T. Belman. I go further. The chief driver of antisemitism today is the Palestinian Authority. It picked up where Hitler left off. It promulgated all kinds of lies about the Jews and Israel and preceded to spread them around the world. As a result, we have seen an exponential rise in antisemitism. Of course the PA is aided and abetted by the EU and others.
In The Church planted the seeds of the Holocaust, I added an addendum in which I made this point.
Mahmoud Abbas’s antisemitism isn’t new and contrary to Palestinian apologists’ claims it is representative of the Palestinian people’s attitudes.
By ALIZA PILICHOWSKI , JPOST SEPT 24, 2023
In my last column, I wrote about the Jewish desire for peace – especially with the Arabs and Palestinians in and around Israel today. My column must have come off as naïve when a few days later the headlines carried the story of a speech Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivered to the Fatah Revolutionary Council in July that was broadcast on Palestinian television.
In his speech, Abbas made several antisemitic remarks, including claims that Hitler wasn’t antisemitic but perpetrated the Holocaust because Jews were moneylenders, that European Jews and their descendants weren’t related to the ancient Israelites, and that today’s Jews have no connection to the land of Israel.
Abbas’s remarks shocked many but weren’t surprising to those who have followed his writings and speeches. Abbas has made comments just like this in front of the Palestinian National Council. His doctoral dissertation was titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” Abbas has previously compared the Israeli government to Nazi Germany, saying it lied “just like Goebbels.” While standing in Berlin standing alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Abbas claimed Israel had committed, “Fifty massacres, 50 Holocausts.”
It isn’t only Abbas who displays disturbing attitudes towards the Jewish people and Israel. Antisemitic views are prevalent in today’s Palestinian culture. In a global survey of antisemitism, 93% of Palestinians were found to hold antisemitic views. Compare Palestinian antisemitism to Iran, where 56% of the adult population maintains antisemitic views. Fifty-two percent of Palestinians believe in an armed struggle against Israel; 72% of Palestinians support forming armed groups in Palestinian populated lands; 71% supported the shooting of the innocent Yaniv brothers in Huwara; and Arabs in Haifa recently organized a Nazi club.
Palestinian antisemitism is only part of the problem. Palestinians have consistently rejected the Jewish right to a state since before its founding, and 75 years after Israel’s formation still refuse to recognize it as a Jewish State. Rejection of Israel as a Jewish State isn’t simply a position in line with Palestinian claims to the land of Israel. It is a hateful position that denies Jewish history and its people’s connection to its national homeland.
A feature, not a bug
The Palestinian’s hateful positions shouldn’t surprise anyone. They organized themselves with a representative body, the PLO, in 1964. For the next 29 years, the PLO openly declared itself a terrorist organization whose charter called for the annihilation of the Jewish state. It ignored Israeli calls for peace and considered all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to be occupied Palestinian territory. The PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, denied the historical Jewish connection to the land. The absurdity of their positions reached its apex at the Clinton Camp David peace summit in 2000 when chairman Arafat told president Clinton that the Jewish Temples never existed in Jerusalem.
Through 30 years of intransigence since signing the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, support of terror, and indoctrination of its youth to hate Israel, the Palestinians have made it clear to all honest observers that they’re not interested in peace. They have turned down Israeli peace offer after Israeli peace offer – which is their right – but they’ve never offered their own plan or even a counteroffer.
Palestinians have spent their energy and resources on battling the Jewish state as opposed to finding a way to end the conflict. [NOTE: There is no way to end the conflict because the religion of Islam commands Moslems to make war on the Jews and subjugate them to Islamic rule.] Many observers call into question whether the Palestinians even want their own state. Their leadership’s actions and policies are completely inconsistent with working towards an independent state. They seem to sabotage any process that gets them closer to their goal of a Palestinian State.
Palestinian terrorism is at one of its highest peaks. In 2023 there is an average of more than three attempted terror attacks a day. The Palestinian glorification of terrorists, its adulation of violent resistance, and its dreaded pay-to-slay program all point to a people and culture more interested in defeating Israel through violence, than establishing its own state and ending the conflict with Israel through a peace deal. It is obvious to most Israelis, and especially Israeli leadership, that the Palestinians are more interested in ending Israel than creating their own peaceful state.
Mahmoud Abbas’s antisemitism isn’t new and contrary to Palestinian apologists’ claims it is representative of the Palestinian people’s attitudes.
Although, a few days after Abbas’s statements came to light (but a month after they were broadcast to Palestinians) a select few Palestinian academics signed an open letter condemning his “morally and politically reprehensible comments,” most of those who affixed their signatures live in the United States and Europe and don’t represent the Palestinian people.
Nevertheless, besides only issuing the letter when Abbas’s comments were translated into English and spread around the world, as opposed to when Abbas made the very public comments on Palestinian TV, the letter additionally included slanderous characterizations of Israeli treatment of Palestinians. It was also signed by some of the world’s most notorious antisemites; people like Ubal Aboudi, a PFLP member, Refaat Alareer who has said, “Most Jews are evil,” and Huwaida Arraf, who equates Israel with Nazi Germany.
Palestinians had an opportunity to condemn Abbas’s antisemitism without slandering Israel – and without cynically having the world’s worst antisemites masquerade as condemning antisemitism while practicing it themselves – and they missed it. Instead, they displayed their true hateful colors. Just as no one should have been surprised by Abbas’s antisemitism, no one should be surprised by the latent antisemitism displayed by the Palestinians in response to their president’s hateful speech.
Many characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a territorial dispute, but that’s far from an accurate description. The conflict is based on centuries-old hate and traditional antisemitism. [NOTE: Where does this antisemitism come from? The Koran!!!] It begins with a rejection of Judaism, continues with a rejection of Jewish peoplehood and their rights to their land, and exists today in violent rejection of the Jewish State.
It is naïve to think the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come with the creation of another Palestinian State or the splitting of Jerusalem. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will only be solved once age-old hate is put to rest – and the prospects of that happening soon aren’t good. [NOTE: In fact the prospects are impossible because this is an Islamic jihad against the Jews. The only very vague hope is that most of the “Palestinians” will become less religious and more secular.]
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, Israel. She lives with her husband and six children.
Thank you for this article and for the article on the antisemitism that began in the Catholic church, the Protestant church, and that began in Islam. In these religions which claimed to have come from Judaism, but claim to have superseded Judaism, the attack on Jews began when Jews refused to convert to the supposedly superior Christianity or Islam.
The Palestinians are subunit of Islamic antisemitism. Characteristic of Palestinians is their view of themselves as victims of Jews and of the Jewish State of Israel. As individuals who see themselves as victims, they cannot regulate their aggression, because absolutely everything they wish to do, to harm Jews feels justified to them. This is a similar character pathology Hitler suffered from: he believed Germans were being victimized by Jews, thus no matter what he wanted to do to them felt completely justified by him. He and the Palestinians felt/feel no guilt whatsoever about killing innocent Jews because they view Jews as the cause of their poverty or wretched living conditions.
The truth is those who lead the Palestinians are the cause of their wretched living conditions, and the Palestinians themselves are the cause. If they put any energy into making their homes and communities good places to live in, they would be much happier, but all their energy is tied up in what they view as righteous revenge against Jews whom they see as the cause of their problems.
This is the problem with people who feel they are victims: they lose a vital sense of agency because they project a good deal of their aggression onto others. Thus they actually do see Jews as the aggressors against them, when in fact it is they who are the aggressors against the Jews. If they didn’t project all that aggression onto Jews, they’d have a lot more of it left for constructive actions and pursuit of a good life.
I also think part of the hatred of Zionism has come about because the globalists wanted the world to associate nationalism with Nazism. They have been planning on transnational governance or governance over the entire world, destroying sovereign nations. But Zionism and American patriotism became flies in the ointment. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and their homeland in the land of Israel goes back more than 27 centuries. While anti-Zionist and Palestinians keep trying to erase the facts and history of the Jews, most of the world knows through reading the Bible how far back in history the Jews lived in Eretz Israel. This has led to the need to attack Zionism as racist or colonialist, something that makes no sense, but it sounds good to ignorant people. Jews who came to Israel were not an empire’s people trying to take over an already existing country by force and subdue the people living there. Jews who came to Israel bought land and worked extremely hard on the land, and then fought to keep the land when they were attacked. So there is no factual basis for this idea, it is a complete lie.
Reading the history of Jerusalem (Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore) it is the history of successive waves of attacks on Jews and on their land. Each invader and conquering empire tried to take over Jerusalem and make it “their” capital city. Whether it was the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, these were the colonialists who tried to colonize the land of Israel and destroy Jews and Judaism in the process.
What can be learned by studying the details of the history of Jerusalem is the amazing miracle of the current land of Israel, for finally after 27 centuries or more Jews have regained their land and home for good.
“No weapon formed against you shall prosper,
And every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,
and their righteousness is from Me,”
says the Lord.
Isaiah 54:17