REPOST: Abbas in 2012 vs 2023
Nobody has ever said Palestine supporters are honest. It’s hard to be honest when your movement changes positions from open, extreme violence towards non-Muslims, to moderate violence towards non-Muslims, depending on the outlet. As a naggy reminder, The Father of Palestine fought for pan-Arabism and Syria-palaestina, before the KGB trained Arrafat to rename his Army of the Holy War to PLO, in efforts to invent a new identity… that has no historical backing.
Aside from the two evil names above, few people are beloved by Palestine supporters. There were plane hijackers and Palestinian leaders who worked directly with Nazi groups, loved by tankies today. There was a poet, considered too peaceful by modern #FreePalestine standards, who openly supported Russian imperialism and claimed he was definitely not antisemitic, just did not want any Jews in Palestine. There is Mo(ron) El-Kurd, who’s name means “Kurdish,” who thinks there is something poetic, not blood libel-y, about lines like, “They harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.” And there is US politician Rashida Tlaib, allegedly Palestinian, because her grandmother lives under PA, queen of “It’s OK when I do it, but not when you do it.”
One of the most famous faces of the Palestinian narrative today, if not the most famous, is Mahmoud Abbas, leader of PA, PNA and PLO, and thus Fatah, a noted holocaust deniar, who wrote his college dissertation (in a Russian Uni) on how the Holocaust is a lie and there were never gas chambers (just ignore my family who died in them). Abbas is not honest. Or reliable.
For “some reason” complaints that Arab leaders are unapologetic Holocaust deniers is not a part of FreeingPalestine (TM). Nor is Abbas et al fascist rise to power, nor absolute refusal of elections. Or the constant civil war between parties (I’ve written out before). So I decided to repost a classic example of Abbas’ unreliability. In 2012, Abbas admitted that Saffad should be under Israel, since it is not in the disputed territories or Gaza. Since then, his movement has gotten more violent. So has he. Like his mentor and foe, Arrafat, the reality is that they are puppets profiting on death, who have no reason to be consistent. Nobody cares if they flip on positions. We all know they’re liars.
Original article from 2012: “Abbas says he has no right to live in Safed, and no territorial demands on pre-1967 Israel”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-says-he-has-no-right-to-live-in-safed-and-has-no-demands-on-pre-1967-israel/
Original aritcle from 2023: “US envoy: Abbas’ claim US wanted to rid itself of Jews deeply offensive”
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-744147
Original article from 2023: “Abbas calls on UN to oust Israel at world body’s first ‘Nakba Day’ commemoration”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-calls-on-un-to-oust-israel-at-world-bodys-first-nakba-day-commemoration/
Abbas says he has no right to live in Safed, and no territorial demands on pre-1967 Israel
Palestinian leader, taking moderate stance in Israeli TV interview, vows there won’t be a new armed intifada on his watch
By ASHER ZEIGER1 November 2012, 11:29 pm
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks to Channel 2 News (photo credit: Channel 2 screen capture)
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stated Thursday that he was not seeking the right to live in Israel, even though he was born in Safed, in remarks that implied a moderated stance on the longstanding Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel for millions of refugees and descendants of refugees.
Abbas also said explicitly that the Palestinians have no territorial demands on Israel in its pre-1967 lines.
Asked in a Channel 2 News interview what he considered to be Palestine, Abbas responded that “Palestine now for me is the ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me. I am [a] refugee, but I am living in Ramallah.”
Interviewer Udi Segal cut in: “Sometimes your official television… speak(s) about Acre and Ramle and Jaffa [all cities within sovereign Israel] as ‘Palestine.'”
“I believe that [the] West Bank and Gaza is Palestine,” said Abbas, “and the other parts (are) Israel.”
Noting that he himself was born in Safed, in what since 1948 has been northern Israel, Abbas said he had visited the town and would like to see it again, but not to make his home there. “It’s my right to see it, but not to live there,” he said, in comments that, if applied to all Palestinian refugees and descendants, would represent a dramatic shift in Palestinian policy.
The formal Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel for millions of Palestinians and their descendants who used to live in what is today Israel has been a key obstacle in peace talks. An influx on that scale would radically shift Israel’s demographic balance, so that it was no longer a Jewish state — a process no foreseeable Israeli government would sanction. Israel has said the Palestinians must permanently house their refugees in a Palestinian state whose modalities must be negotiated with Israel, just as Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted by Reuters as responding that if Abbas “wants to see Safed, or anywhere else in Israel, for that matter, we would happily show him anywhere. But there has to be a desire to move forward on the peace process.” Since Abbas is not an Israeli citizen, the spokesman said, “he doesn’t have a right to live in Israel. We agree on that.”
In the interview, whose moderate content contrasted deeply with the bitterly hostile speech the PA head delivered to the United Nations General Assembly a month ago, Abbas urged Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to return to the negotiating table. His only condition was that Netanyahu declare his agreement to a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, he said.
Abbas indicated that he represented the final chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. “As long as I am here in this office, there will be no armed third intifada,” he promised, “never.”
“We don’t want to use terror,” Abbas said. “We don’t want to use force. We don’t want to use weapons. We want to use diplomacy. We want to use politics. We want to use negotiations. We want to use peaceful resistance. That’s it.”
He noted, however, that he did intend to seek an upgrade in status for “Palestine” at the UN General Assembly. And he criticized Israel’s continued settlement construction in the West Bank.
He also criticized rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into Israel and said Hamas had no justification for launching the attacks.
Segal said Abbas was giving the interview to reach out to Israelis over the heads of their politicians. Abbas expressed disappointment in the leaders of Israel’s so-called peace camp, and said he does not know Labor Party head Shelly Yachimovich and that she has never requested a meeting with him.
Abbas also denied rumors that PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has resigned his post.
US envoy: Abbas’ claim US wanted to rid itself of Jews deeply offensive
Abbas also equated statements by Israeli officials with those of the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
By TOVAH LAZAROFF; Published: MAY 24, 2023 21:40
PA HEAD Mahmoud Abbas told Maher Yunis: ‘We are proud of you... You are the beacon of light of this nation.
(photo credit: Ronaldo Schemidt/Reuters)
PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s accusation that America backed Israel’s creation to expel its Jews is outrageous, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said on Wednesday as she denounced antisemitic and racist rhetoric fueling Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Abbas’s “claim that the United States ‘wanted to get rid of the Jews and benefit from their presence in Palestine’ is totally without basis and it is deeply offensive to the American people,” Thomas-Greenfield told the Security Council during its monthly meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thomas-Greenfield took issue in particular with the speech Abbas had delivered to the UN on May 15 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Nakba Day, which for Palestinians marks the catastrophe of Israel’s creation and the resulting displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians. The US was among 45 nations that boycotted the speech and the Nakba Day event held that evening in the UN General Assembly’s main hall.
During that speech, Abbas equated statements by Israeli officials with those of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Such comments, Thomas-Greenfield said, “are a gross affront to Holocaust victims and survivors. Making this kind of statement about the world’s only Jewish state is entirely unacceptable, especially during a time of rising antisemitic violence around the world.”
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY President Mahmoud Abbas holds up maps of the Palestinian compromise, addressing the UN Security Council, in 2020. But after the 1947 Partition Plan, local Arab leaders encouraged Palestinian Arabs to flee, says the writer. (credit: SHANNON STAPLETON/ REUTERS)
But she also slammed those Israelis who chanted “death to Arabs” and uttered other racist statements during the annual Jerusalem Day parade last week. “These chants are outrageous and they are unacceptable,” the envoy said.
US State Department also condemned Israeli actions
The State Department in the last week had also condemned those chants as well as other actions by Israel, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Aqsa Mosque compound on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
It also spoke out against Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s decision to seek the authorization of the West Bank Homesh yeshiva and the IDF’s signing of the bill rescinding the ban on the entry of Israelis to the site of the four northern Samaria settlements that Israel evacuated as part of the 2005 Disengagement Plan.
Thomas-Greenfield picked upon these issues as well, stating that the US was “concerned by the provocative visit an Israeli minister made to the Haram al-Sharif/the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on May 21, and the accompanying inflammatory rhetoric.
“This holy place should not be used for political purposes. We call on all parties to respect the sanctity,” she said, adding that “I want to reaffirm our longstanding position in support of the historic status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites.”
“I want to reaffirm our longstanding position in support of the historic status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites.”
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield
The envoy moved over to the issue of Homesh, stating that the Biden administration was ”deeply troubled by Israel’s decision to allow citizens to establish a permanent presence in the Homesh outpost,” which was illegally built on private Palestinian land, which is the site of the four evacuated settlements from 2005.
Such a step, she said, violates Israeli promises to the United States and “undermines the prospects for peace.”
“Without new funding, [the] World Food Programme will suspend cash assistance to some 200,000 Palestinians next week and [the] UN Relief and Works Agency will not have the resources to deliver core services in September.
“This comes alongside existing financial challenges facing the PA and declining donor support overall. I encourage member states to immediately seek ways to increase their support to Palestinians, including funding to UNRWA and WFP, without which we will face serious humanitarian and, potentially, security challenges,” she said.
Abbas calls on UN to oust Israel at world body’s first ‘Nakba Day’ commemoration
PA head claims Israel ‘lies like Goebbels,’ says he wants right to live in Safed; Foreign Ministry says it convinced dozens of nations to stay away; US boycotts ‘anti-Israel’ event
By LUKE TRESS 15 May 2023, 10:27 pmUpdated: 17 May 2023, 11:51 am
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks at a UN event commemorating the Palestinian 'Nakba,' in New York, May 15, 2023. (Screenshot: UN; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
NEW YORK — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas compared Israeli rhetoric to Nazi propaganda, demanded Israel be suspended from the UN if it does not grant Palestinians a state and a “right of return” for millions of refugees, and denied Jewish ties to the Temple Mount during a speech at UN Headquarters in New York on Monday.
Abbas was speaking at the UN General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe” and the Palestinian term for Israel’s creation.
Israel harshly opposed the event marking the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, calling it a “distortion of history,” and said it had convinced dozens of other countries to boycott the commemoration.
Abbas, wearing a key on his lapel symbolizing a planned return to his family’s former home in Safed, in northern Israel, said Israel had agreed to a Palestinian state in 1947 and had agreed to the return of Palestinian refugees to join the UN. The Jews in the UK’s Mandatory Palestine accepted the UN’s two-state solution at the time, but the Arab world rejected it and launched the 1948 War of Independence.
“Forcing Israel to implement these two resolutions was a condition, a prerequisite for their membership in the UN at the time, however, sadly, certain countries, we all know who we are talking about… have obstructed deliberately the implementation of these resolutions in a practice that undermines justice, ethics, and human values,” Abbas said, speaking at the UN for an hour, though he had been allotted 30 minutes for his speech.
“We demand today, officially, in accordance with international law and international resolutions, to make sure that Israel respects these resolutions, or suspend Israel’s membership from the UN,” he said.
The vote on the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine or United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947. (GPO)
“I am a Palestinian refugee. I want to return to my land… I want Safed,” Abbas said to applause. In the past, Abbas has indicated he does not expect millions of the descendants of Palestinian refugees to be allowed to live in Israel, has no demands on pre-1967 Israel, and does not seek the right to live in Safed.
The immediate establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and the right to return for all refugees and their descendants, are non-starters for Israel, which views both moves as threats to its existence.
Abbas specifically blamed the UK and US for the Nakba and Israel’s establishment.
“Britain and the United States specifically bear political and ethical responsibility directly for the Nakba of the Palestinian people because they took part in rendering our people a victim when they decided to establish and plant another entity in our historic homeland for their own colonial goals,” Abbas said. “These countries wanted to get rid of their Jews and benefit from their presence in Palestine.”
He compared Israeli claims of cultivating the land to rhetoric by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
“Israeli and Zionist claims continue by saying that Israel made the desert bloom. As if Palestine was a desert and they made the desert bloom,” Abbas said. “These are lies. They continue to lie, like Goebbels, and they continue to lie until people believe their lies.”
Abbas has landed in hot water for making similar statements before, including last year in Germany, when he accused Israel of perpetrating “50 holocausts” at a press conference alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Israel, Germany, and the US reacted to the statement with shock and outrage.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (R) and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas hold a joint press conference at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, on August 16, 2022. (Jens Schlueter/AFP)
Abbas called on the UN to establish an annual event with a UN resolution to commemorate the Nakba, “considering the 15th of May of every year, an international day to commemorate the Palestinian plight which is a plight for humanity as a whole.”
He also said the Palestinians were building a “commemoration monument” to the Nakba.
Abbas attacked the hardline Israeli government, saying it was urging a “new Nakba” against the Palestinians, naming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“Netanyahu and other even worse people, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, this is what they’re calling for — some people are calling for massacring Palestinians and this is what happened in Huwara,” he said. “When things happened in Huwara, Ben Gvir said, ‘Why didn’t you massacre them?’ so what happened in Huwara, the killing and burning of houses and properties by terrorist settler gangs happened under the protection of Israeli army.”
Ben Gvir did not make such a remark after settlers rampaged earlier this year through the West Bank village, burning cars and homes. One man died at the time under unclear circumstances.
Abbas was likely referring to a statement made by Smotrich shortly after the incident, saying that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it,” comments which he later apologized for.
The PA president also denied a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, saying Israelis have “been digging for 30 years to find any evidence or proof of the existence” of Jewish ties to the site.
“They haven’t found anything,” he said. “Al-Sharif belongs exclusively to the Muslims,” he said, referring to the Temple Mount by its Arabic name. The complex was the site of the two ancient Temples, and, as such, it is the holiest site to Jews. The Al Aqsa Mosque on the mount is the third-holiest shrine for Muslims.
Israeli security forces patrol outside the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound during Ramadan and Passover, late on April 8, 2023. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
The UN held another commemorative event on Monday evening at the UN General Assembly hall.
Responding Tuesday to Abbas’s remarks, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan accused the Palestinians of speaking from both sides of their mouths.
“On the one hand, they talk in the most inciting and despicable manner against the rights of the State of Israel and the Jewish people,” Erdan told Army Radio. “On the other hand, without the security cooperation [between Israel and the PA], without the IDF operating in Judea and Samaria, Abbas long ago would no longer have been chairman of the [Palestinian] authority, because Hamas would do to him and his people exactly what they did in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel opposed the Nakba event and reached out to around 100 countries in recent days in an attempt to convince them to avoid the Nakba event at the UN General Assembly, according to an Israeli diplomat.
Some 32 countries, including the US, the UK, Canada and Ukraine, told Israel they would stay away. Ten of these countries were EU member states, said the diplomat, and three are in Africa. India, where Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited last week, will also not attend the event.
Other countries, including some who have been particularly critical of Israel in recent years, have told the Foreign Ministry they will be lowering their level of representation at the event.
“We will fight the lie of the ‘Nakba’ with all our might,” pledged Cohen in a video statement from Stockholm, “and we will not allow the Palestinians to continue spreading lies and to distort history.”
The Israeli mission to the UN urged other diplomats away from the event in a letter, Erdan said on Sunday. After the commemoration, the mission said that 44 countries in total had not attended.
“The thought that an international organization could mark the establishment of one of its member states as a catastrophe or disaster is both appalling and repulsive,” Erdan wrote in the letter. “Not only does this condone Jew-hatred, but it also gives a green light to the Palestinians to continue exploiting international organs to promote their libelous narrative.”
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan holds a picture of terror victims brothers Yaakov and Asher Paley while speaking to members of the media, following the United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on February 20, 2023. (Yuki IWAMURA / AFP)
The United States Mission to the UN did not participate in the event and said it showed the world body’s slant against Israel.
Washington “does not support events [that are] organized or in support of the institutional anti-Israel bias,” a spokesperson said. “Nonetheless, “the United States continues to recognize the plight of Palestinian refugees,” US mission spokesman Nate Evans said in a statement.
“The United States supports actions in the UN that bring the parties together and lay the groundwork for a negotiated two-state solution and has also been focused on encouraging the parties to take steps to de-escalate tensions and restore mutual confidence,” Evans said. “At the same time, the United States has longstanding concerns over anti-Israel bias within the UN system, which is also counter-productive to peace.”
The General Assembly approved the Nakba event in December, with a vote of 90 in favor, 30 against, and 47 abstentions.
The initiative was sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Senegal, Tunisia, Yemen, and the Palestinians.
“Nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians use to recall the displacement and dispossession they experienced during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
The event was held days after the end of a five-day violent escalation between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, and in the shadow of elevated tensions in the West Bank, with the IDF conducting near-nightly raids in the territory due to a series of deadly Palestinian terror attacks.
Lazar Berman and Jacob Magid contributed to this report.
Reader, I sincerely ask, how can you negotiate with someone who has no honesty? My answer is simple: You don’t.
