The Palestinian conflict with Israel is rooted in antisemitism - opinion

In my last column, I wrote about the Jewish desire for peace – especially with the Arabs and Palestinians in and around Israel today. My column must have come off as naïve when a few days later the headlines carried the story of a speech Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivered to the Fatah Revolutionary Council in July that was broadcast on Palestinian television. 

In his speech, Abbas made several antisemitic remarks, including claims that Hitler wasn’t antisemitic but perpetrated the Holocaust because Jews were moneylenders, that European Jews and their descendants weren’t related to the ancient Israelites, and that today’s Jews have no connection to the land of Israel. 

Abbas’s remarks shocked many but weren’t surprising to those who have followed his writings and speeches. Abbas has made comments just like this in front of the Palestinian National Council. His doctoral dissertation was titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” Abbas has previously compared the Israeli government to Nazi Germany, saying it lied “just like Goebbels.” While standing in Berlin standing alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Abbas claimed Israel had committed, “Fifty massacres, 50 Holocausts.” 

It isn’t only Abbas who displays disturbing attitudes towards the Jewish people and Israel. Antisemitic views are prevalent in today’s Palestinian culture. In a global survey of antisemitism, 93% of Palestinians were found to hold antisemitic views. Compare Palestinian antisemitism to Iran, where 56% of the adult population maintains antisemitic views. Fifty-two percent of Palestinians believe in an armed struggle against Israel; 72% of Palestinians support forming armed groups in Palestinian populated lands; 71% supported the shooting of the innocent Yaniv brothers in Huwara; and Arabs in Haifa recently organized a Nazi club. 

Palestinian antisemitism is only part of the problem. Palestinians have consistently rejected the Jewish right to a state since before its founding, and 75 years after Israel’s formation still refuse to recognize it as a Jewish State. Rejection of Israel as a Jewish State isn’t simply a position in line with Palestinian claims to the land of Israel. It is a hateful position that denies Jewish history and its people’s connection to its national homeland. 

A feature, not a bug

The Palestinian’s hateful positions shouldn’t surprise anyone. They organized themselves with a representative body, the PLO, in 1964. For the next 29 years, the PLO openly declared itself a terrorist organization whose charter called for the annihilation of the Jewish state. It ignored Israeli calls for peace and considered all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to be occupied Palestinian territory. The PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, denied the historical Jewish connection to the land. The absurdity of their positions reached its apex at the Clinton Camp David peace summit in 2000 when chairman Arafat told president Clinton that the Jewish Temples never existed in Jerusalem. 

Through 30 years of intransigence since signing the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, support of terror, and indoctrination of its youth to hate Israel, the Palestinians have made it clear to all honest observers that they’re not interested in peace. They have turned down Israeli peace offer after Israeli peace offer – which is their right – but they’ve never offered their own plan or even a counteroffer. 

Palestinians have spent their energy and resources on battling the Jewish state as opposed to finding a way to end the conflict. Many observers call into question whether the Palestinians even want their own state. Their leadership’s actions and policies are completely inconsistent with working towards an independent state. They seem to sabotage any process that gets them closer to their goal of a Palestinian State. 

Palestinian terrorism is at one of its highest peaks. In 2023 there is an average of more than three attempted terror attacks a day. The Palestinian glorification of terrorists, its adulation of violent resistance, and its dreaded pay-to-slay program all point to a people and culture more interested in defeating Israel through violence, than establishing its own state and ending the conflict with Israel through a peace deal. It is obvious to most Israelis, and especially Israeli leadership, that the Palestinians are more interested in ending Israel than creating their own peaceful state. 

Mahmoud Abbas’s antisemitism isn’t new and contrary to Palestinian apologists’ claims it is representative of the Palestinian people’s attitudes. 

Although, a few days after Abbas’s statements came to light (but a month after they were broadcast to Palestinians) a select few Palestinian academics signed an open letter condemning his “morally and politically reprehensible comments,” most of those who affixed their signatures live in the United States and Europe and don’t represent the Palestinian people.

Nevertheless, besides only issuing the letter when Abbas’s comments were translated into English and spread around the world, as opposed to when Abbas made the very public comments on Palestinian TV, the letter additionally included slanderous characterizations of Israeli treatment of Palestinians. It was also signed by some of the world’s most notorious antisemites; people like Ubal Aboudi, a PFLP member, Refaat Alareer who has said, “Most Jews are evil,” and Huwaida Arraf, who equates Israel with Nazi Germany. 

Palestinians had an opportunity to condemn Abbas’s antisemitism without slandering Israel – and without cynically having the world’s worst antisemites masquerade as condemning antisemitism while practicing it themselves – and they missed it. Instead, they displayed their true hateful colors. Just as no one should have been surprised by Abbas’s antisemitism, no one should be surprised by the latent antisemitism displayed by the Palestinians in response to their president’s hateful speech. 

Many characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a territorial dispute, but that’s far from an accurate description. The conflict is based on centuries-old hate and traditional antisemitism. It begins with a rejection of Judaism, continues with a rejection of Jewish peoplehood and their rights to their land, and exists today in violent rejection of the Jewish State.

It is naïve to think the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come with the creation of another Palestinian State or the splitting of Jerusalem. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will only be solved once age-old hate is put to rest – and the prospects of that happening soon aren’t good. 

The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, Israel. She lives with her husband and six children.