Abate Abbas, please

Mahmoud Abbas is one of the many people to whom President Trump is getting. It is entirely to Trump’s credit that Abbas’s usual shtick has failed so miserably with Trump, as is the contrast with President Obama in this respect.

Abbas is a deeply unsavory figure in a world of unsavory figures. Entering the fourteenth year of his four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority, he lacks legitimacy of any kind. His regime is a monument to murder and corruption. But having earned his Ph.D. in Holocaust denial (literally), he has moved on, in a sense.

On Sunday night Abbas gave a speech reflecting his frustration with the impasse he has reached. He implied European Jews during the Holocaust chose to undergo “murder and slaughter” over emigration to British-held Palestine, and alleged that the State of Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion imported Jews from Yemen and Iraq to the country against their will.

Query: Does that mean he has repudiated his contribution to historical scholarship? Probably not.

The Palestinian leader further asserted that the State of Israel was formed as “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism” to safeguard European interests. Abbas’s deeply deranged account of Israel’s history has not gone unnoticed in Israel. The Times of Israel attends to the details, for example, in “Rewriting history, Abbas calls Israel a ‘colonial project’ unrelated to Judaism.” For some reason this speech hasn’t won the attention it deserves in the United States.

As I was just about to post these comments this morning I received the related column by Times of Israel editor David Horovitz reflecting on Abbas’s speech. David is a man of moderate views and temperament, but his disgust is evident in “Abbas couldn’t make peace with the Jews; he believes his own lies about us.” Read it for the true history with which David responds to Abbas’s lies.

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