Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the Palestine Liberation Organization's 30th Central Committee session in Ramallah on Sunday. Frustrated by Hamas' obdurate attempts to further splinter from the PA and be recognized as a truly sovereign entity, Abbas lamented the small number of participants in the "fateful" conference, held as the Palestinian issue is being continuously sidelined on the global agenda.
"A council member who failed to attend the meeting identifies with Hamas' separatism," he declared, reiterating past demands that Hamas yield to the PA's authority.
Abbas, who according to the Israeli Left is willing to relinquish the Palestinian demand for the "right of return," again demanded that all Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria be evicted and declared that his government will keep paying stipends to terrorists imprisoned in Israel and their families, despite the American and Israeli demand that the practice be ceased.
The Israelis and the Americans, he asserted, plot to "seize east Jerusalem, our capital," do away with the UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees, and annul "the right of return of 6 million refugees to Palestine."
The Israelis and the Americans, he continued, plan to support Hamas and help it establish a state in Gaza, in lieu of Palestine, reducing the Palestinian Authority into an autonomous entity limited to the West Bank.
One can feign understanding for Abbas' ability to defraud the Israeli Left, and even for his resolve to keep paying terrorists' stipends, but one cannot accept the malevolence of a Holocaust denier like Abbas when he tries to belittle the Jewish tragedy by repeatedly enlisting the number "6 million" to inflate his bogus claim of refugees. Arabs who fled Israel during its 1948 War of Independence numbered, at most, around 700,000.
When piercing the motivation of sanctimonious Holocaust deniers and examining their arguments against Israel one always circles back to their anti-Semitism. Some boycott "only" the "occupation"; some disguise their desire to destroy us with their "profound concern" for the Palestinians; some boycott Israel out of "concern for its fate"; and some "only target Zionists, not Jews."
But getting to the core of the multilayered facade of these "lovers of Zion" is akin to pulling apart a matryoshka doll, whose hollow core houses wooden dolls of decreasing size. It is only in the very last piece that the truth – pure anti-Semitism – lies.
The matryoshka doll principle also applies to the mudslinging between the Israeli Right and Left. Beyond the Left's grudges and false claims about political failures and corruption, the heart of the matter – the smallest doll, if you will – is the Left's regret that time and again it cannot regain the reins of power.
And last but by all means not least: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting demonstrated that Jews are being killed simply for being Jews. A gunman does not stop to check if one is a BDS supporter, a virulent critic of Israel in the U.N., a New Israel Fund lobbyist or merely a naive ideologue. Your death may be banal, just because you are a Jew.
