One can understand and respect the refusal of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to revoke the law requiring the PLO to financially support the families of Palestinian prisoners serving time in Israeli jails. After all, why should the sin of a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank town of Jenin be visited on his son when the family’s breadwinner is put away? Why should the daughter of a Palestinian woman who stabbed an Israeli soldier go hungry? On the other hand, it’s hard to understand and respect the campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the Palestinian payments to the prisoners’ families. The descendants of Israel’s biggest terrorists, among them the children of Baruch Goldstein who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994, and the son of Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, were rightfully entitled to child support from Israel’s National Security Institute.

One can also put up with the Palestinian custom of commemorating the names of friends they consider “freedom fighters” and “heroes of the struggle for Palestine,” although Israel views them as “terrorists” and “murderers.” Netanyahu, who regards this tradition as "sedition," obviously knows that dozens of town squares and major streets throughout Israel are named after “members of the undergrounds.” That is the term used for Jews who murdered women and children in mass terror attacks against the British rulers of Palestine and the Arab enemy before Israel gained independence in 1948. In addition, members of the “Jewish Underground” who murdered innocent Palestinians in the 1980s are not serving several life sentences. They received pardons, and one of them is even the editor of a well-known Israeli newspaper: Haggai Segal, editor-in-chief of Makor Rishon.

Just as one should understand and respect Abbas’ attitude toward prisoners’ families and the commemoration tradition, one should harshly condemn the cruelty he displays toward 2 million of his own people living for the past decade in the world’s biggest prison: the Gaza Strip. Did his hand not shake in April when he signed the order that effectively shut down the only power station operating in Gaza?

How evil does one have to be to ask the same country occupying his people’s land for 50 years to reduce the amount of electricity it supplies the Strip down to three hours of power a day? This is in addition to existing Israeli restrictions on Gaza that limit bringing in power generators, transformers and vital equipment to repair the grids that have collapsed under the heavy load on the power lines in the Strip. What crime did newborn Gazan babies commit for Abbas to cut off power to their incubators and to patients whose lives depend on medical equipment? Is everything acceptable in the struggle against Hamas?