What are the Palestinian Arabs thinking?

Video Of The Week -Arab Children's Lives are Saved - https://tinyurl.com/7836fsct

A new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), provides a fresh view of Palestinian Arab opinions.

For the full article by Maurice Hirsch go to - https://tinyurl.com/mtu7wrm9

• 71% of Palestinian Arabs support the cold-blooded murder of Israeli brothers Yagel and Hallel Yaniv while they were driving on a main road through Hawara

• Only 27% of Palestinian Arabs support the so-called “Two-State solution”
• 63% of Palestinian Arabs view the PA as a burden and 52% of Palestinian Arabs believe that the collapse or dissolution of the PA is in their interest
• 77% of Palestinian Arabs are dissatisfied with the performance of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and want him to resign

A newly published poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), provide an interesting view of the thoughts and opinions of the Palestinian Arabs regarding different subjects. Several provide an insight into how the Palestinians see both Palestinian-Israel relations and internal Palestinian Arab issues. While the United States and the European Union often present what they believe the Palestinians are thinking, the reality is far different.

Palestinian-Israeli relations

• Palestinian Arab support for terror

According to the survey, the Palestinian Arab support for terror against Israel is multi-faceted and includes, inter alia, substantial support - 71% of the population - for the cold-blooded murder of brothers Yagel and Hallel Yaniv, aged 19 and 21 respectively, by Hamas terrorist Abd Al-Fattah Kharousha, while they were driving on a main road through Huwara.

In addition to supporting the cold-blooded murder of Israelis, substantial parts of the Palestinian Arabs (68%) support the creation of armed terror groups to attack Israelis and 83% of them are against the surrender of existing terror groups.

87% of Palestinian Arabs believe that the PA Security Forces do not have the right to arrest members of these armed groups to prevent them from carrying out attacks against Israel. A majority of 63% say it supports the ending of security coordination with Israel.

When asked about the most effective means of “ending the Israeli occupation and building an independent state,” the report says that 77% of Palestinian Arabs chose violence. 54% chose armed struggle - i.e., to engage in all-out terror similar to the PA-launched 2000 – 2005 terror campaign. 23% chose “popular resistance” – i.e., the PA euphemism that includes sporadic terror attacks like shootings, stabbings, and car rammings. Only 18% of the Palestinian Arabs chose the path of “negotiations.”

These statistics are particularly significant since they reflect a rise in support for violence and a decline in support for negotiations, compared to a similar survey conducted a year ago, as exposed by Palestinian Media Watch. Then, support for violence stood at 68% while 25% of Palestinians supported negotiations.

• What political solution do the Palestinian Arabs support?

According to the survey, only 27% support the so-called “Two-State solution”. Most Palestinian Arabs (74%) appear to have embraced the PA propaganda, and believe that the two-state solution is “no longer practical or feasible due to the expansion of Israeli settlements”. This, notwithstanding the fact that all the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip were evacuated in 2005, that there are no Israeli settlements in areas A or B of Judea and Samaria (which together make up 40% of the area), and that the Israeli settlements in area C cover no more than 2.5% of that area.

The same percentage (74%) also believe that the chances of creating a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel in the next five years are slim or nonexistent.

While they are skeptical about the possibility of creating a Palestinian state, 75% of them are opposed to the suggestion of Mahmoud Abbas to demand one Israeli-Palestinian state.

Interestingly, in a question about the main problem confronting Palestinian society today, 26% say it is corruption; 21% say it is unemployment and poverty; while only 20% say it is the continuation of the Israeli “occupation and settlement construction.”

Regarding the Arab residents of Jerusalem, who the PA considers “Palestinians”, a separate recent PCPSR study, found that 38% of the respondents believe that East Jerusalem should be under Palestinian sovereignty, 19% would prefer Israeli sovereignty and 14% do not want anyone to have sovereignty over the city. The remainder want the city to be under 25% international sovereignty (25%) or Islamic/Arab sovereignty (3%).

The findings are significant when compared to the same PCPSR survey conducted in 2010, in which 52% of the respondents supported Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and only 6% supported Israeli sovereignty.

A similar trend was also identified in the preferences of the Jerusalem Arabs regarding citizenship as part of a permanent political solution. In the current study, 58% of the Jerusalem Arabs said that they would prefer Palestinian citizenship (down from 63% in 2010) while 37% said they would prefer Israeli citizenship (up from 24% in 2010).

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How "Human Rights" Believers Fund Evil

 Video Of The Week "Funding Evil is not British Fair Play" https://tinyurl.com/t8k88rw7

For the full article by Melanie Phillips go to https://tinyurl.com/35mc3dep

This week’s Jewish Chronicle features a major story by David Rose, which reveals that Britain has been investing millions of pounds in training the Palestinian Authority in human rights even while the PA has been perpetrating torture and beating a prominent Palestinian democracy and human rights campaigner to death.

David’s story can be read here, here and here.

The opinion piece that I wrote for the JC to accompany the story follows below.

***

For many in the west, it has long been an article of faith that peace will only come to the Middle East when the Palestinians gain a state of their own.

Along with the EU and America, successive British governments have promoted a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

Central to this thinking is a key distinction. Hamas is considered beyond the pale as Islamist extremists who throw gay Palestinians off rooftops to their death and make no bones about their aim to destroy Israel. But the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas is deemed “moderate” and entitled to run a future state of Palestine that would be part of the community of nations.

The JC has now exposed this faith in the PA as an excruciating misjudgment.

For while Britain has been investing millions in it in the arrogant belief that it can teach it western values, Palestinian officers have been murdering and torturing dissenters who campaign for their human rights.

Last year Nizar Banat, a leading Palestinian campaigner for freedom and democracy, was dragged from his home in Hebron by a squad of 14 PA officers and beaten with a hammer so severely he effectively drowned in his own blood. His murder triggered weeks of protests that were in turn violently crushed by the PA security forces.

Now the JC has revealed that for the past 14 years a “British Support Team” under the command of a brigadier has been training PA officers in human rights — including “inclusivity and gender awareness”.

The JC investigation shows that, in PA-controlled territory, torture by these forces is routine and systemic. People are arrested for their political views; lawyers are beaten; women are sexually assaulted.

A senior PA official said torture was justified to gather intelligence and that Banat deserved to be killed. Yet the British are solemnly teaching such people “inclusivity and gender awareness”. Maybe someone should teach the British “humility and self-awareness”.

The idea that human rights training might turn the PA into defenders of law and liberty is as laughable as it would be to provide human rights training to Vladimir Putin’s secret police or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Yet Britain has long told itself ten impossible things before breakfast about the Palestinians. Ever since the Oslo Accords in the nineties established the PA as the putative government of a Palestinian state, Britain and others in the west have resolutely denied the truth about it.

They’ve denied that its aim has remained the destruction of Israel; denied  that British and EU funding facilitates PA incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land; denied the savage repression it inflicts upon its own people.

Whitehall’s moral blindness is truly epic. Astoundingly, Britain has repeatedly claimed that its Palestinian human rights training is succeeding.

In 2011, the Foreign Office stated: “The PA leadership is committed to strengthening human rights and is making good progress” 

In 2018, the Foreign Office awarded itself an official score of “A+” for its PA programme, meaning that it had “exceeded expectations” for developing “capable, accountable and responsive security and justice services”.

Well, we can now see that the PA’s “accountable and responsive” reaction to this training was to continue to perpetrate torture and to produce a brutal squad that beat a human rights campaigner to death.

As a result, millions of pounds have been squandered. Worse, Britain has made itself complicit with a tyrannical regime that oppresses its own people.

Worse still, the British government has been helping sanitise the PA and perpetuating the lethal fiction that it can be trusted to uphold human rights.

It told itself this because it wanted to believe it. To put it another way, if it acknowledged that the PA was incorrigibly despotic with no understanding of or commitment to justice, the rule of law and respect for human life, it would have to acknowledge that there could be no state of Palestine in the foreseeable future.

That would mean its support for the Palestinian cause would be negated. It would mean that when Israel said the Palestinians posed a mortal threat to life and liberty, they were all too correct.

This would not only derail a key feature of British foreign policy. It would also show up as hypocrites, idiots or fellow-travellers of tyranny all who support the establishment of a Palestinian state run by the PA.

Since such a state is the cause of causes for the western intelligentsia, the truth must be denied. More than £65 million has now been wasted in perpetrating a lethal “human rights” fiction instead.

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Abbas’ Message of Hopelessness at the UN

Video Of The Week -2700 Year Old Toilet Discovered in Jerusalem - https://tinyurl.com/3mt8y34m

For the full article go to JPCA - https://tinyurl.com/m57tkcb7

• PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021, was almost identical to Yasser Arafat’s statement at the 2001 Durban Conference. Nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.
• Citing the “Nakba” (catastrophe), Abbas deliberately inverted history and ignored decades of organized violence by Arab groups and forces against Jewish communities, including massacres of Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1938, all aimed at terrorizing the Jewish residents and removing any Jewish presence from the area.
• He misled the General Assembly into believing that General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) created a “right of return” for Palestinians. The truth is that the resolution was a non-obligatory recommendation and did not create legal rights.
• In violation of UN resolutions and international conventions criminalizing the financing of terror, Abbas blatantly and unabashedly defended and justified the PA’s “pay to slay” policy that provides salaries to prisoners guilty of acts of terror and murder, knowing that such payments serve as incentives and encouragement for more acts of terror.
• To come to the UN General Assembly with delusional, misleading, and misguided accusations and threats does not serve the interests of peace and does not advance the chances of a return to peace negotiations one iota.

Anybody reading or listening to the PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021,¹ could not but be transformed back to the almost identical statement made by then-head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, at the 2001 Durban Conference.

Evidently, nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.

Abbas presented the same re-hashing of the familiar Palestinian accusations, clichés, and buzzwords of racism, colonialism, apartheid, nakba, and ethnic cleansing; unceasing whining about having been neglected by the international community; misrepresentation of, and delusional reliance on old, non-binding UN General Assembly resolutions, none of which have any legal authority or practical relevance; and finally their penchant for threatening – whether to continue their “peaceful popular resistance” of rocket-firing, terror infiltration, stabbings, ecological and agricultural terror, or complaining to international juridical bodies.

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Why the status quo is the least bad option for Palestinians

Video Of The Week - Israel Is Not an “Occupier” - https://tinyurl.com/rf5a5m2

Even among people who recognize that Israeli-Palestinian peace is currently impossible, a growing number think that Israel must nevertheless quit the West Bank. Israel has a right to defend itself, their argument goes, but not by controlling another people for decades. Instead, it should withdraw to the “internationally recognized border” and protect itself from there, like other countries do.

Forget for a moment that the “internationally recognized border” is an arrant fiction. Forget as well that Israel remains in the West Bank precisely because defending itself from the 1949 armistice lines (the above mentioned fictional border) hasn’t worked very well in either the West Bank—from which Israel partially withdrew in the 1990s before returning the following decade—or the Gaza Strip.

That still leaves another uncomfortable fact: As long as genuine peace remains impossible, Israeli control of the West Bank, despite the undeniable hardships it causes Palestinians, remains the least bad alternative for the Palestinians themselves. As evidence, just compare the Israeli-controlled West Bank to Gaza, which has been free of both settlers and soldiers since August 2005. By almost any parameter, life in the former is far better.

Take, for instance, casualties. According to B’Tselem’s statistics, Israeli security forces killed 5,706 Palestinians in Gaza from September 2005 through August 2019. That’s almost eight times the 756 killed by Israeli security personnel and settlers combined in the West Bank during this period (no Gazans were killed by settlers since there are no settlers there).

Nor is this surprising. Israel’s control of the West Bank means that suspected terrorists can often be arrested rather than killed, though shootouts (with attendant collateral damage) do occur. But in Gaza, where Israel has no troops, it can’t arrest terrorists. Thus the only way to fight terror is through military action, which naturally produces many more casualties among both combatants and civilians.

Seemingly more surprising is that the number of Palestinians killed by other Palestinians is also much higher in Gaza. According to B’Tselem, there have been 520 such deaths in Gaza since September 2005, more than 20 times the number in the West Bank (25). But this isn’t surprising either because the same terrorists who kill Israelis often turn on Palestinians from rival organizations. Thus Israel’s arrest of terrorists in the West Bank has the side effect of reducing internecine Palestinian violence there.

No less dramatic is the economic difference between the territories. The first-quarter unemployment rate in Gaza was 46 percent, almost triple the West Bank’s rate of 16 percent. One contributing factor is that while one-sixth of employed West Bankers work in Israel or the settlements, almost no Gazans do. Moreover, Gaza’s median daily wage was just 42 shekels ($12), less than half the West Bank median of 100 shekels ($28) and less than a fifth of the median earned by Palestinians in Israel and the settlements at 250 shekels ($71.50). Thus it’s no surprise that fully three-quarters of Gazans wish Israel would provide them with more jobs.

These two factors, combined with fewer wars and greater access to the Israeli market, have also helped boost the West Bank’s per capita gross domestic product to three times Gaza’s ($1,025 versus $343 in the second quarter). And, of course, Gaza has astronomically higher poverty rates: In 2017, the last year for which the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics published poverty data, Gaza’s poverty rate of 53 percent was more than triple the West Bank’s 14 percent.

But while Israel is a major cause of these differences, it isn’t the only one. So would its departure really turn the West Bank into another Gaza? Unfortunately, the answer is yes—for many of the same reasons that Gaza looks like it does today.

First, the most likely scenario is that Hamas would take over the West Bank just as it took over Gaza. That’s the Israeli defense establishment’s assessment, and it’s also Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s assessment, which is precisely why he has continued security cooperation with Israel despite its unpopularity among the Palestinian public. Ever since Hamas ousted him from Gaza in a one-week civil war in 2007, Abbas has recognized both that the Islamist organization is the greatest threat to his rule and that the Israel Defense Forces are his main protection against it.

Yet even if Hamas didn’t take power, an Israeli pullout would almost certainly produce a significant upsurge of terror from the West Bank. First, as noted, the IDF does most of the counterterrorism work, and there’s no evidence that P.A. forces would be capable of suppressing Hamas without Israel’s help.

Second, while Abbas does fight Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he has shown little interest in fighting non-Islamist terrorists, including elements of his own Fatah party and smaller groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Moreover, many of his likely successors in Fatah are even more supportive of terror than the 83-year-old Abbas (who both funds and incites it). Thus without the IDF, terror from non-Islamist groups would also rise.

Israel would obviously treat escalating terror from the West Bank no differently than it treats terror from Gaza. That means periodic military operations, with all the attendant casualties. It also means restrictions on dual-use imports, exports to Israel, Palestinians working in Israel, use of Israeli ports and airports, etc., which would have the same devastating effect on the West Bank’s economy as they have had on Gaza.

Granted, a post-pullout West Bank could presumably develop greater economic ties with other countries. But its only other neighbor, Jordan, is a poor substitute for Israel, which currently buys 80 percent of the P.A.’s exports. With an economy one-ninth the size of Israel’s and an unemployment rate of 19 percent, Jordan simply lacks the capacity to absorb the quantity of Palestinian exports and workers that Israel does.

In short, an Israeli pullout from the West Bank under current conditions would lead to much higher Palestinian casualties and a devastated Palestinian economy, just as the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza did. As unsatisfying as the status quo is, it’s hard to see how turning the West Bank into a second Gaza would be an improvement.

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Israel Blocks Terrorists, Palestinians Block Critics

Video Of The Week - False Charges that Israel Is Racist - https://tinyurl.com/y53mxxup

From “Gatestone Institute” -by Bassam Tawil 30-10-2019

For the full Article go to - https://tinyurl.com/yyqqg9gn

On the one hand, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) condemn Facebook for "surrendering to Israeli pressure" and taking action against those who incite terrorism and hate speech. On the other hand, the same PA leaders keep pressuring Facebook to silence Palestinians who demand an end to financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

"[E]very time Fatah posts a new terror message on Facebook encouraging violence or presenting murderers as role models, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are given more motivation to kill Israelis. Facebook still chooses to do nothing to stop it." — Itamar Marcus, Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2019.

What Abbas and his senior officials apparently fear is that the current wave of anti-corruption protests sweeping Lebanon and other Arab countries may reach the West Bank. They appear nervous that their critics and political rivals will use social media to encourage Palestinians to revolt against corruption and tyranny.

For these leaders, when they turn to Facebook to clamp down on criticism and voices calling for reform and democracy, that is good government. However, when Israel tries to silence those who seek to spill more Jewish blood -- well, that is criminal.

While Facebook has been deleting pages of individuals and groups promoting terrorism, violence and hate speech, particularly against Israel, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are now seeking to block dozens of websites and social media pages for a different reason: to prevent them from criticizing and exposing corruption cases related to PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his senior officials in the West Bank.

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The Palestinian Battle against a Plan that Does Not Exist

 Video Of The Week -Life on Gaza’s Side of the Fence - https://tinyurl.com/ya46wx43

For the full article by Khaled Abu Toameh go to - https://tinyurl.com/yatqu3l4

§  While Palestinian hatred for President Trump and his administration does not come as a surprise, what is strange is that the two Palestinians factions -- Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip -- are now using the US president's awaited plan to throw mud at one another.

§  Mahmoud Abbas evidently wants the world to believe that Hamas is working for Trump and Israel. Hamas, for its part, wants Palestinians to believe that if anyone is part of the Trump administration's "conspiracy," it is Abbas and his Fatah faction.

§  Guess who gets caught in the crossfire -- again. The Palestinians. It is they who continue to pay the price for the vicious strife between their "leaders" -- in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

No Palestinian -- or anyone else for that matter -- has been made privy to US President Donald J. Trump's long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East, which has also been referred to as the "deal of the century." This minor detail however, has not prevented the Palestinians from rejecting the rumored plan, on the pretext that it is aimed at "liquidating" the Palestinian cause and national rights.

Hardly a day passes without Palestinian leaders and officials across the political spectrum behaving as if they know every detail of the "deal of the century." The Palestinians are not even prepared to wait until the US administration actually presents a plan.

The Palestinian rejection of a yet-to-be-announced peace plan should not surprise anyone. The Palestinians will never accept any plan from a US administration they consider extremely "hostile" to the Palestinians and "biased" in favor of Israel.

Even before Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017, the Palestinians had made up their minds: As Trump administration is on the side of Israel, and its policies seem mainly designed to appease and strengthen Israel, the Palestinians apparently decided that they should boycott the US administration. This boycott is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, especially in light of continued Palestinian denunciations of the US administration and its policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinians, it appears, have become hostage to their own vitriolic rhetoric. It is hard to see how after nearly a year of attacks on the Trump administration, any Palestinian leader would be able to accept the proposed "deal of the century," no matter what is in it, or to have any dealings with US officials. The massive anti-US campaign that the Palestinian leaders have been waging for the past few months in the media and every available platform has made it impossible, if not dangerous, for any Palestinian leader to do business with the Trump administration.

The two rival Palestinian parties have been at each other's throats for many years and are still engaged in a power struggle. Hamas and Fatah hate each other so much that they are even prepared to accuse each other of "collaborating with the enemies," America and Israel.

President Trump is most likely unaware that he has secret Palestinian "agents" working for him in Fatah and Hamas. This is only true, of course, if one is to take seriously the mutual accusations made by Fatah and Hamas.

Welcome to the Palestinians' Theater of the Absurd, where fabrication, lies and conspiracy theories have long been part of the fabric of Palestinian culture and society.

According to a statement issued by Fatah in Ramallah, the (unseen) "deal of the century" requires Palestinians to "give up Jerusalem and the right of return and the right for compensation for Palestinian refugees." Trump's plan, according to Fatah's imagination, also envisages separating the West Bank from the Gaza Strip "to prevent the establishment of an independent and sovereign state, on the pre-1967 armistice lines, with Jerusalem as its capital."

No one knows on what basis Fatah is making these claims about a plan that does not yet even exist. Perhaps these allegations can be traced to unconfirmed reports in various Arab and Western media outlets. Evidently, the Palestinians have taken these speculations as facts and have built entire arguments around them.

In the West Bank, the PLO Executive Committee, another Ramallah-based Palestinian body dominated by Abbas loyalists, echoed the same charge against Hamas. After a meeting on October 11, the committee "affirmed its rejection of the plan to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank" as part of the "deal of the century." Again, this is an accusation by Abbas and his officials that is aimed at convincing Palestinians that Hamas is involved in a conspiracy against them and their rights. Abbas evidently wants the world to believe that Hamas is working for Trump and Israel.

Hamas, for its part, wants Palestinians to believe that if anyone is part of the Trump administration's "conspiracy," it is Abbas and his Fatah faction. Hamas's message to the Palestinians basically boils down to this: "We're not the traitors working with Israel and Trump. The real traitors are Abbas and his Fatah, who are imposing economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip and obstructing efforts to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians."

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The UN: Abbas’s Palestinian playground

Video Of The Week - Why is the US cutting aid to refugees? https://tinyurl.com/y8uq8snw

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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