in order to wipe it out.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.