#Mahmoud Abbas

[vyorei]

Live coverage of the 10th of January 2024 is now closed.

Here is a recap of today's major events.

It is 12am in Ireland now so I have to go to bed.

I'll be back to resume live updates in the afternoon, but due to the ICJ case taking place allegedly being public I may be watching it as it happens if it's streamed. I'll be trying to update during, it's hard not to be glued to a historic event as it occurs.

Also, before I leave, this link will let you buy olive tree saplings for Palestinian farmers. I hope one day I can visit the trees I donated and the farmers who will raise them:

For continuous updates while I'm gone, click the link below:

[hero-israel]

Regarding this thread, in which I am blocked from responding:

@trailofstardust the thread was specifically about Hebron and so was my response, particularly regarding the unrelenting cruelty of forbidding Jewish access to the Tomb of the Patriarchs for 700+ years.

"Something their grandparents did" - again concerning Hebron, yes. "Fearful that Israeli soldiers would exact retribution for the 1929 massacre of the city's Jewish community, Hebron's residents flew white sheets from their windows and rooftops."

But this did occur in other parts of Palestine too, precisely because death-level oppression of Jews had been so widely enjoyed. As Mahmoud Abbas said about himself and his parents in Safed: "People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations - particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising... This was in the memory of our families and parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale - saving our lives and our belongings."

As for "groups being interchangeable": there certainly were multiple distinct groups oppressing and massacring Jews over the years, and you can check my tags for a lot of content specifically about Muslims or Christians or Ottomans or Arabs or Palestinians each. In the specific context of the ugliness and tensions in Israeli-occupied Hebron, the point is that all prior landlords were worse.

In the 21st century, "what your grandparents did" should not determine how people are treated. I want better conditions for Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere, including their own contiguous state. But I will not sit quietly for an ahistorical litany of how bad things are in Hebron only NOW, after the Fire Nation attacked.

[eretzyisrael]

by Bassam Tawil

Palestinians have a custom of celebrating in the streets every time Israel is attacked or a Jew is murdered by terrorists.

It is hard, if not impossible, to find one senior Palestinian official who is willing to criticize his own people for celebrating terrorist attacks. It is also hard, if not impossible, to find one senior Palestinian official who is willing to condemn the October 7 atrocities and massacres against Israelis. Palestinian leaders have good reason not to speak out: they are afraid of being killed by their own people.

Last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, ignored the Hamas attack and instead accused Israel of committing "massacres," "crimes," and "genocide" against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Needless to say, Abbas also ignored the fact that a large number of Palestinians expressed support for the Hamas-led October 7 attack and took to the streets to celebrate the brutal mass-murder of Israeli women, children and the elderly.

Palestinian leaders who do not have the courage, or are unwilling, to denounce terrorism will never be able to call on their people to recognize Israel's right to exist, let alone make peace with it. Palestinians who celebrate the murder of their neighbors are not ready for a state, which will undoubtedly be used as a springboard to slaughter more Jews and to try to destroy Israel.

There is no excuse for celebrating murder. A society that celebrates murder will never be a partner for peace. True peace will only come when Palestinian leaders values their people's lives more than celebrating the murder of Jews.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Nan Jacques Zilberdik

The US has announced that it’s giving the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank additional humanitarian aid worth $336 million.

But in response to all the US support during the war (and prior), the Palestinian Authority (PA) is relentlessly demonizing the US as being the aggressor and mastermind behind Israel’s war against the Hamas and Hezbollah terror organizations, regardless of the fact that both terror organizations first attacked and continue to attack Israel and Israeli civilians.

Worse still, three days ago, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman also blamed the US for “the continuing chaos, wars, and instability” in the region:

Official Spokesman for the [PA] Presidential Office Nabil Abu Rudeina [said] … the successive American administrations bear responsibility for the continuing chaos, wars, and instability through their mistaken policy and provision of political, monetary, and military support for the continuation of the occupation [i.e., Israel], which has encouraged it to commit more crimes against our people and against the peoples of the region in Syria and Lebanon, alongside the ongoing threats against other regions.” [emphasis added] [WAFA, official PA news agency, Sept. 29, 2024]

While many Western governments have been highly critical of Israel’s response to Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks during the ongoing 2023 Gaza war, and have supported the idea of having the PA take power in Gaza after it is done, the PA and its ruling Fatah party have, on the other hand, made their hostility to the West clear in numerous recent conspiracy theories and statements of demonization.

Even as Abbas was again welcomed in the US last week, his PA and Fatah officials are busy bad-mouthing the US administration, accusing it of being behind the war and using Israel as its pawn.

[secular-jew]

Modern Islam = repackaged Nazism and needs to be understood in this context.

[girlactionfigure]

Palestinians reject Israel’s demands to save PA

The Palestinian Authority rejected Israel's terms for helping to prevent the PA's collapse and vowed to continue making payments to the families of terrorists.

The Palestinian Authority on Monday rejected Israel’s demands for helping prevent the collapse of the PA.

PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh vowed to continue the legal-diplomatic effort against Israel in the international arena and rejected the demand to stop payments made by the PA to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned while carrying out attacks against Israelis.

The security cabinet on Sunday decided that Israel will take steps to prevent the collapse of the PA, while advancing the demand that the Palestinians cease their activities against Israel in the international legal-diplomatic arena, end incitement, and stop payments to families of terrorists and illegal construction in Area C.

More: Jerusalem Post

[dadsinsuits]

Mahmoud Abbas

[daddies-i-love]

Benjamin Netanyahu & Mahmoud Abbas

[quotesfrommyreading]

Don’t blame the Holocaust on the Jews. This past May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked how his country could credibly claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine when the latter is led by an elected Jewish president. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood,” he replied, later adding, “Some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews.” While these claims may sound bizarre, they are far from isolated.

As I wrote at the time, ever since World War II, people have attempted to pin the Holocaust on the Jews. A 1938 Gallup poll found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault.” Another 11 percent said it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as Hitler rose to power and implemented his anti-Semitic architecture, a large majority of Americans blamed European Jews for their own oppression.

This victim-blaming has persisted to the present day. David Icke, one of our era’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, has claimed that wealthy Jews bankrolled the Holocaust, asserting, “The Warburgs, part of the Rothschild empire, helped finance Adolf Hitler.” (Icke has also said that “Hitler was a Rothschild.”) The anti-Semitic book in which this passage appeared was later enthusiastically promoted by the author Alice Walker in The New York Times.

Along similar lines, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, devoted his entire doctoral dissertation to the conspiracy theory that “Zionist” Jews had collaborated with the Third Reich in order to spur Jewish immigration to Palestine. (The dissertation also claims that no Jews were murdered in the Nazi gas chambers, and that the overall number of Jewish victims was exaggerated by several million.)

Others do not go so far as to blame Europe’s Jews for their own genocide, but instead try to use their murders to attack their descendants, insinuating that this or that group of Jews “failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.” But Auschwitz wasn’t a philosophy seminar with some unfortunate fatalities. And the Holocaust was not some moral test that the Jewish world failed, but a moral atrocity committed against it.

In all of these cases, those who weaponize a people’s greatest trauma to bludgeon them once more inadvertently reveal the very inhumanity that made such brutality possible in the first place.

  —  How Not to Talk About the Holocaust

[older-is-better]

Mahmoud Abbas.

[vyorei]

[eretzyisrael]

by Stephen M. Flatow

Abbas has made similar outlandish claims on many other occasions. In one 2019 speech at Jalazoun, near Ramallah, he declared: "This land belongs to the people who live on it. It belongs to the Canaanites, who lived here 5,000 years ago. We are the Canaanites!”

Ironically, those darn archaeologists have also documented that the Canaanites, with whom Abbas so closely identifies, practiced child sacrifice. And, of course, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas practice various kinds of child sacrifice of their own, such as using sending children to carry out terrorist attacks and using Arab children as human shields against Israeli counter-terror strikes.

Perhaps the Palestinian Arab leaders could claim to be the spiritual descendants of the Canaanites, even though they are not their literal descendants because the Canaanites were wiped out by Assyria and others.

The Palestinian Arabs and their supporters are naturally frustrated that archaeologists have never found evidence to back up their cause. No evidence of any “Palestinian” kingdoms, no ancient artifacts showing a distinctly “Palestinian” culture or society. That’s because the Arabs in the Land of Israel arrived after Mohammed and began identifying themselves as Palestinians only in the 20th century, and even then, only as a propaganda tactic in their war against the Jews.

No wonder the European Union—which passionately supports the Palestinian cause—is so worried about the archaeologists. Last year, EU officials drew up a document outlining their strategy for helping the PA to claim territory which—in accordance with the Oslo accords—is located in the Israeli controlled region known as Area C.

One part of the EU document referred to the need “to monitor Israeli archaeological digs in Area C.” Why are the EU and the PA anxious about archaeological digs? Because, as Prof. Garfinkel has reminded us, every time archaeologists dig, they find fresh evidence of the Jews’ deep roots in the Holy Land—and no evidence of any “Palestinian” roots at all.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

The Palestinian Authority is mulling the possibility of declaring financial bankruptcy, Kan Reshet Bet, Israel’s Public Broadcasting service, reported on Wednesday. The decision would entail the complete closure of P.A. government offices, leading to possible instability in Judea and Samaria, as the P.A. is the largest employer in the areas under its control. A large number of Palestinian security personnel have already resigned and are looking for work in the private sector, the news site reported. In recent months, they have been receiving 80% of their salaries, and many have gone into debt, upon which the banks close their accounts. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Knesset panel recently that the P.A. would not be allowed to fail. “We need the Palestinian Authority. We cannot allow it to collapse. We also do not want it to collapse. We are ready to help it financially. We have an interest in the P.A. continuing to work. Where it succeeds in operating, it does the job for us. And we have no interest in it falling,” said Netanyahu, according to Kan. Tensions are already high in Judea and Samaria, as the P.A. appears to have effectively lost control of northern Samaria, and violence has increased dramatically. More right-wing members of Netanyahu’s coalition have called for a tougher military response following a string of incidents, including a terror attack near the Samaria community of Eli on June 20 that left four Israelis dead, and an Israeli military operation that ran into tough resistance in Jenin, requiring the unusual use of an Apache gunship to ensure soldiers’ safe extraction. On Monday, two rockets were launched by terrorists in Jenin, though without warheads.

In spite of this alleged impending bankruptcy, I assume Abbas is still a billionaire. I also assume that this is probably a thinly disguised demand from Abbas and the PA to the international community (the West) for more money. My third assumption is that a good amount of this money will end up in Abbas' and his cronies' pockets, and another large chunk will go to funding the PA's popular "Pay-to-Slay" program.

[hero-israel]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-academics-sign-open-letter-condemning-abbass-antisemitic-comments/ Idk if you've got my ask about being amazed that Abbas is finally receiving consequences for being antisemitic but now there's an open letter by Palestinian academics calling it out. This is honestly amazing. I think, for better or worse, this is somehow the straw that's breaking the camels back. To be frank, I feel like Abbas' situation is like Trump's now, where he's served his purpose so now that powers that be are tossing him to the wolves, letting him face long-due consequences and will replace him with someone more extremist (DeSantis/Hamas/etc), but you know, we can hope! The thing is that Hamas is *also* starting to lose popularity among Palestinians/Gazans, so even if they've been more popular than the PA before it might not be guaranteed that they could take over the WB or hold on to Gaza in the near-ish future. It's not like Palestinian activists will take all their structures falling apart as a sign they should stop fighting with Israel (the open letter specifically called Abbas/PA out for being "pro-Israel") and I feel like the PA was/is the best shot we had at 2-state, but changes could potentially lead to something new and good, or at the very least *interesting*

Yes, I hadn't gotten around to responding to your prior ask, so let me do that now: I agree that it's remarkable that Abbas seems to be facing some consequences. Now let's move on to your new point...

I like to think I have a decent grasp of the big issues in I/P from closely, perhaps obsessively, following that issue from all over the news and political spectrum for decades. And there are 2 issues in particular where I really have no idea what would happen, where I can't even guess.

The one with far more immediate importance is: "What happens after Abbas dies?"

Abbas himself is not going to dissolve the PA. He has cried wolf on that about 30 times. Will the PA stay in place after he dies? Does he actually have a successor? Will there be a power struggle among rivals, maybe even a street war? Will Israel have to brutishly and - yes - colonially make clear which party it considers to be the true Palestinian president? Could Hamas take over the West Bank Palestinian towns?

He's 87 and looks 100 so I guess we'll find out soon enough. For better and for worse.

(The other issue where I wouldn't dare to take a guess, and perhaps even scarier, is: "What happens if the Jordanian monarchy falls?")

[girlactionfigure]

[dadsinsuits]

Mahmoud Abbas