For full article by Yisrael Medad - https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-un-abbas-playground/
(October
2, 2018 )
How important is
the Temple Mount? Ask Mahmoud Abbas. Elected leader in 2009, with no
elections since then, of the Palestinian Authority that purports to be a state
(but can’t even extend effectively its rule over Gaza).
According to the Haaretz version of his
speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday last
week, he said:
“And you might note, ladies and gentlemen, that the Israeli
settlers and even the Israeli army on every single day; they are committing
acts of blasphemy against our holy sites, especially Al-Aqsa mosque.”
The media
supporting the P.A. regularly employs purposeful terminology so as to distort
and demonize Jews. One recent headline published during the Sukkot holiday reads: “Over 500 Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa.” Indeed, “storm” is their preferred word-of-choice,
intimating that Jews as Jews should not be there at all, and that they are
somehow breaking in illegally. Another referred
to “religious rituals” as if they
were witches from Macbeth.
Interestingly, that
section was not in the official WAFA version.
By the way, Jews do
not, indeed cannot, enter the Temple Mount compound daily, unlike prior to
2000. Almost 160 days in the year the Temple Mount are off-limits to Jewish
visitors for various reasons.
But that was but
one part of Abbas’s litany of lies.
He also touched on
the Law of Israel as a nation-state and declared:
“This racist law talks about
what is called the ‘land of Israel.’ Can you ask the Israeli government what
exactly constitutes the ‘land of Israel’? What are the ‘borders’ of the State
of Israel? I challenge anyone to tell us what they are.”
If one reads the Basic Law of the
Palestinian Authority, no exact borders of a proposed
Palestinian state exist. Worse, all we are informed geographically is
that “Palestine is part of the large Arab world.”
In another version, we read of another land mass undefined: “On the land of the fathers and forefathers, the land of heavenly
Messages … ,” but then deeper into the document, we read, “Its territory is an indivisible whole with its boundaries, as they
existed on the eve of 4 June 1967.” And yet, Judea and Samaria
were part of Jordan, illegally occupied and annexed, and Gaza was under
Egyptian military rule. We also need not forget that the U.N.’s Resolution 242
does not mention Palestine as a state or other political entity.
So, what is Abbas
claiming?
Quite simply, he is
engaged in national-identity negation.
A bit later on in
his address, Abbas notes that the Arabs of Palestine are “an indigenous people and our roots are deep across 5,000 years.”
Arab collective identity within the general area of historic Palestine is 1,380
years old. Arabs may have been engaged in commerce or pilgrimage before 638
C.E. (and prior to them assuming an Islamic ethos), but to claim a 5,000-year
history, even as Canaanites or Jebusites or even Natufians are
false, ridiculous and outlandish suggestions.
What does Abbas
mean when he said peace must include “an independent Palestinian
state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and not some place in East Jerusalem
as its capital, and with all of its holy sites?” Do all
holy sites refer to just Islamic sites? What about Christian or Jewish sites,
and the claim that one cannot be Palestinian if one is Jewish? Of course, since
Abbas and company promote a form of reconstructionism that suggests the Western
Wall is actually the Al-Buraq tethering
post, and outright
denies of the 800-year existence of two Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount—despite
their explicit mention in the Koran—perhaps
Abbas really does disavow anything Jewish about Jerusalem.
One last excerpt of
reveals Abbas’s strategy of self-denial, on the one hand, and his assumption
that all will believe him no matter how pejorative he is on the other:
“We resist this colonial,
settler Israeli occupation through the legitimate means created by this
international organization. Foremost among these is peaceful, popular
resistance as we witness today in the Great March of Return in Gaza.”
Incendiary kites,
terror tunnels, sniper fire, tossing of grenades, IEDs, infiltration and more
at the Gaza border occur almost daily, not to mention mortars, rockets and
missiles.
But Abbas knows
that the United Nations is his playground, his theater. He can be elected, as
he was just now, to the Group of 77 with impunity despite his words and his
actions. And his stage is becoming increasingly immoral, malevolent and
extremely hazardous, revealed by the applause Abbas received from that
seemingly august, peace-loving body.
It is that applause
that assign to his appearances the tragicomic label.
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