As Western media swallows Mahmoud Abbas/Abu Mazen’s line about “ending the violence,” the Jerusalem Post’s David Horovitz takes us inside the Ibdaa cultural center, in a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem, to illustrate The Abu Mazen disconnect.

As we were walking along the second floor corridor, where each of the 10 pink-doored bedrooms for foreign exchange students and other guests bears the name of a different former Arab village inside Israel, international news agencies were headlining the text of a newspaper interview with the putative next head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in which he termed the Palestinian use of violence against Israel these past four years “a mistake” and urged its cessation.

Such entreaties sound rather like messages from another planet when absorbed in a place like the Ibdaa building. Far away, in a remote galaxy, sits Abu Mazen, demanding that the “rejection of the occupation” be expressed without weapons, solely “by popular and social means.” And here… Well, let me just describe the brightly-colored paintings that line the entire stairwell.

MOVING FROM ground floor and on up, we pass a middle-aged, traditionally dressed Palestinian mother poised to hurl the rock in her outstretched hand (“the first intifada,” Jihad explains helpfully), and then a rendering of the Al-Aksa mosque surrounded by flames (“the second intifada”). The artistic glorification of “resistance” is interspersed with panels naming the dozens of villages inside sovereign, pre-1967 Israel that the thousands of children who use this center are told they will one day rebuild.

And at the top of the stairs, at the entrance to the hall where, Jihad says, the teens and their grandparents meet regularly to discuss their heritage (“because we can’t actually go and visit the destroyed villages, like we used to until 2000”), there is what can only be described as the artistic piece de “resistance.” A life-sized portrait of a young Palestinian man, lighted petrol bomb in hand, beneath a slogan that underlines the depth of the disconnect from Abu Mazen: “Oh enemy of the sun,” it proclaims. “I will not compromise and I will continue to struggle until the last pulse in my veins.”

And here’s a brutally direct expression of Palestinian-style realpolitik, from 23-year old Jihad:

Jihad isn’t going to vote on January 9. And he knows plenty of other young Palestinians who won’t vote either. He might have bothered for Marwan Barghouti. “But Abu Mazen?” He says the name almost pityingly. “Abu Mazen won’t make any difference.”

What if Abu Mazen tries to strike a deal, to find a compromise on the refugee issue.

“He can’t sell out the refugees because he would be killed,” says Jihad, before adding, after a pause and with a bit of an embarrassed, apologetic grin, “maybe.”