Australia / Israel Review

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23 was laden with questions.

Why are the Palestinians still living under occupation? Why, after hundreds upon hundreds of pro-Palestinian resolutions passed by the General Assembly, the Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council, have the Palestinians still not been granted full membership status at the UN? Why do they not yet have a state? 

I’m not deaf to his people’s aspirations for independence. And I’m deeply aware of the threat to Israel’s Jewish democracy if we cannot separate from millions of Palestinians.

Nevertheless, I found the answers to Abbas’ frustrated, ostensibly baffled questions were in his speech as well.

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 – “of course you do not remember it,” he ad-libbed, “because we are the only ones suffering its consequences.” He described Israel as a colonising 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, daily Israeli attack.

In his narrative, furthermore, there was no acknowledgment, no sign of internalisation, of why Israel might hesitate to hand over 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 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.

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”.

Moreover, his championing of the heroic “martyrs” who “have lit the way to freedom and independence with their blood,” was a debasement of his claim that the Palestinians “will not resort to weapons… will not resort to terrorism.”

Indeed, so deaf or indifferent to his own transparent bad faith was Abbas that he devoted some of the closing passages of his address to the case of Nasser Abu Hamid. Abbas allowed that Abu Hamid “committed a crime”, but described him as a heroic martyr who was now dying in jail because – he again produced a picture to make the point – of ostensible Israeli medical negligence, with his mother not allowed to visit him.

Abu Hamid, who has cancer, is serving multiple life terms for the murders of seven Israelis and the attempted murders of 12 more.

Palestinian prisoners “are the living conscience of our people,” Abbas declared, treading his well-worn path of championing the killers of Israelis – terrorists to whom his Palestinian Authority insists on paying salaries, thus nurturing the next generations of murderers. Heroes who “have taken four or five life sentences,” he specified; no minor offenders, these.

Abbas affected to welcome Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s readiness-in-principle for a two-state solution, as set out at the same podium the previous day. 

But he ignored the “one condition” Lapid set for the implementation of that vision: “That a future Palestinian state will be a peaceful one. That it will not become another terror base from which to threaten the well-being and the very existence of Israel.”

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. 

But his speech contained the explanations. Like his unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat, he continues to resist Israel’s legitimacy as the revived historic homeland of the Jews, encourages his people to believe that it is a colonising presence that can be ejected, and incites and rewards murderous hostility toward it.

Lapid 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.

David Horovitz is the founding editor of the Times of Israel. © Times of Israel (timesofisrael.com), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.