Husam Zomlot is head of the Palestinian mission to London and an adviser to the country’s president Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the 18th year of his four-year term. Zomlot was interviewed by Sky News’s Kay Burley this week in response to Burley’s interview with Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to Britain. Both interviewees were asked about the synagogue murders in Jerusalem last Friday, in which seven Israelis were killed. They were also asked about a prior Israeli raid on an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell in Jenin, which killed ten Palestinians, including a civilian woman.
At the outset of the interview, Zomlot complained about Hotovely’s characterisation of the synagogue murders. He accused his counterpart of having ‘failed to mention that the incident in Jerusalem happened in an illegal settlement and that it is squarely the responsibility of the Israeli government to send their citizens to practise illegality’.
Just as she had confronted Hotovely on the Jenin operation, Burley asked Zomlot if he condemned the synagogue murders. Since he has claimed ‘misrepresentation’, I quote this part of the interview in full. For the sake of accuracy, Burley misstates the age of the perpetrator as 15. He was 21.
[Exchange between Burley and Zomlot]
Zomlot is a seasoned diplomat and therefore skilled in the precise and deliberately imprecise use of language. His refusal to condemn the murders was no mistake. The pivot to familiar-sounding cliches about ‘the cycle of violence’, something I objected to in my Coffee House piece earlier this week, reflects the Palestinian Authority’s strategy of speaking the language of incitement at home while its diplomats, such as Zomlot, speak the language of peace and human rights abroad. The dichotomy is underscored by Zomlot’s claims of providing ‘protection to our own jailers’.
Read the article by Stephen Daisley in The Spectator.