Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas unsurprisingly devoted much of his U.N. General Assembly address to denouncing the “Israeli occupation of our territory” and demanding more international pressure against Israel to make concessions.
He claimed the Israelis have violated over a thousand U.N. resolutions, along with “international law and international legitimacy.”
The head of the Palestinian Authority is invited to address the General Assembly’s debate on an annual basis despite not being the head of government of a country.
“Despite this painful reality, and thirty years after the Oslo Accords, which Israel has totally discarded, we still maintain hope that your esteemed organization will be able to implement its resolutions demanding an end to the Israeli occupation of our territory,” he said.
Abbas demanded a Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem as its capital” carved from Israel’s borders as of 1967, meaning Israel’s borders before it obtained control of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Old Jerusalem from attacking Arab powers in the Six Day War.
Israeli leaders, notably including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have long rejected such demands because they say returning to the 1967 borders would make Israel impossibly difficult to defend, inviting another conflict like the Six Day War.
“As I stand before you here, the Israeli racist right-wing government continues its attacks on our people, and through its army and its racist terrorist settlers, continues to intimidate and kill our people, destroy homes and property, steal our money and resources, and detain the bodies of the martyrs,” Abbas charged.
“Detain the bodies of the martyrs” was a reference to Israel’s policy of “postmortem detention.” Israeli officials say the practice is necessary for convincing the Palestinians to return the bodies of slain Israelis, to discourage future terrorist attacks, and to prevent angry crowds from forming at funeral services for terrorists.
“This is being done in full view of the world, and without any deterrence, punishment, or accountability, and the leaders and ministers of this government have even been bragging about their apartheid policies on our people under occupation,” Abbas said.
Accusations of “apartheid” against Israel have become a popular criticism, and a few retired Israeli officials have leveled the charge themselves, most recently including former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state,” Pardo said in an early September interview.
President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at United Nations headquarters on September 21, 2023 in New York City. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
“The occupation government also persists in violating the City of Jerusalem and its people, assaulting our Islamic and Christian sacred sites, and violating the historical and legal status of the holy sites, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque, which international legitimacy has recognized as an exclusive place of worship for Muslims alone,” Abbas charged.
“The occupying power is also feverishly digging tunnels under and around Al-Aqsa Mosque, threatening its collapse, or the collapse of parts of it, which will lead to an explosion with untold consequences,” he added.
Israel has been conducting archaeological excavations around Al-Aqsa for many years, and Palestinian officials have been accusing them of trying to destroy or subvert the mosque for just as long. Palestinian complaints that Israel was proceeding with “suspicious haste” became more common over the past year. Some critics of the excavation accuse the Israelis of seeking to uncover archaeological evidence that would undermine Muslim claims to the land occupied by the mosque.
The tunnels became a topic of especially heated controversy in May when the Israeli government decided to hold a cabinet meeting in one of the tunnels. Palestinian officials accused the Israeli government of pandering to extremists by holding the meeting and demanded closer U.N. scrutiny of the excavation project.
Abbas and his officials have made claims that are far more aggressive regarding Jerusalem’s holy sites than Israel’s excavations. In 2017, Abbas’ religious adviser Mahmoud al-Habash declared that the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, should be wholly controlled by Muslims and reserved solely for their devotions. Habash repeated that “prayer, management, and ownership” of the Western Wall plaza should be “the exclusive right of Muslims” in 2022.
Abbas himself repeated the claim to a U.N. committee in May 2023. “Ownership of the al-Buraq Wall and al-Haram al-Sharif belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic waqf alone,” he said, using Muslim names for the Western Wall and Temple Mount, respectively.
At the General Assembly on Thursday, Abbas accused the U.N. of remaining “silent” about “all the flagrant violations of international law that are being committed by Israel.”
“Why are sanctions not imposed on it for ignoring and violating international resolutions, as is the case with other countries? Why practice double standards when it comes to Israel?” he asked.
Israel was, in truth, the target of more critical resolutions from the U.N. than all other nations combined last year, including countries launching brutal wars of aggression and practicing genocide. Over the past decade, Israel was the subject of twice as many critical U.N. resolutions as the entire rest of the world.
Abbas also castigated “both Britain and America for their roles in the fateful Balfour Declaration,” along with everyone else who “had a role in the catastrophe and tragedy of our people.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (L) meets with United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (R) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, United States on September 20, 2023. (Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Abbas simultaneously demanded harsh unilateral punitive measures against Israel and a “peace conference,” which he portrayed as “the last opportunity to salvage the two-State solution and to prevent the situation from deteriorating more seriously, threatening the security and stability of our region and the entire world.”
“I can neither understand, nor accept, that some States, including America and European States, are reluctant to recognize the State of Palestine, which the United Nations has accepted as an observer State. These States confirm every day their support for the two-State solution, but they recognize only one of them, which is Israel,” he fumed.
Abbas chose not to mention the many incidents of Palestinian violence or take any responsibility for them. In fact, he argued that Israel was wholly responsible for all of the failures of his government (Abbas is currently serving the 18th year of the four-year presidential term he won in 2005). He even claimed the Israelis were responsible for his perpetual decisions to postpone every election that might knock him out of power.
“Israel bears full responsibility, through its control over all the crossing points and dividing lines between the occupied West Bank and its surroundings, and for the deliberate spread of weapons, drugs, and criminal killings taking place in Arab cities inside Israel, part of which is spilling over into our areas, creating a great threat to the societal security of Palestinians everywhere in our territory,” he asserted.
Abbas’ Fatah Calls for ‘Escalation’ to Counter Bahrain Workshop https://t.co/jTvSjc5Url
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 23, 2019
“For several years, we have presented our Palestinian narrative, and the story of our people, which has been deliberately distorted by the Zionist and Israeli propaganda. We are relieved that the peoples of the world and many of its countries have begun to believe our narrative and sympathize with it, after having been misled for decades,” Abbas said near the end of a lengthy speech in which he took responsibility for nothing, admitted to absolutely no wrongdoing by Palestinian terrorists, and offered not the slighted concession toward achieving the peace he claimed to desire.
He did, however, find time to demand more money:
I must tell you that as long as we continue to suffer under the abhorrent Israeli occupation, we will continue to need financial assistance from the international community, in addition to the crucial provision of financial support to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). We are thankful to the international community for the support it has given us to build our State and our economy, and we look forward to the continuation of this support until the occupation ends and we are able to rely on ourselves.
Abbas did not mention it, but he is surely aware that contrary to his triumphalist rhetoric about the “Palestinian narrative,” international donors are growing more nervous about financing his government. In May, the European Parliament passed its fourth annual resolution in a row condemning the Palestinian Authority for infusing school textbooks with “problematic and hateful” material.
The latest resolution was the most critical one to date, and the first in which the European Parliament explicitly threatened to withhold future funding unless the Palestinian Authority brings its textbooks up to U.N. standards by deleting “all anti-Semitic references” and “examples that incite hatred and violence.”