Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ April 30 speech to the Palestinian National Council at first went unnoticed by most Israelis and was given scant media coverage, though not for long. While the Palestinian leader was rewriting Jewish history, using racist language and denying the Holocaust, Israelis were riveted to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s live presentation of Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranian documents and CDs Netanyahu exhibited on all of Israel’s television channels left no room for Abbas on the agenda.
Otherwise, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman would not have missed this opportunity to condemn him immediately. They would have argued that they had been right all along in saying he was the main obstacle to peace. In fact, even those still espousing the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who saw Abbas as a potential negotiating partner will not be able to defend his outrageous remarks, which provide substantial grist to portray him as a hater of Jews, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Here are just a few quotes from his 90-minute speech in the West Bank city of Ramallah:
