Palestinian President-For-Life Mahmoud Abbas, who has shown his impressive business acumen by accumulating a fortune of $400 million — though his P.A. salary has never surpassed $72,000 a year — is now full of righteous fury. He is alarmed that the endlessly cruel Israelis are at it again. This time, they want to build an elevator, so as to make it possible for disabled people and the elderly to visit the Cave of the Patriarchs. They even threaten to annex territory in the West Bank (to use its ancient Palestinian name) that has belonged to the Palestinian people for thousands of years.
MEMRI.org reports here on Abbas’ display of righteous anger. A summary is followed by excerpts from a transcript of his May 5 speech:
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a May 5, 2020 address that was posted on the Facebook page of Palestine TV that the countries of the world do not agree on where the coronavirus came from and that no serious effort is being made to find a vaccine or medicine for it. He also said that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Palestinian Authority has been dealing with the Deal of the Century and with potential Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, settlements in the West Bank, and the Cave of the Patriarchs. President Abbas declared that if Israel announces that it plans to annex even a single centimeter of any of these areas, the Palestinian Authority will consider itself no longer bound by any of the agreements that it has signed with Israel and the United States. In addition, he insisted that the correct number of Palestinian refugees from 1948 is 950,000, and not 850,000 or 250,000 as has been claimed by others.
The transcript of excerpts:
Mahmoud Abbas: “As you and I are hearing, the countries of the world disagree on many things and they disagree on where this [COVID-19] virus came from, how it appeared, what its nature is… Worse still, to this moment, there are no serious efforts to find a cure, a vaccine, or a medicine that can stop the existence of this disease.
He’s flatly wrong. There are numerous “serious efforts” to find a vaccine to prevent the coronavirus infection, and to find therapies to treat or cure those who have been infected. What he ought to have said, to be truthful, was that there are no “serious efforts,” indeed no efforts of any kind, in any Muslim country, to find a cure or a way to treat the coronavirus. There are many efforts in the advanced non-Muslim world. Has he not heard that Phase 2 trials of a vaccine from Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna are about to begin? Not heard that Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech have already begun human trials of their potential coronavirus vaccine? Has he heard nothing about Inovio or CanSino, or several dozen other companies working on potential vaccines and therapies?
And then – how embarrassing for Mahmoud Abbas! – what about all the “serious efforts” being made in tiny Israel, which has at least four potential vaccines, and possibly more, already in the works? Has he heard nothing about the vaccine developed at the Migal Galilee Research Institute? Or about the work of Professor Jonathan Gershoni at Tel Aviv University? What about the advances being made at the Israel Institute for Biological Research on an “antibody that attacks the virus in a monoclonal way and can neutralize it within the bodies of those ill”? And other Israeli scientists are also making “serious efforts” on therapies for those who have the disease. Hasn’t he heard about Pluristem’s placenta-based cell-therapy product , or Zion Medical’s drug Gamarra? Or what about the dozen Israeli advances in diagnostic tests? There are “serious efforts” going on, President-for-Life Abbas needs to be informed, but I don’t think he’d be pleased to hear about some of the places where that is happening.
“In the midst of this tragedy, we have been dealing with the Deal of the Century and with the annexation declared by… Well, the Israelis still haven’t officially declared the annexation of the Jordan Valley, of the Dead Sea, of the settlements, and of the Cave of the Patriarchs. They are now focusing – and I am saying this with the press present…The Israeli government is now focusing on the Cave of the Patriarchs. They want to take a few square meters to do something. We will consider this the beginning of the annexation.
The Cave of Machpelah, or Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron, is the second holiest site in Judaism; only the Temple Mount is considered more holy. It is far less important in Islam, coming after Mecca, Medina, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and with a half-dozen other Muslim sites vying for fourth place in significance. According to Jewish belief, the cave and the adjoining field were purchased by Abraham some 3700 years ago. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah were all later buried in the same Cave of Machpelah. These are considered the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people.
About 700 years ago, the Mamelukes converted the Cave into a mosque, and forbade Jews from entering it..When Israel took control of the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1967, it chose to share the site with Muslims, dividing the structure into a synagogue and a mosque.
Now the Israeli government wants to make the second holiest site in Judaism wheelchair accessible, by building an elevator. For this they will need to take a few square meters of Palestinian-owned land. One million visitors a year come to the Cave of the Patriarchs..Some of them are unable to climb the stairs to the entry. The elevator that Israel proposes to build will allow the disabled, the elderly, pregnant women, and others who cannot climb their way to the halls of worship, to finally enter the site.And ,of course, that elevator will be available for use by Muslims as well as Jews.
Mahmoud Abbas is enraged at this attempt by Israel to make the second holiest site in Judaism accessible to everyone, including disabled, elderly, and pregnant Muslims. Why, Mahmoud Abbas himself one of the people – he’s 84 – whom the Israeli project would benefit. Were he not convulsed with hatred for Jews, this President-for-Life and Holocaust Denier would recognize the need for such a project, and be grateful to the Israelis for undertaking it.
His absurd tantrum must have been a sight to see:
“Therefore, if Israel announces that it plans to annex even a single centimeter of the Cave of the Patriarchs, the settlements, or the Jordan River, we will consider ourselves to be no longer bound by all the agreements that we have signed with them and with the Americans.”
“Why the Americans? Because they are the ones who brought the Deal of the Century and they are the ones who inspired the Israelis [to go on] with the annexation. They are the ones who pushed them towards this. So they cannot say to us: ‘We have nothing to do with this. Israel is making these decisions.’ The Deal of the Century came from America. All of the American officials talked about it multiple times – the Secretary of State and others. They said that this deal would be implemented. We will not wait for its implementation. The moment this is declared, we will consider ourselves to no longer be bound by all the agreements we signed and to which we committed ourselves – all of them, with no exception.”
Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t noticed, but the rest of us have — Israel hasn’t needed any “push” from the Americans to decide to hold onto territory which, as we know from the Mandate for Palestine, was always intended to be part of the Jewish National Home. The Israelis are well aware of their rights under the Mandate. They know that their claim did not expire when Jordan, purely as a “military occupier,” held the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) from 1949 to 1967. And they are also aware that U.N. Resolution 242, with a different rationale, reinforced that claim by recognizing Israel’s right to retain territory it deemed necessary in order for it to have “secure and recognized boundaries.” “Secure” means “defensible,” and the Israelis have determined that even if they decide to give the Palestinian Arabs some part of the West Bank for a state of their own – which they are under no obligation to do — they must hold onto the Jordan Valley, that lies athwart the invasion route from the east. And they have no intention of giving up any of the villages and cities (or “settlements”) that they have built in Judea and Samaria, on land to which they have an unassailable legal, historic, and moral claim, as recognized by the Mandate. These Jewish “settlements” are now home to nearly 500,000 Israelis; they will never be uprooted.
Abbas continued:
“The number of refugees who were driven out of their homes… A refugee is not someone who was expelled from his country. A refugee is someone who was expelled from his home. [The figure is] 950,000 refugees. I remember that [in 2000], when we went to negotiate in Camp David, the Israelis said: ‘There were 250,000 refugees, most of whom are dead, and we will see about compensations for the others…’ No! The official figure in the UN’s records is 950,000. A few days ago, I read in one of our media outlets that the figure was 800,000 or 850,000. No! It is 950,000.”
We all know that the definition of who is a “Palestinian refugee” has been fantastically inflated by the Arabs, who have managed to convince much of our giddy globe that, unlike any other group of refugees since time began, the “Palestinian” refugees are especially privileged, for their refugee status is an inheritable trait, so that the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (and so on) of those Arabs who originally left Mandatory Palestine or Israel just before, during, or just after the 1948-1949 war, are also deemed to be “refugees.” By the Arab count, there are over six million “Palestinian refugees.” By any normal reckoning, of the original refugees, fewer than 30,000 Palestinian Arabs are still alive.
Abbas says that “a refugee is someone who was expelled from his home.” That definition would certainly cut down on the number of Palestinian Arab refugees. For many of those Arabs who left did so not because they were “expelled,” but because they had been urged by the broadcasts both by their own leaders, and by Arab leaders abroad, to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies, and then, once the slaughter of the Jews had ended, they could safely return home, having avoided being caught in the middle of battles. When the Jews began winning the war, some Palestinian Arabs – knowing what their side would have done to the Jews had the Arab armies won –assumed that the Jews would behave the same way, so they naturally fled.
There were Jews, like the Mayor of Haifa, who pleaded with the Arabs to remain. But most Jews shared the view that David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary as the Arabs began fleeing: “We must afford civic and human equality to every Arab who remains, [but, he insisted,] it is not our task to worry about the return of the Arabs.” If Mahmoud Abbas thinks that the definition of a refugee is someone who is “expelled from his home,” then many of the Palestinian Arabs who left in 1948-1949 ought not be called “refugees.”
Abbas claims that the Israelis with whom he met at Camp David insisted that there were only “250,000 refugees.” That is a flat-out lie. No Israeli has ever claimed that low a figure. Mahmoud Abbas has simply pulled that number out of the thin air, counting on the ignorance and gullibility of his audience. He has also claimed that “the official figure [of Arab refugees] in the UN’s records is 950,000.” He repeats that figure “950,000” three times, in order to hammer it home. But there is no such figure in the UN records. There were two contemporaneous reports from UN bodies giving the number of Arabs who left “Palestine” between 1947 and 1949: the first records 711,000, while the second records 726,000 refugees. So where did Abbas get his figure of “950,000″ refugees? He took it from the records of UNRWA. But the records of UNRWA were – and are – notoriously inflated. Individuals have been listed more than once; Arabs who have died often are not taken off the rolls; children might be lent, or rented, by one Arab family to another, in order to increase the benefits for which the second family would be eligible. And there were also Arabs in the countries where the Palestinian “refugees” ended up, who would present themselves to UNRWA as “refugees” from “Palestine.” Thus Jordanian, Lebanese, and Syrian Arabs were able, as “Palestinian refugees,” to receive food, clothing, housing, and family allowances from UNRWA. And that’s where Mahmoud Abbas gets his figure of 950,000 — those swollen UNRWA rolls which bear little relation to the U.N. records on Arab refugees..
At the end of the war, according to that scrupulous historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict Ephraim Karsh, “the Israeli government set the number of Palestinian refugees at 550,000–600,000; the British Foreign Office leaned toward the higher end of this estimate. But within a year, as large masses of people sought to benefit from the unprecedented influx of international funds to the area, some 962,000 alleged refugees had been registered with the newly-established UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).”
There is one more thing that deserves mention, since President-For-Life Abbas has raised the matter of refugees. And that is the 850,000-900,000 Jews who fled for their lives from Arab lands – Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen — during the period 1947 to 1956, leaving behind tens of billions of dollars in property. There were far more Jewish refugees from Arab lands than there were Arabs who left “Palestine” in 1947-1949, but their story receives very little attention. In December 2019, Danny Danon, Israel’s combative ambassador at the U.N., first spoke of introducing in the General Assembly a resolution recognizing those Jewish refugees.
Mahmoud Abbas, of course, thinks it preferable that you not learn about any of this: not about the elevator for the disabled that Israel would like to build for Jews and Muslims alike, at the Cave of the Patriarchs, not about the territories assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, not about the significance of U.N. Resolution 242, not about the real number of Arab refugees from “Palestine,” not about the much larger number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
But why should we care what Mahmoud Abbas thinks about anything?
terry sullivan says
i seem to recall that yasser arafat had billions stashed away when he died–eu largesse?
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Arafat amassed a fortune of between $1 and $3 billion dollars. When he died, none of that money could be found. It was aid money Arafat had pocketed. The full story of his Grand Theft was revealed by his financial adviser Muhammed Rashid (who helped himself to a few hundred million dollars as well).
revereridesagain says
Yeah, but he’s so focused on how he’ll spend eternity! For example, how much does it cost to maintain 72 renewable virgin hookers for that long a span of time?
ploome says
yasser preferred males
curious george says
terry sullivan
+1
Compliments of the Clinton’s.
Uma Maheswar Nakka says
What these people do with all the many they loot during their career. They need to know about the last three wishes of Alexander The Great,
“Bury my body, do not build any monument, keep my hands outside so that the world knows the person who won the world had nothing in his hands when dying“. – Last words of Alexander the Great.
Paul Stein says
What a waste of our oxygen. Can anyone imagine making it one’s life work to embezzle millions from one’s fellows and continually work to come up with lies and pathetic excuses to distract the entire World from that?
elee says
This is not news, Muslims are scripturally required to violate any truce or treaty as soon as they think they can win by fighting. Would someone please tell first-world foreign services this little bit of eternal Muslim truth?
ploome says
Duty of the Muslim Towards These Treaties
Shaykh `Abdul Rahman `Abdul Khaliq
The last chapter from “Verdict on the Treaties of Compromise and Peace With the Jews”
Note: This piece represents the perspective of a Muslim scholar on the peace treaty and is presented here since their perspective is often ignored in the media and is important for the Muslims.
And now comes the most important question, that is: What is the duty today on the Muslim as regards these treaties?
The answer:
(1) The first duty is to firmly believe in their invalidity and that because they contain invalid conditions they were born dead the very day they were given birth to; because it is not lawful for the Muslim to conclude an agreement with the unbeliever for abandoning jihad and abrogating this religious duty, nor for giving up hostility towards the Jews and affirming love and amity for them; for this is leaving the millah. These treaties also contain provisions making it incumbent to screen out such Ayahs of the Quran and ahadith (statements) of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings of Allah be on him, that declare this enmity towards the Jews.
This undertaking constitutes a collusion with the unbelievers for concealing the Deen and knowledge and for suspending the Ayahs of the noble Quran and ahadith of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings of Allah be on him, that explain the essence of obligatory relationship with the Jews; and this in fact is driving the Muslims out of Islam and stripping the Ummah of its belief and history.
And since these treaties contain such conditions and stipulate them clearly, they are therefore invalid and it is not lawful for the Muslim to believe in them.
———————-read the rest
gravenimage says
Yes–this dates back to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, which the “Prophet” violated as soon as he had raided enough caravans to cement his power.
gravenimage says
Another Tantrum from Mahmoud Abbas
…………
This is grimly hilarious. Abbas doesn’t consider the “Palestinians” bound by any of their agreements with Israel now.