We last heard of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a month ago when he horrified his Berlin hosts by blithely talking of the "50 holocausts" that Israel had committed against the Palestinians. On Friday he was speaking at the UN in New York, and continued the same tone-deaf bad faith approach, with his determination to vilify the Israelis at every opportunity.
David Horovitz in the Times of Israel - Abbas asked why there is no Palestinian state. The answers were in his speech:
He claimed to genuinely want peace with Israel, but in other passages of his address made clear that he rejects Israel’s very legitimacy: he denounced the Balfour Declaration; he described Israel as a colonizing power for 75 years — that is, since its historic rebirth in 1948; he airbrushed Judaism out of his “eternal” Jerusalem, in which there are only Muslim and Christian holy sites, under relentless, unjustified, daily Israeli attack.
In his narrative, there was no acknowledgment, no sign of internalization, of why Israel might hesitate to relinquish any more of the territory he has sought all these years for a Palestinian state.
His comments included powerful passages on the terrible deaths of children in Gaza, complete with a New York Times front page filled with the faces of young people killed in May 2021’s conflict. But there was no mention that Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew all its soldiers from Gaza in 2005. No hint that Hamas took over, and has relentlessly provoked conflict with Israel ever since, using its civilian population as human shields for its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, subverting all relevant resources for weaponry — and battering home the lesson to Israel that relinquishing the adjacent territory where Abbas demands sovereignty merely empowers the forces that seek our destruction.
In his depiction, last year’s 11-day war between Hamas and Israel was the latest of “50 massacres” carried out by Israel against the Palestinians since 1948; at least this time he refrained from calling them “holocausts.” ...
For three-quarters of an hour, the Palestinian Authority president fulminated against Israel’s refusal to grant the Palestinians full sovereignty on all the territory they seek, and condemned the international community, led by the United States, for failing to force Israel’s hand. He professed bitter indignation at Israel’s brutal intransigence and utter bafflement at the world’s complicity.
But his speech contained the explanations. Like his unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat, he continues to resist the very fact of Israel’s legitimacy as the revived historic homeland of the Jews, encourages his people to believe that it is a colonizing presence that can be ejected, and incites and rewards murderous hostility toward it.
Lapid on Thursday offered Abbas a one-sentence formula for Palestinian independence: ‘Put down your weapons, and there will be peace.” But as ever, tragically for our people and for his, the Palestinian leader was not minded to listen.
Comments