In a speech ignoring Jewish ties to the holy land, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Israel a “colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism”.
Speaking on Sunday during a meeting in Ramallah, President Abbas also that implied that European Jews during the Holocaust chose to suffer “murder and slaughter” rather than emigrate to British-held Palestine, and alleged that Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion imported Jews from Yemen and Iraq to the country against their will.
He additionally claimed that Zionist leaders in the 1950s deliberately stirred trouble in Arab countries in order to forcibly move Middle Eastern Jews into Israel.
In his address, Abbas made no mention of the Jews’ historic presence in the holy land.
Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin condemned the PA President for promoting “terrible” anti-Jewish “conspiracies”.
President Rivlin said: “What we heard yesterday from Mahmoud Abbas was terrible. He returned back to the ideas he expressed decades ago, when they were no less terrible”.
