In an interview with an Israeli television station last week, the Palestinian Authority president spoke of his security forces’ efforts to bring an end to the stabbings and announced that he wants peace with Israel. His words, writes Khaled Abu Toameh, may have cost him the support of his base:

Verbal attacks against Abbas are not only coming from his political enemies, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Some are coming from his own supporters in Fatah and the PLO. . . . The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the second largest faction of the PLO after Fatah, has called for Abbas’s immediate resignation. . . . Palestinians also took to social media to denounce their president for his remarks. . . .

Let us put things into perspective. This is the same Abbas who over the past six months has remained silent in the face of the new “knife intifada”; the same Abbas who whips his people into a frenzy by telling them that Jews are “defiling the al-Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet”; and the same Abbas whose media and officials glorify Palestinians who murder Israelis. . . .

Abbas has only himself to blame for this morass. In the last months, he and the PA leadership have been inciting their people against Israel through the media and public rhetoric. Forget what they say in English: in Arabic, many of the Palestinian leaders talk of death to the Israelis. Like other Palestinian leaders, Abbas has become hostage to his own poisonous anti-Israel rhetoric.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.