search
Alan Stein

The Mendacity of Mahmoud Abbas in His UN Speech

An abridged version of was published in the Waterbury Republican-American with the title “Palestinian leader lies to United Nations.”

I long ago learned that when a person or an organization points to Israel and proclaims “j’accuse,” the accusation is almost invariably false but, almost as invariably, it would be true if it was directed at the Palestinian Arabs. This has occurred with increasing frequency since the horrendous, barbaric terror attack perpetrated last October 7, primarily by Hamas but with the assistance of other terror groups in Gaza and thousands of ordinary Gaza “civilians,” with weapons, expertise and financing largely provided by Iran and Qatar.

A graphic example is provided each year when Mahmoud Abbas, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, the leader of the Palestinian Authority who is now in the twentieth year of his four year term, addresses the United Nations General Assembly.

More and more, that organization, established with so much idealism and hope in the aftermath of World War II, joins in the propagation of those false accusations and double standards. Indeed, just weeks ago, the General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a despicable resolution which, among other things, called for the ethnic cleaning of Jews from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. It also overwhelmingly recommended the acceptance of the non-existent “State of Palestine” as a member of the United Nations and Abbas was absurdly introduced as “His Excellency, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine.”

Here’s just a small sample of the lies and cultural appropriation which permeated Abu Mazen’s speech.

He began his speech by proclaiming “Palestine is our homeland, it is the land of our fathers, our grandfathers, it will remain ours” and closed by proclaiming “Our people will live on the land of their fathers and grandfathers as they have done for more than 6,000 years.”

It was just 1,400 years ago when, as part of the Muslim conquests, Arabs first began arriving in what Abbas calls Palestine. In modern terms, they came as settler colonialists, a term Palestinian Arabs falsely use to malign Israeli Jews. This was about half a millennium after an earlier groups of settler colonialists, the Romans, ethnically cleansed what was then called Judea of most of the indigenous people, the Jews, and renamed the area Syria Palaestina. Most of those now calling themselves Palestinians come from families that migrated to the Land of Israel far more recently – indeed, a substantial portion, perhaps even a majority, came to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by the Zionist pioneers – and only adopted the identity of Palestinian about six decades ago.

Abbas also appropriated for his recent interlopers the historical connection of the Jewish people to their holiest site, the Temple Mount, and falsely accused Israel of changing its status quo when it has been the Palestinians who have repeatedly done so.

He said “the al Aqsa mosque and its surroundings ladies and gentlemen is the exclusive property of Muslims.” Of course, the al Aqsa mosque was built on the Temple Mount, on the ruins of the Jewish Temples, roughly 1,600 years after King Solomon built the First Temple there. It is, by far, the holiest site in the world for the Jewish people. For Sunni Muslims, it is a distant third to Mecca and Medina, while it has no religious significance for Shiite Muslims.

Related to Abbas’ lies about the Temple Mount is his assertion that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, does not deserve to be a member because it has allegedly violated a commitment to adhere to UN Resolutions 181 and 194.

UN Resolution 181 was the Partition Plan, which the pre-state Zionists accepted despite its giving the Arabs nearly 90% of Palestine when one recognizes the British had decades earlier partitioned Palestine and given more than 3/4 of it to the Arabs to create what is today called Jordan. Despite the plan’s bias in their favor, the Arabs not only rejected, but launched a genocidal war aimed at destroying Israel the day after it was reestablished.

When it comes to Resolution 194, he refers to the provision calling for the repatriation of “refugees wishing to return to their homes.” He conveniently omits the next few words of that sentence: “and live in peace with their neighbors.” The refugees never exhibited a desire to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors, making that provision meaningless. Their descendants – there are likely fewer than 15,000 actual refugees still around – on October 7 graphically demonstrated their unwillingness to live in peace. Given that the youngest of the actual refugees were then 75 years old with very few of them in Gaza, it’s highly unlikely any refugees directly participated in October 7.

The same resolution also resolved that “religious buildings and sites in Palestine should be protected and free access to them assured.” Yet when those five Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, Jordan conquered the Old City in Jerusalem and occupied it until Israel recaptured it in 1967. Jordan didn’t just deny free access for Jews to their holiest site, the Temple Mount, but allowed absolutely no access.

To be honest, Israel has also violated that provision since it reconquered the Old City after Jordan attacked again in 1967. While, subject to unavoidable security precautions, it provides free access to the Temple Mount for Arabs, it severely restricts access for Jews and has allowed the Muslim Waqf to repeatedly decrease the access for Jews. When I first visited Jerusalem in 1980, I was able to enter both the al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I found it a very moving experience, one of the highlights of that life-changing visit. Today, Jews are barred from both sites, although Israeli forces sometimes have to enter the al Aqsa Mosque when terrorists are using it as an armory and as a base for terror attacks. And while Arabs have free, 24/7 access to the entire Temple Mount through no fewer than ten gates, Jews have access only a few hours a day, a few days a week, through just one gate and are also greatly restricted as to where on the Temple Mount they may go, not to mention being prohibited from praying.

Meanwhile, whereas in 1967 there was just one mosque on the Temple Mount, since then the Muslim Waqf has built four more, all illegally.

Successive Israeli governments have repeatedly made mistakes regarding the Temple Mount similar to the mistakes they made regarding Iran, Hezbollah and Gaza: they routinely allowed our enemies to get away with what were dismissed as minor changes in the status quo, or violations of written commitments, trying to keep things calmer in the short term at the price of greatly increasing the long term problems and dangers. In Gaza, this enabled October 7. In Lebanon, it enabled Hezbollah to install an estimated 150,000 rockets in violation of binding United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 and depopulate our northern towns for the last year. With Iran, it led to them becoming a nuclear threshold state. When it comes to the Temple Mount, we have effectively lost sovereignty over our holiest site.

Naturally, none of that is mentioned by Mahmoud Abbas, inverted the truth by referring to Jerusalem as “our eternal capital al-Quds” and saying it “is being subjected to entrenched campaigns to change its nature, to Judaize it, and to agress it and its holy sites and landmarks, to change its historic and legal status.”

Abbas also repeatedly called Israel’s necessary response to the atrocities of October 7 as a “genocide.” He didn’t just call Israel’s defensive war a genocide, but accused Israel of committing genocide since its reestablishment: “The massacres, crimes, and genocide that Israel has committed against our people since its establishment until today will not pass without accountability, and will not be forgotten, because no right is lost if there is a claimant.”

This is an inversion of the declared genocidal war launched by the Arab invaders in 1948, of Nasser’s explicit genocidal rhetoric in 1967 and the calls for genocide in Hamas’ charter, while Israel has arguably been waging the most humane war in history. Israel has taken more steps than any other army in history to avoid civilian casualties. The ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths has likely been less than 1 to 1, while the norm for modern urban warfare is in the neighborhood of 9 to 1. This was actually the subject of a United Nations Security Council Meeting on May 25, 2022.

Israel has not only kept the proportion of civilian casualties amazingly low, but has helped transfer massive amounts of food and other humanitarian supplies to the people in Gaza, something virtually unheard of in war. For example, Ukraine isn’t sending food to the people in Russia.

As I wrote at the start of this analysis, accusations against Israel are almost invariably false but would be true if made against the Palestinian Arabs.

Perhaps most sobering is the way Mahmoud Abbas received a standing ovation when he finished his litany of lies, while the next day many diplomats made a show of walking out of the chamber when the time came for the prime minister of the only democracy in the Middle East and world’s only Jewish state came to do something rarely done in the United Nations, speak the truth.

About the Author
Alan Stein is a retired mathematician (Ph.D. Courant Institute) and college professor (University of Connecticut) who was long active in Jewish communal affairs in the United States before deciding after retirment to spend winters in Israel, making aliyah with his wife in 2014 and splitting his time between Netanya and Natick, Massachusetts. He was CAMERA's Letter Writer of the Year in 2015 and enjoys playing tennis, bike riding, swimming, playing with computers and shopping at the shuk in Netanya.
Related Topics
Related Posts