Abbas at UN disavows Jewish ties to Al-Aqsa, compares Israel to Nazis

There is no proof of Jewish ties to the area of the al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations on Monday as he referenced Judaism’s holiest site the Temple Mount and its adjacent Western Wall during a wide-ranging speech in which he compared Israel to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“They [Israel] dug under al-Aqsa… they dug everywhere and they could not find anything,” Abbas said.

He spoke during a special session of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, which in Arabic means “the catastrophe,” and is the Palestinian commemoration of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The UN also planned to hold a second Nakba Day event on Monday evening.

Israel has, in past years, waged a stiff diplomatic battle against Palestinian attempts at the UN to disavow its connection to the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, the third-holiest site in Islam.

It had also protested the UN General Assembly resolution approved last November to hold Nakba Day events for the first time at the organization’s headquarters in New York.

Abbas, in his speech, emphasized that “the ownership of the al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] and the al-Haram al-Sharif [Temple Mount] belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic Wakf alone.” He pointed to a 1930 League of Nations report which he said affirmed this conclusion. Abbas also repeated the claim, which Israel has denied, that Palestinians were not given freedom of worship on al-Aqsa.

During his speech, Abbas held the United States and the United Kingdom responsible for the permanent displacement of what he said was close to a million Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence.

These two countries “bear political and ethical responsibility directly for the Nakba of the Palestinian people because they took part in rendering our people a victim when they decided to establish and plant another entity [the Jewish people] in our historic homeland,” Abbas said.

The US and the UK did this for “their own colonial goals and objectives,” Abbas said, adding that “Israel would not have continued its hostility and aggression without the support it receives from these two countries.”

He took the UK to task for issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that recognized the Jewish right to a homeland in full coordination with the US, but did not recognize the self-determination of the Palestinians.

“These countries wanted to get rid of the Jews and benefit from their presence in Palestine,” he said. This was “a promise of those who do not own to those who do not deserve. Britain gave Palestine as a gift to Israel. Why Palestine? Give them another island somewhere else,” Abbas said.

Comparing Israel’s narrative to Nazi propaganda

He then compared Israel’s rendition of its historical narrative to the kind of misinformation put out by Goebbels during World War II.

“The Israelis and Zionists continue their false claims that Israel made the desert bloom. Palestine was a desert, and they made it blossom, a paradise. They can’t but lie. But what can we do? They lie and lie just like Goebbels. They lie, lie and lie until people believe.”

The early Zionists “falsely” claimed that “Palestine was a land without people” but this was never true, Abbas said, as he claimed that the Palestinians were descendants of the Biblical Canaanites. This was proven “in religious scriptures, including the Torah,” Abbas said.

“But the biggest lie is the claim that Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East… how can you have an occupation and still call yourself a democracy. It’s an oxymoron” to do so, Abbas said.

He clarified that the Palestinians were not “against Jews. We can not be against Jews, because Judaism is one of the three monotheistic religions. I believe in Judaism but I am against those who occupy my land,” Abbas said.

In his address, Abbas alternatively called for a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the pre-1967 lines and insisted that he was open to holding talks with Israel to achieve that goal.

At the same time, he also claimed Palestinian rights to both land within sovereign Israel as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.Abbas called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to land within the pre-1967 lines, a move that Israel has in the past opposed on the grounds that it undermines any possibility of a two-state solution.

Abbas told the UN it was important that there be a “return of the refugees to their towns and villages of which they were displaced so that this tragedy does not constitute a scar for humanity.”

The UN should implement the hundreds of resolutions it has issued upholding the rights of Palestinians, including Resolution 181 from 1947, which he said called for the establishment of an Arab state “for the Palestinian people on 44% of the total area of historic Palestine alongside the state of Israel.”

He did not mention that Israel accepted that resolution and that the Arab states rejected it, proceeding to launch an existential war against the nascent Jewish state, in what became known to Israelis as the 1948 War of Independence.Israel should be forced to accept Resolutions 181 and 194 on the return of Palestinian refugees or face suspension, Abbas said.

“We demand today officially” that the UN must insist that Israel respect “these resolutions or suspend Israel’s membership in the UN,” Abbas said.

He repeated his accusation that Israel had “committed 50 massacres” against the Palestinian people, charging that during the 1948 War, Israel had demolished 530 villages and led to the creation of 957,000 refugees, according to UN statistics.

The UN, he said, must recognize Palestine as a member state of the UN and provide the Palestinians with international protection, he said. This is particularly true, he claimed, given that members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have called for the displacement and expulsion of Palestinians.

“We will not repeat the event of 1948,” he said.

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