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:

“From the 11th century until the Holocaust that took place in Germany, the Jews — who moved to Western and Eastern Europe — were subjected to a massacre every 10-15 years. But why did this happen?” Abbas asked. His Shylock-inspired answer: “Not because of their religion, but rather their social role related to usury and banks.”

The Palestinian president then launched into a conspiracy theory whereby the Jewish state was actually established by European powers. “The truth is that Zionism was a colonial project with no relationship to Judaism, designed to plant a foreign presence in the land,” he said. According to Abbas, the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the British rulers of Palestine supporting a homeland for the Jewish people and the 1947 UN resolution partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state were attempts by European states to salvage their international standing, which was threatened with being supplanted in the Middle East and the Maghreb. That was why they sent the Jews “east of the Suez Canal” to “leave the states of the Middle East backward and unstable.”