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The History of Palestinian Authority Rejectionism Towards Israel
Jordan’s King Abdullah II speaks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, during a group photo of Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, March 31, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Zoubeir Souissi / Pool / File.
For decades, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has rejected Israel’s right to exist. This rejectionism has a long historical background, and is deeply rooted in antipathy towards Jews and a Jewish state in any borders.
In February 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin explained why Britain would not continue its Palestine Mandate:
His Majesty’s Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles … For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. [emphasis added]
[Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, UK parliament, February 18, 1947]
The Palestinian Arabs’ “essential principle” in 1947 of rejecting “Jewish sovereignty” in any part of the land was adopted in 1965 as the core ideology of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This “principle” was reconfirmed in 1988 as the endgame of the PLO’s program to destroy Israel in stages, and it continues today as key to the doctrine of the PA.
While the PA on occasion has recognized the fact of Israel’s existence — solely for public relations reasons — it has never wavered in its rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
Even in front of world leaders at the United Nations last year, Mahmoud Abbas defined Israel as a “foreign entity,” established both “for colonialist purposes”and to “get rid of the Jews.” He worded it as “two birds with one stone.” Abbas did not need to elaborate any further.
The PA leadership close to him, his colleagues in Fatah, and PA children’s education programming on official PA channels all openly reiterate the same ideology on a regular basis — that Israel is an artificial state with no right to exist, and thus is destined for oblivion.
As Israel celebrated 76 years of independence this year, this rejectionist ideology remains the most fundamental message of the internal Palestinian conversation.
Just days before Israel’s Independence Day, PA TV featured a preacher who articulated the vision: “It is our duty to fight, confront, and carry out Ribat [i.e., religious conflict] in this land … and Allah willing Palestine will return free, from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.”
The anticipation of Israel’s destruction is not limited to TV sermons, but is the fundamental message that has been passed on to Palestinian children, constituting the essence of its vision for the future.
This map in Fatah’s children’s magazine tells the whole story.
[Fatah’s children’s magazine Waed, Issue 41, April 2022]
“Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” is not a Hamas slogan that was initiated after October 7. It is a PA/Fatah slogan that has been adopted by all Palestinian terror factions as well as their supporters around the world.
The four critical drivers of PA rejectionism
The PA has built its rejection of Israel’s right to exist into a full science with a number of critical components:
1. The PA denies all the fully documented Israeli/Jewish history in the Land of Israel/Judea. The following are some of the thousands of examples of the PA’s transmission of this message:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina: “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the foundational pillars of history, and they are Palestinian holy places, and not Jewish holy places. There is no historical proof — despite all the excavations — that [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land.”
[Official PA TV News, March 20, 2023]
Director of the National Action Committee in Jerusalem Muhammad Jadallah: “The false Israeli narrative, the alleged Jewish Israeli narrative, that they have relics in this city [of Jerusalem] — [None] of them for dozens of years have succeeded in finding [even] a tiny bit that belongs to them from any period of the long historical periods … Their narrative is false, but they want to falsify the true story, the correct story, the Palestinian Arab Islamic Christian story. They claim that they have roots in this city — and they completely understand that they have no roots.”
[Official PA TV, To the Capital We Will Go, April 30, 2023]
These denials come from the highest levels of the PA.
Abbas’ Advisor and PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “It has been proven that the continuous truth in this land is the Palestinian people, whose Canaanite ancestors lived in it more than 5,000 years ago … There was no First Temple and no Second Temple, and there also will be no Third Temple.” [emphasis added]
[WAFA, official PA news agency, March 20, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “It is not possible, if we are objective, to call the human Israeli component a ‘nation.’ There never existed a Jewish nation nor a nation of Israel. They [Europeans] invented this issue in order to gather the Jews for colonialist goals that we all know.”
[PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Facebook page, Feb. 28, 2024]
2. Once the PA denies Israel’s history and right to exist, it then must explain why the Jews are there at all.
To do so, it defines Israel as a colonial implant intended both to establish Western control and to solve the world’s Jewish problem by finding a place to dump the “human waste.” The following are some examples, starting with Mahmoud Abbas at the UN in 2023:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas at the UN: “Britain and the United States … decided to establish and plant a foreign entity in our historic homeland, for colonialist purposes of their own… The truth is that these Western countries wanted to get rid of the Jews–and profit from them in Palestine. ‘Two birds with one stone.’” [emphasis added]
[Archive news, YouTube channel, May 15, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “The colonialist states conspired together to issue [the Balfour Declaration] — and foremost among them was Britain and America — in order to get rid of the Jews in Europe on the one hand and establish a so-called national home for them in Palestine on the other hand. The truth is that they wanted to build an outpost to protect their interests in our region.”
[Official PA TV, Feb. 12, 2023]
Palestinian researcher Muhammad Al-Yahya: “The Jews are arrogant by nature. They don’t accept the other. They always stick to themselves. The Europeans hated them and wanted to get rid of them, and therefore one of the interests of the European states… was to get rid of the Jews, so the idea started of establishing a Jewish state for the Jews… Their [Jewish] thinking is based on racism that caused them to be hated everywhere. The Zionist thinking is based on them being ‘God’s chosen people.’
In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in what was leaked of [it], there is a parenthetical sentence that they are fulfilling that has caused them to be hated by all peoples: ‘God created the land, and afterwards He created man to prepare the land for them [the Jews], and afterwards He created them so that they would be masters over them.’ The pure Jew has the outlook that he is of the people chosen by God.”
[Official PA TV, Returning, Jan. 17, 2023 and Feb. 27, 2023, May 14, 2023]
Palestinian political commentator Kamal Zakarneh: “They [Europe and America] are demonstrating a lot of solidarity with the Israeli occupation … Europe and America — succeeded in getting rid of the Jews, whom they themselves view as human waste, and they threw them out into Palestine. They created a place for them far away from them, far away from Europe. They don’t want reverse migration now and their [Jews’] return to Europe again.
They, Europe and America, are prepared to provide all the aid they can … to strengthen the occupation and leave the Jews where they are. [US President Joe] Biden said this during the events in Israel: ‘If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.’ He would have invented it to absorb the human waste.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Oct. 24, 2023]
3. Nevertheless, denial of Israel’s history and right to the land is not enough to create a Palestinian right. So, the PA invented a history of its own, claiming that it represents a 5,000-year-old people who are descendants of Canaanites:
PA Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities Director of Historical Sites Dirgham Al-Fares: “The Palestinian people today is a continuation of the original residents from the Stone Age … There was no monotheistic religion throughout the Iron Age. The Jewish religion formulated during the period of Babylonian Exile, and the ones who formulated it and developed it and developed the concept of divinity (i.e., monotheism) were our ancestors. We accepted the Jewish religion, and the Christian religion, and Islam.
Therefore, we always say that everything on the land of Palestine and the antiquities within it are a heritage of the Palestinian people, in any period and regardless of the character of the place, whether it is a place of worship, a synagogue, a church, or a mosque. And here a question could pop up for some people:
If we are the ancient Jews and we own the cultural heritage, then who is the occupier? … It is the right of the Jews in the world to come to Palestine for religious tourism, but under the sovereignty of the Palestinian state and according to the laws of the Palestinian state… Everything on the Palestinian land is ours. We own the land and the history… When I speak about Palestine, I’m of course talking about historical Palestine (i.e., both Israel and the PA areas.) These are our antiquities and this is what is proven by archaeology and the historical truths.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Sept. 13, 2023]
This is of course egregiously false. There is no Palestinian Arab history before the modern period. Absent of any such evidence, the PA, at its highest levels, simply denies whatever does not fit into its narrative:
Official PA TV host: “This site [i.e., the Western Wall] will remain the Al-Buraq Wall, to which only the Muslims have a right. Not as the occupation [i.e., Israel] claims in its mistaken Zionist narrative that this is the Wailing Wall. And it will return to its original state when the transient settlers leave … The Jews used the site as a place of worship only after the publication of the British Balfour Declaration in 1917, and this wall was not part of the alleged Jewish Temple.”
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, June 14, 2023]
To reinforce its efforts to establish a false history, PA leaders in the official PA-owned media often combine creation of a new narrative together with its denial of Israel’s right to exist:
Official PA TV commentator Iyad Abu Zneit: “We [Palestinians] are first of all Canaanites, and therefore we have been in this land for many years … The Israelis are the ones who need to return to the lands they came from, lands throughout the world. Israel by its very nature is a foreign element. They established a state and afterwards brought residents to it.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 14, 2023]
4. Finally, since Israel has no right to exist according to the PA, justice will only be achieved when Israel is removed and all Jews are expelled.
This was articulated by a senior Fatah official just three weeks after Hamas’ October 7 massacre. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his top religious advisor have also said it many times before:
Fatah Secretary in Spain Ahmed Ma’arouf: “Let them [Israelis] learn from history: There is no occupier who remained … The top priority is to strengthen the resolve of the Palestinian people on the Palestinian land in order to continue to resist. The day will come when we will sweep away this occupation from every centimeter [of Palestine].” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Oct. 29, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas:“We have been the owners of this land since this land’s existence … We will remain in this land forever, while the attackers [Israelis] have no place in Jerusalem and no place here.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV News, Jan. 17, 2022]
Abbas Advisor and PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “[The] claim that this land is sacred to the Jews is based on fables … The foreigners [Jews] will leave, today or tomorrow. This land spits out its scum. It spits out everything that is foreign to it, and it will not be anything but ours.”
[Official PA TV Jan. 10, 2020]
Preacher on PA TV: “It is our duty to fight, confront, and carry out Ribat [i.e., religious conflict] in this land as much as we can. It is our duty to reject all the expressions of settlement, colonialism, and occupation … We reject all the expressions of the occupation [i.e., Israel], and Allah willing Palestine will return free, from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, May 10, 2024]
Fatah’s children’s education likewise defines Israelis as “invaders” and promises that every single Jew will leave the land:
“There is no invader who invaded this land and did not leave it defeated in the end, and that is what will happen to the Zionist invaders.” [emphasis added]
[Waed, Issue 27, p. 23]
Algeria received independence in 1962, after 132 years of colonialism … At the end of the period of French colonialism, the number of French settlers in Algeria stood at approximately a million, and they all fled to France and left Algeria to the Arabs and Algerians.
Algeria’s experience assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end. [emphasis added]
[Waed, Fatah’s children’s magazine, ages 6 -15, Issue 28, p. 25]
The PA science of rejecting Israel is perhaps summed up best by this recent staff editorial in its official daily:
Seventy-six years of Nakba, the handiwork of the colonialist West that used it to strike and wound Palestine, which is still bleeding … Seventy-six years, and every Palestinian has his story about this great injustice… [The Israelis] took control of the land with violent colonialist behavior, and with an even more violent falsification. They claimed that the land is a land without a people for a people without a land and gave it a name [Israel] that would fit their fabricated Zionist narrative, which is still not recognized and which is unable to erase the name that the land has had since the dawn of history. Therefore, our [Palestinian] poet [Mahmoud Darwish] wrote: ‘It was called Palestine, and it is now called Palestine’… The stone of the youth in the great [first] Intifada (i.e., Palestinian wave of violence and terror against Israel, approximately 200 Israelis murdered, 1987-1993)… is still in their hand against the occupation (i.e., Israel). Their call is still heard, the call of freedom and independence, until the Nakba is defeated along with all the injustice and darkness that it caused, and this will certainly happen.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida website, May 15, 2024]
Israel moves forward in 2024 while PA remains stuck in 1947
While Israel in 2024 celebrates 76 years of independence accompanied by incredible growth, progress, and creativity that have benefited all humanity, the Palestinian Authority remains trapped in 1947, rejecting any “Jewish sovereignty” and refusing to live beside Israel as a neighbor.
Worse yet, the PA has indoctrinated the entire Palestinian population with these and many other hate messages together with justification and glorification of terror. This makes peaceful coexistence alongside the current Palestinian population an impossibility, and the creation of a Palestinian state an existential threat for Israel.
It is not enough for the PA to simply recognize the reality that Israel happens to exist. If it wishes to make any progress, it must accept the principle of Israel’s right to exist, reject its own falsifications of history, accept the truth of Israel’s history, and actively reeducate its population.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
The Oxford Circus station in London’s Underground metro. Photo: Pixabay
JNS.org – In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. This week, my peg is another act of violence—one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community. According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to The Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain—not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however. Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minority. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews—with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry—are willing to compromise on. What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time. We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well? I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel—firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of power; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States—a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora. Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.” The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death. As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life—which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
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Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from the terrorist organization Hamas called the changes made by the US to the ceasefire proposal “vague” on Saturday night, speaking to the Arab World Press.
The official said that the US promises to end the war are without a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and agree to a permanent ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden made “vague wording” changes to the proposal on the table, although it amounted to an insufficient change in stance, he said.
“The slight amendments revolve around the very nature of the Israeli constellation, and offer nothing new to bridge the chasm between what is proposed and what is acceptable to us,” he said.
“We will not deviate from our three national conditions, the most important of which is the end of the war and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” he added.
Another Hamas official said that the amendments were minor and applied to only two clauses.
US President Joe Biden made the amendments to bridge gaps amid an impasse between Israel and Hamas over a hostage deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire have been met with Israeli leaders vowing that the war would not end until the 120 hostages still held in Gaza are released and the replacement of Hamas in control of the Palestinian enclave.
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Sacred Spies?
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – How far away is theory from practice? “In theory,” a new system should work. But it doesn’t always, does it? How many job applicants ticked all the boxes “theoretically,” but when it came to the bottom line they didn’t get the job done?
And how many famous people were better theorists than practitioners?
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle taught not only philosophy but virtue and ethics. The story is told that he was once discovered in a rather compromised moral position by his students. When they asked him how he, the great Aristotle, could engage in such an immoral practice, he had a clever answer: “Now I am not Aristotle.”
A similar tale is told of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He, too, expounded on ethics and morality. And like Aristotle, he was also discovered in a similarly morally embarrassing situation.
When challenged, his rather brilliant answer was: “So what if I teach ethics? People teach mathematics, and they’re not triangles!”
This idea is relevant to this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, which contains the famous story of Moses sending a dozen spies on a reconnaissance mission to the Land of Israel. The mission goes sour. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise to see the best way of conquering Canaan. But it resulted in 10 of the 12 spies returning with an utterly negative report of a land teeming with giants and frightening warriors who, they claimed, would eat us alive. “We cannot ascend,” was their hopeless conclusion.
The people wept and had second thoughts about the Promised Land, and God said, indeed, you will not enter the land. In fact, for every day of the spies’ disastrous journey, the Israelites would languish a year in the wilderness. Hence, the 40-year delay in entering Israel. The day of their weeping was Tisha B’Av, which became a day of “weeping for generations” when both our Holy Temples were destroyed on that same day and many other calamities befell our people throughout history.
And the question resounds: How was it possible that these spies, all righteous noblemen, handpicked personally by Moses for the job, should so lose the plot? How did they go so wrong, so off-course from the Divine vision?
Naturally, there are many commentaries with a variety of explanations. To me personally, the most satisfying one I’ve found comes from a more mystical source.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his work Likkutei Torah, explains it thus: The error of the spies was less blatant than it seems. Their rationale was, in fact, a “holy” one. They actually meant well. The Israelites had been beneficiaries of the mighty miracles of God during their sojourn in the wilderness thus far. God had been providing for them supernaturally with manna from heaven every day, water that flowed from the “Well of Miriam,” Clouds of Glory that smoothed the roads and even dry cleaned their clothes. In the wilderness, the people were enjoying a taste of heaven itself. All their material needs were taken care of miraculously. With no material distractions, they were able to live a life of spiritual bliss, of refined existence and could devote themselves fully to Torah, prayer and spiritual experiences.
But the spies knew that as soon as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna would cease to fall and they would have to till the land, plow, plant, knead, bake and make a living by the sweat of their brow. No more bread from heaven, but bread from the earth. Furthermore, they would have to battle the Canaanite nations for the land. What chance would they then have to devote themselves to idyllic, spiritual pursuits?
So, the spies preferred to remain in the wilderness rather than enter the land. Why be compelled to resort to natural and material means of surviving and living a wholly physical way of life when they could enjoy spiritual ecstasy and paradise undisturbed? Why get involved in the “rat race”?
But, of course, as “holy” and spiritual as their motivation may have been, the spies were dead wrong.
The journey in the wilderness was meant to be but a stepping stone to the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt: entering the Promised Land and making it a Holy Land. God has plenty of angels in heaven who exist in a pure, spiritual state. The whole purpose of creation was to have mortal human beings, with all their faults and frailties, to make the physical world a more spiritual place. To bring heaven down to earth.
While their argument was rooted in piety, for the spies to opt out of the very purpose of creation was to miss the whole point. What are we here for? To sit in the lotus position and meditate, or to get out there and change the world? Yes, the spies were “holy,” but theirs was an escapist holiness.
The Torah is not only a book of wisdom; it is also a book of action. Torah means instruction. It teaches us how to live our lives, meaningfully and productively in the pursuit of God’s intended desire to make our world a better, more Godly place. This we do not only by study and prayer, the “theoretical” part of Torah but by acts of goodness and kindness, by mitzvot performed physically in the reality of the material world. Theory alone leaves us looking like Aristotle with his pants down.
Yes, it is a cliché but a well-worn truth: Torah is a “way of life.”
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