Abbas calls on UN to oust Israel
Israel harshly opposed the event, calling it a "distortion of history" and said it had convinced dozens of other countries to boycott the commemoration.
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 the United Nations on Monday.
Abbas was speaking at the UN General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of the “Nakba” (catastrophe), the Palestinian term for Israel’s creation.
Israel harshly opposed the event, calling it a “distortion of history” and said it had convinced dozens of other countries to boycott the commemoration.
Abbas claimed Israel had agreed to a Palestinian state in 1947 and to the return of Palestinian refugees to join the UN. “We demand … 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.
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.
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.”
Abbas attacked the hardline Israeli government, saying it was urging a “new Nakba” against the Palestinians.
“[Benjamin] Netanyahu and other even worse people, [Bezalel] Smotrich and [Itamar] 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. Abbas was likely referring to a statement made by Smotrich after the incident that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it,” comments he later apologised for.
Abbas also denied a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, 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.
Responding on 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.”
The General Assembly approved the Nakba event in December, with a vote of 90 in favour, 30 against, and 47 abstentions.
TIMES OF ISRAEL
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