Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has consistently refused to recognize the Jewish state or to halt the ongoing promotion of terror in PA-run territory. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leader addressed Israeli students at his headquarters at the initiative of activists pushing for a peace agreement between Israel and the PA, and he made several questionable claims.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas addressed 300 Israeli students at his headquarters in Ramallah, claiming to be seeking peace while blaming Israel for the lack of an agreement, distorting facts and undermining the promotion of terror by his own government.
While only yesterday further reports circulated confirming the PA’s active incitement to violence against innocent Israeli civilians, including clear evidence of substantial financial reward to Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands, Abbas compared Palestinian incitement with alleged Israeli incitement.
Abbas “admitted that anti-Israeli incitement exists and that it needs to be confronted,” Times of Israel explains. “However, he argued that the Palestinians for years have been willing to discuss incitement in a trilateral committee with the Israelis and the Americans, but that such efforts had failed due to Israeli obstinacy.”
“There is incitement on my side, I admit it. I admit it, but let’s discuss it. And the Israelis don’t want to admit it,” Abbas claimed. “Incitement is a germ that would harm the atmosphere and the desire for peace, so let’s remove it. We want to remove it but we haven’t heard any response.”
On the issue of five-million socalled Palestinian refugees, Abbas told the students:
“All that we said was, come let’s put the refugee question on the table, because refugees is a topic that must be resolved to bring an end to conflict. But we do not seek, and we will not seek, to flood Israel with millions in order to change its social culture. This is nonsense that you read in the Hebrew media and elsewhere.”
However, Times of Israel points out, only “last month, speaking to a group of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Abbas said that he could not negotiate away the absolute right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to sovereign Israel, and expressed other hardline positions on core issues.”
Other questionable claims that he made included, for example, “settler violence” and a lack of water supply to the Palestinians.
“It’s a big shame on you, what settlers do against us; without any reasons they come and kill, uproot trees,” he said. “They slaughter us, they kill my sheep and my livestock. It’s a shame on you. And by the way, every time we take one step toward peace it takes us back 20 steps, because our people wonder, what is peace with these people?”
Abbas claimed that Israelis are supplied with 12 times more water than Palestinians, saying: “We are humans, you need to take a shower, I need to take a shower. You need to drink, I need to drink. We are similar. Why do you take 12 times more?”
That number seems to be even more exaggerated than the misinformation repeated by EU Chair Martin Schulz at Israel’s parliament last week, when he said that Israelis receive a supply seven times larger than that of the Palestinians. (Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu responded that Schulz should have checked the “facts” that he heard in Ramallah the previous day.)
Abbas also claimed that the Hamas terror group had renounced violence and would support any final agreement between the PA and Israel. Hamas, however, had condemned the meeting with the Israeli students and reiterated its clear opposition to the negotiations.
Date: Feb. 17, 2014