Israel Policy Forum expresses its disgust over President Abbas’s words to the Fatah Central Committee delegitimizing Zionism, denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, and peddling conspiracy theories about the plight of European Jewry. It is impossible to view Abbas as a viable negotiating partner when he continues to deny the right of the Jewish people to their own national movement and when he continues to insist that the basic recognition of a Jewish homeland is the original sin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The injustice of Palestinians remaining stateless cannot and will not be rectified by a fever dream that wishes for a world in which Jews would also be stateless and in which Israel would not exist.
Words matter, and if Abbas’s commitment to nonviolence is worthy of praise, his commitment to vitriolic rhetoric is equally worthy of condemnation. Abbas’s unhinged screed provides ammunition to those who insist that the sole obstacle to peace is Palestinian denial of Israel’s legitimacy, making his hateful words instrumentally harmful as well as being utterly without merit in their own right. With his distortion of history and denial of reality, Abbas makes himself part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Israel and the Palestinians must reach a two-state solution that recognizes both sides’ legitimate claims and narratives, and President Abbas must unequivocally recognize these mutual rights if he is to be a credible partner in the quest for peace.
