In the aftermath of the US announcement on December 6 recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the intent to move their Israeli embassy there, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has opened up a diplomatic attack on Israel, spearheaded by many Muslim states.<\/p>\n
The website for the General Delegation of the Palestinian Authority to Australia has\u00a0posted the speech<\/a>\u00a0that Abbas delivered at the summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on December 13.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0during the speech<\/a>, Abbas deviated from his prepared remarks often, at times even dabbling in Islamist antisemitic tropes and historical revisionism.<\/p>\n About 30 minutes and 30 seconds into his speech, Abbas claimed the Palestinians descended from the Canaanites. This claim actually appears in his prepared remarks. Abbas said, adhering to his prepared remarks:<\/p>\n Yes, women and men believe in our right and God’s promise to us, that this holy Palestinian city and since it was founded by the Canaanite Jebusites five thousand years ago were not and will not be other than the capital of our independent state and the sovereign the State of Palestine;Mahmoud Abbas<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n At this point, Abbas put down his speech\u00a0and began speaking off the cuff<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the way, I don’t want to discuss religion or history because they [the Jews] are really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history and religion. But if we read the Torah it says that the Canaanites were there before the time of our prophet Abraham and their [Canaanite] existence continued since that time, this is in the Torah itself. But if they would like to fake this history, they are really masters in this and it is mentioned in the holy Quran they fabricate truth and they try to do that and they believe in that but we have been there in this location for thousands of years.Mahmoud Abbas<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even his prepared speech, as it stands, was much more hostile to Israel than most local and international media reported.<\/p>\n SBS, for example,\u00a0ran a modified AFP story on their website<\/a>\u00a0that only reported on Abbas’ rejection of the US as a mediator in the conflict.<\/p>\n However, Abbas went much further than that, laying out 13 demands or actionable talking points – the third of which was “that the countries of the world review their recognition of the State of Israel as long as it persists in violating the rules of international law and violating all international resolutions since its establishment in 1948.”<\/p>\n Meanwhile Abbas’ 12th point was that the PA now considers itself unbound by the Oslo Agreement.<\/p>\n On a related note, the\u00a0Jerusalem Post<\/em>‘s Seth Frantzman\u00a0noted in an analysis on December 14<\/a>\u00a0that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates did not attend the summit – a fact which suggests that the Saudi-allied bloc has far more of a problem with Iran’s desire to project their influence on Muslim affairs than they do with the US announcement.<\/p>\n
\n(Overwheming evidence\u00a0disputes this claim<\/a>. Meanwhile, virtually every prominent Palestinian clan\u00a0have family names that originated outside of the Holy Land<\/a>.\u00a0A recent genetic study, however, did find some Canaanite ancestry\u00a0among some Lebanese<\/a>.)<\/p>\n