January 15, 2018 — New York
AJC, which has long advocated for the search for a two-state solution, denounced the incendiary speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the Palestinian Central Council.
“Mahmoud Abbas has presented, not for the first time, a totally warped history of Israel, of the Zionist movement,” said AJC CEO David Harris. “Is this even remotely a foundation for building peace and coexistence?”
Abbas called Israel a “colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness” and declared that “the Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the Promised Land – call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”
Ignoring the historical fact that Britain prevented most Jews from entering Mandatory Palestine, Abbas also stunningly asserted that “The Jews did not want to emigrate even with murder and slaughter. Even during the Holocaust, they did not emigrate.”
And, he lied in saying that Israel “gathered all the Jews in Arab countries, from Morocco to Algeria and Tunis, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon,” in addition to Iraq and Yemen, without mentioning the incontrovertible fact that Arab governments’ violence and intolerance led more than 800,000 Jews in those countries to flee for their lives.
Harris called “Abbas’s latest invectives against Israel and the Jewish people an outrageous assault on the truth. His consistent twisting of historical facts is a surefire recipe for continued conflict, not permanent peace.”
“Let the international community weigh Abbas’s words and decide for itself if these are the sentiments of a peacemaker or not. The answer, tragically, should be painfully clear to all but the willfully blind,” Harris concluded.
