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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