In yet another exposure of the fraudulent peace process, the State Department report on terrorism for 2016, released this month, said that some Palestinian violence is driven by “a lack of hope” in ever gaining sovereignty:

Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.

Those assertions would seem eminently logical after 70 years of failure to deliver on promises of a Palestinian state, but they have generated a storm of pushback from Israel’s friends in the United States.

Last week Illinois congressman Peter Roskam wrote to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, saying the “root cause” of Palestinian violence is the Palestinian Authority, not “a stalled peace process.”

Then on Monday, the Zionist Organization of America demanded that Tillerson step down.

In light of the U.S. State Department’s new, bigoted, biased, anti-Semitic, Israel-hating error-ridden terrorism report, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) calls on Secretary of State Tillerson to resign. This Tillerson State Department Report blames Israel for Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks on innocent Jews and Americans…

(The ZOA had criticized the Tillerson appointment when it was made, saying it could not trust Tillerson because of his connections to Arabs as a former oil man.)

On Tuesday, B’nai B’rith International (the “global voice of the Jewish community”) slammed the State Department for “pro-Palestinian bias.” B’nai B’rith executives Daniel Mariaschin and Gary Saltzman said that if the report didn’t say State Department on it, you’d think it had come “directly from the Palestinians.”

We are deeply concerned at the pro-Palestinian bias displayed in a new State Department report that severely mischaracterizes the reality in the region.

In the new annual Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department blames Israel for Palestinian violence against Israelis. It is astonishing that State is echoing the false Palestinian narrative. If it were not released by the State Department, it would be easy to mistake the inflammatory and accusatory language as coming directly from the Palestinians… Israel is not driving the violence committed by the Palestinians. It’s Palestinian leadership—Fatah and Hamas— that incites violence against Israelis on a daily basis.

Two days ago at the State Department briefing, spokesperson Heather Nauert deflected the criticisms:

There is no justification – and we will say that time and time again – there is no justification for any acts of terrorism. The Secretary of State is staying here, he will remain here, and that will not change… There are organizations around the world who will take issue with certain things that the State Department does…. And so I’m not going to get into commenting or characterizing every single one of them.

It is tragic to see how mired in prejudice is the American discussion of the question of the “root cause” of the conflict. Many powerful forces are resisting the necessary consciousness-raising; and it is distressing to think how much more bloodshed there will be before simple claims for freedom are accepted in the U.S. mainstream.