With an Israeli-Palestinian round of negotiations off to another wobbly start,  there are few, if any, optimistic prognoses from anyone involved.  Simultaneously, there appears to be an overabundance of warnings about what  might likely scuttle the process. This in itself is telling, especially when the  nature of the profuse admonitions is examined.

Palestinian Authority  official Yasser Abed Rabbo charged that Israeli “settlement expansion is  unprecedented” and “threatens to make talks fail even before they’ve  started.”

While assuming the guise of an honest broker, the US rushed to  side with the PA position. Behaving more like an adjudicating overseer than a  non-interventionist mediator, Secretary of State John Kerry pronounced all  so-called settlements as inherently illegitimate (this includes entire extensive  veteran neighborhoods of Jerusalem).

Moreover, Kerry has reportedly  threatened Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with “delegitimization on steroids”  should the talks flounder. The subtext is that unless Israel surrenders more and  more ground, it will become a pariah. The onus is on Israel.

Israel  stands alone at the other side of the table, against the combined forces of its  antagonist interlocutor and the supposed impartial referee. Netanyahu has  written Kerry that “incitement and peace cannot coexist…. Rather than  educate the next generation of Palestinians to live in peace with Israel,”  unremitting “hate education poisons them against Israel and lays the ground for  continued violence, terror and conflict.”

Suffice it to say that Israel’s  complaint has gained zero resonance not only in the international media but also  from Kerry and his team. Netanyahu’s words were studiously ignored.

But  are they unimportant? They should not be if Israel is viewed a priori as a  negotiating partner rather than as a scoundrel state to be pressured and  squeezed into submission.

Hate propaganda should be prohibited in the  context of any quest for peace. Where incitement is tolerated, it may be argued  that peaceful intentions are dubious. But, as in the PA’s case, where incitement  is the pet project of the authorities, it amounts to a gross violation of any  and every undertaking to pursue any mode of coexistence.

In the PA,  incitement is omnipresent and actively nurtured by officialdom via its  controlled media, the school system it operates and in the mosques whose clerics  it appoints and sustains.

Numerous daily reports by Palestinian Media  Watch more than amply illustrate this. Calls for what amounts to genocide and  for ethnic cleansing against Jews proliferate without offending any State  Department sensibilities or generating the slightest indignation in overseas  media.

Ubiquitous Palestinian denial of any Jewish connection to this  land and right to exist here is serially overlooked.

Just last week, PMW  informed all and sundry that the official Facebook page of Mahmoud Abbas’s  Presidential Guard posted a picture of the Western Wall with a Palestinian flag  superimposed on it. Not a murmur of protest anywhere about the Arab claim to  ownership of the holiest relic to Judaism.

A documentary broadcast twice  on official PA TV declared that the PA plans to destroy Western Wall Plaza,  Judaism’s ultra-scared prayer site frequented by millions of Jews, and replace  it with assorted edifices. The documentary stated that Jews worshiping at the  Western Wall were “sin and filth.” No foreign statesmen or journalists were  bothered in the least.

There is more here than an unspeakable double  standard.

Ceaseless indoctrination of young, impressionable minds is an  antithesis to peace. Its effects are lasting and pernicious. The PA has promised  repeatedly to clean up its act but in reality has done the opposite with  absolute impunity. Clearly in the eyes of the international community,  Ramallah’s rulers are unassailable, which in itself constitutes a huge  disincentive to compromise.

Concomitantly, the world seethes against  housing construction in distinctly Jewish areas. It creates a hullabaloo against  tenders and blueprints that are years away from implementation.

Given  this, does Israel have any chance of a fair hearing in the international arena,  or should it expect “delegitimization on steroids” no matter what it does?