The latest shabby move to abuse the State of Israel in increasingly worthless international institutions by the Palestinian leadership has begun at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

The drearily predictable move was set in train by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, a man who routinely glorifies terrorism and gallivants around the world at Western taxpayers' expense.

The Palestinians will join the ICC, appropriately enough, on April 1, with one aim in mind: to pursue Israel on trumped-up "war crimes" charges with the backing of every bigoted ally they can find, many of whom will come from Europe. On Friday, the ICC said it had "opened a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine". No prizes for guessing what that's all about.

Israel has already made moves to freeze Palestinian tax revenue and is rightly considering more. A travel ban on Palestinian officials to international institutions might be an appropriate, non-violent mode of escalating the pressure.

After all, if the Palestinians have no intention of being reasonable with Israel, why should Israel facilitate their unreasonableness? Let them declaim against the Jewish state from Ramallah rather than New York, the Hague, or Geneva.

Surely they've got plenty to do back home -- there must be quite a backlog of  pending approvals for squares and streets to be named after terrorists, for example.

But it shouldn't just be down to Israel. The "International Community" claims to want Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate together.

While the Palestinians continue to both glorify terrorism and make negotiations impossible by their antics at outfits like the International Criminal Court, the United States and Europe should be imposing travel bans and tax freezes on the Palestinians of their own.

The Palestinian leadership has had a free pass for far too long. Now is the time for all of us to get tougher.