Abbas Advisor: Europe Created Israel to Get Rid of Jews

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Foreign Relations Nabil Shaath said on June 26 that the Europeans created Israel as a way to dispel Jews from Europe, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports. 

The Ramallah-based Al-Ayyam newspaper, which was translated by PMW, stated that Shaath, was speaking at an Iraq symposium. He said that Israel’s creation was part of a “European plot to settle the Jews who were unwanted in Europe in order to get rid of them, so that they created a homeland for them that would absorb them in Palestine.”

PMW’s report points out that Abbas’ Religious and Islamic Affairs Advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash and PA Minister of Education Sabri Saidam both said similar things in 2018, reflecting a claim in a PA TV documentary that the Europeans viewed Israel “as an ideal solution to get rid of [Jews].” Such claims are anti-Semitic because they downplay the Jewish “connection to the Land of Israel,” PMW notes.

Abbas himself said in January 2018 that Israel is “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism,” which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called out as “an anti-Semitic rejection of the undeniable Jewish connection to Israel. This false claim only raises serious doubts about the Palestinian Authority’s desire to negotiate, in good faith, a peace agreement with Israel, one which would recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

Other examples of Abbas’ anti-Semitic statements include accusing Israeli rabbis of poisoning Palestinian water in June 2016 and comparing Zionism to Nazism in his 1984 book, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism” that pushes Holocaust denialism.