While spouting lies about Israel and the Palestinians and making absurd historical revisions, Abbas called for an international peace conference by the middle of 2018 that will accept the “State of Palestine” as a full UN member with Jerusalem as its capital.
In his address to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of “acting as a state above the law” while calling for “an international peace conference by the middle of 2018 that will accept the “State of Palestine” as a full UN member” and make Jerusalem its capital.
“We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land 5,000 years ago and continued to live there to this day,” Abbas claimed, among other outrageous statements.
“A nation that invents its past has no future,” Education Minister Naftali Bennett tweeted in response. ““The ancestors of the Palestinians may have existed 5,000 years ago, but south of here, in the Arabian Peninsula. I recommend to [Abbas] to focus not on constructing an imaginary past but on creating a practical future.”
Abbas blamed the deadlock in peace talks on US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December as well as Israeli “permanent settlement colonization” in Judea and Samaria and what he described as Israel’s “disrespect” of Security Council resolutions.
He slammed Trump’s cuts in funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinians have nothing against Jews or Judaism, he claimed. Rather, the problem is the “occupiers of Palestinian land.”
The Palestinian leader repeated his rejection of the traditional US role as broker of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, noting its failure to achieve an agreement over the years.
The Trump Administration is nevertheless working on a peace plan. A delegation was present at the UN Tuesday, including American Mideast envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt as well as US Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded on Tuesday evening to the PA head’s remarks, stating, “Abbas said nothing new. He continues to run away from peace and continues to pay terrorists and their families $347 million.”