Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports that The Palestinian leadership’s falsification of history by presenting Jesus as an ancient Palestinian has increased in regularity as Christmas was approaching this year. In the last month alone, the PA media has transmitted six additional PA misrepresentations of Jesus as a Palestinian, including a statement by the Governor of the Ramallah district Leila Ghannam: “The Palestinian pain is one and the joy is one. We all have the right to be proud that Jesus is a Palestinian and that Palestine is the birthplace of the religions…”

A Palestinian historian, Khalil Shoka, further added on Dec. 16: “The Christian religion started here [Bethlehem]… The entire world is focused on this city because of its important historical and traditional role… because, in the final analysis, Jesus is a Palestinian.” Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, said on PA TV on Nov. 30: “The Palestinian nation is rooted in this land since the Canaanites and the Jebusites. The Arab presence – Christian and Islamic – on this land is uninterrupted. Jesus is a Palestinian par excellence.”

In addition, there is an attempt to connect Jesus to the Palestinian leaders themselves. Senior PA leader Jibril Rajoub, a Fatah Central Committee member, said on PA TV on Nov. 29: “The greatest Palestinian in history since Jesus is Yasser Arafat,” and an editorial in the PA official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida referred to Arafat, Jesus and Abbas as the Palestinian “holy Trinity”: “Jesus is a Palestinian; the self-sacrificing Yasser Arafat is a Palestinian; Mahmoud Abbas, the messenger of peace on earth, is a Palestinian. How great is this nation of the holy Trinity!”

PMW has documented the ongoing PA historical revision, which falsely connects the current Palestinian-Arab population to a fabricated ancient Palestinian-Arab nation. Although there is no record of any Palestinian-Arab history and no people ever identified as being part of a Palestinian-Arab nation until very recently, the PA claims they are an ancient Palestinian people in an attempt to compete with Israel’s well-documented Jewish history in the land.

While Christian tradition and the historical writings of the period portray Jesus as a Jew living in the land of Judea in Israel, the PA consistently tells its people that they are the ones connected to Jesus. This is not only a distortion of Jesus’ personal history as reported in Christian writings, it is also an anachronism. The Romans changed the name of Judea to “Palestine” in order to punish the Jewish nation after its unsuccessful rebellion, a 136 years after the alleged birth of Jesus.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas phoned Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal on Wednesday to discuss ending the division between their organizations. The call had been prearranged, a Fatah official told Ma’an.

Azzam al-Ahmad said Abbas phoned Mashaal to accelerate implementing national reconciliation. Abbas talked with Mashaal about his first visit to Gaza, and about Hamas’s 25th anniversary celebrations.

Al-Ahmad said he and a member in Fatah’s central committee had met Mashaal on Wednesday, as part a of new efforts to see if a reconciliation deal could finally be implemented.

The Fatah official said he was pleased that Mashaal was able to enter the Gaza Strip after decades away from Palestine, and also happy for Mashaal’s participation in Hamas’s anniversary events. He said the celebrations were aimed to end the division between Gaza and the PA.

Al-Ahmad said it was too soon to say when a meeting in Cairo with all the factions would take place, as Hamas officials were still in Gaza for the anniversary and Egypt is holding a constitutional referendum.

On Thursday Abbas proceeded to criticize Mashaal’s statement that his group will “never recognize the state of Israel.”

“I don’t agree with Khaled Mashaal’s statement on the non-recognition of Israel because we, in fact, recognized it in 1993,” Abbas told a group of reporters in Ankara following his two-day visit, Turkish Weekly reported. “A four-article agreement between [Fatah and Hamas] stipulates a two-state vision. And Mashaal approved of this agreement.”

At Wednesday’s press briefing, DOS Spokesperson Victoria Nuland unexpectedly declared—not in response to a reporter’s question, and in the middle of an only loosely-related topic, that the U.S. is not seeking diplomatic contact with the Hamas government in Gaza.

Nuland told the room, seemingly out of the blue: “… Let me just say one other thing which has to do with Hamas.

“There have been some bizarre claims out there that Hamas has a back channel to the U.S. Government or that the U.S. Government is dealing with ex-officials to have some kind of a back channel to Hamas. I want to say here that these assertions are completely untrue. There is no such back channel. And our position on Hamas has not changed. And recent remarks by Hamas leaders during Khaled Meshaal’s visit to Gaza reinforce the fact that Hamas is not a partner for peace. And unless Hamas unambiguously accepts the Quartet principles for peace, it cannot be a partner in any negotiations.” As you may recall, the U.S. Congress last month froze $200 million in development aid to the Palestinian Authority, in response to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s successful move to upgrade his organization’s status at the UN.

At the daily press briefing on Wednesday, a reporter asked Spokesperson Nuland: “Victoria, what about the money that is being withheld? The Palestinian sources … say that they are on the verge of collapse and total bankruptcy. Have you done anything to … persuade Congress to release the money?”

NULAND: Well, we’re continuing to work with Congress, we’re continuing to make our views known about this, that we think this money is important. We think it supports important work by the Palestinian Authority and to support the needs of the Palestinian people and it should move.

QUESTION: Are you also urging Israel not to hold up their tax revenue?

Israel’s finance minister, who declared the suspension of tax payment transfers, explained at the time that this was done because the PA hadn’t been paying its electric bill, and owes $800 to the Israeli electric company.

According to Wednesday’s Jordan Times, at the recent Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in Doha, Qatar, Arab states agreed to come to the rescue of the Palestinian Authority by pledging a $100 million monthly payment.

That should cover the electric bill…

NULAND: We are making clear to the Government of Israel that we think funding of the Palestinian Authority is necessary, and that it should work with the PA to address the issues that they have, and that all sides need to take steps to reduce tensions, to build trust, to produce the kind of climate that’s going to get us back to direct talks.

Now that the Palestinian Authority has been recognized as a non-member observer state at the United Nations, it will now use its new power to ask the Security Council to force Israel to abandon plans to build in the E-1 area near the Jewish city of Maale Adumim.

Israel announced last week, immediately following the PA’s unilateral decision to request non-member state status at the UN, that it would begin building on the area which is under Israeli control.  The world responded to the Israeli plan primarily through condemnation, with many European countries calling in their Israeli ambassadors to submit formal protestations.

PA head Mahmoud Abbas called the plan a “red line”, although it is unclear what the implications of that are.

The Palestinian representative to the UN submitted a letter calling the move a “contemptuous response” to international approval for recognition of a Palestinian state.

“ Israel is methodically and aggressively pushing ahead with this unlawful land grab and colonization of Palestine with the intent to alter the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian territory… in its favor in order to entrench its illegitimate control of the land and prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations,” the letter stated.

The US would be expected to veto a resolution against Israeli housing growth, primarily because of its interest in bringing Israel and the PA back to face-to-face negotiations.

Approximately 600,000 Jews live in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem.  The PA and its supporters oppose any construction for use by Jews in those areas.

Originally published Rubin Reports.

Note: This interview is satire, but is very close to actual experience. 

Journalist: Professor Rubin, why is Israel making a two-state solution impossible by building 3000 apartments in east Jerusalem?

Me: In 1993 Israel signed an agreement with the PLO in which there was no ban whatsoever on Israel building more buildings on existing settlements. The Palestinians formed a government that received political control over all the towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It agreed that Israel would continue to control Jerusalem. The two sides further agreed that the political status of these territories would be changed only through a mutual peace treaty.

In 2000, the Palestinian Authority (PA) rejected the offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem living in peace alongside Israel.

Instead it launched a war against Israel whose main feature was terrorist attacks on Israel civilians. A few months later, it rejected an even better offer of peace with a Palestinian state having its capital in east Jerusalem on the exact amount of territory that constituted the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem before 1967.

Ever since then, for 12 years now, Palestinian leaders have repeatedly said they no longer accepted a two-state solution or at least would soon stop doing so.

Israel withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip and dismantled all the settlements there in order to encourage the Palestinians to move toward a two-state solution by developing that area and showing they were willing to live in peace. Instead, Hamas took over, openly declared its rejection of all previous agreements, that it would never accepted the two-state solution, fired rockets and missiles at Israel, put on television programs teaching children that they should grow up to be suicide bombers, and that all Jews in the world be murdered.

Despite these positions of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority has tried endlessly to make a deal bringing Hamas into the government, a government that would have to be based on a platform rejecting any real, lasting two-state solution.

This policy was continued after the 2008-2009 and 2012 Hamas escalations to war with Israel.

For more than a half-dozen years the PA has refused to negotiate seriously with Israel.

PA schools teach that Israel should be wiped off the map; sermons in PA-controlled mosques say that Israel should be wiped off the map; PA officials demand that eventually Israel be wiped off the map.

Those who murdered Israeli civilians are glorified by the PA, which names, schools, squares, and soccer tournaments after them.

When Israel, at the U.S. request, froze all construction for ten months the PA refused to negotiate seriously.

For the last three years, the PA has concentrated all of its efforts on abandoning a negotiated two-state solution and getting their own state without making any such commitment. Now, the UN—including many European countries—has helped them achieve a non-member state status. Thus, due to Palestinian action the 1993 Israel-PLO agreement has been killed, every deal made since then abrogated, every concession and risk taken by Israel during this period has been deprived of anything in return.

Remember also that if the PA were to negotiate a peace deal with Israel all the settlements on Palestine’s territory would be dismantled. So if construction upsets them so much why don’t they stop it permanently by making a peace deal? You know who made that exact same point? King Hussein of Jordan. And that was in 1986. They ignored him.

Now in the wake of the UN General Assembly decision, PA leaders have been proclaiming that Israel is a racist state that shouldn’t exist, that the UN has now endorsed the Palestinian claim to all of the 1967 borders (which is not true), and that they will go to the international court to prosecute Israel for allegedly being the occupier of territory belonging to another country which has (not true) been declared sovereign over that land.

Reportedly, some of the countries that voted Palestine would be a non-member state at the UN asked the PA for assurances that they would not use this new status to launch lawsuits against Israel at the World Court. Within hours, however, the PA announced that this is precisely what it will do. The main goal is to get the court to rule that Israel is occupying the territory of a sovereign state and thus must withdraw immediately, with no peace treaty and no end to the conflict. Thus, as called for in the PLO Covenant almost a half-century ago, a state of Palestine would serve as a base for a “second stage” in which Israel would be completely eliminated.

The United Nations General Assembly’s vote to make “Palestine” a “non-member state” of the UN has done no less than legitimize the two Palestinian regimes that promote terrorism and Israel’s destruction. How can the world claim to be fighting terrorism when it has just declared that two terrorist regimes should enjoy sovereignty?

For years, the UN, controlled by a majority composed of dictatorships and tyrannies, has frequently supported odious and evil causes. This is the organization that gave us the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution among scores of other anti-Israel, anti-U.S, anti-democratic resolutions. It is the body that appointed Libya to its Human Rights Council and Iran to its Committee on the Status of Women.

True, UNGA resolutions are non-binding and have no legal force; only Security Council resolutions have legal force. Nonetheless, the Palestinian movement enjoyed a victory. Why? Because this resolution gives aid and comfort to its cause – its actual cause of eliminating Israel as a sovereign Jewish state, not its fictitious cause of creating a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Consider Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas’s choice of language. He falsely called the state he professes to wish to live peacefully alongside “racist” and guilty of creating “apartheid” and a “colonial occupation.” No one makes peace with racist, apartheid or colonial entities – they dismantle them. Can any other meaning be read into Abbas’s words in 2010 to Arab journalists – “If [Arab states] want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor”?

Abbas insisted, citing UNGA’s 1949 resolution 194 (rejected by all Arab states at the time), on the legally baseless so-called right of return of Palestinian refugees of the 1948-9 war and their millions of descendants to Israel, which would end Israel as a Jewish state.

The horrid irony is that Abbas’s cause fits the lurid description he applied to Israel. His Fatah party still calls in its constitution for the destruction of Israel (Article 13) and the use of terrorism as an essential element in the struggle to achieve that goal (Article 19). Indeed, Fatah’s emblem depicts the whole of Israel relabeled “Palestine” and flanked by images of a Kalashnikov rifle and arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, a portion of the territory Abbas is claiming for statehood, calls in its charter for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (Article 7).

Senior PA officials have clearly insisted that a Palestinian state be Jew-free. The PA also does not accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Abbas has said this several times; so have other PA officials. Nor has the PA fulfilled its Oslo obligations to dismantle terrorist groups and to end incitement to hatred and murder against Israel in its schools, media and speeches. To the contrary, the PA calls terrorists shahids (martyrs) and officially honors and glorifies dead terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi, naming schools, streets and sorts teams after them. The PA refuses to arrest terrorists and pressures Israel to free Jew-killers it has imprisoned – scarcely the action of a regime interested in making peace and ending violence.

The Palestinian goal has never been statehood; it has been preventing or destroying Jewish statehood. The proof is that whenever they’ve been offered statehood alongside a Jewish state – in 1937 (Peel Commission), 1947 (UN partition plan), 2000 (Barak/ Clinton plan) or 2008 (Olmert plan) – they’ve turned it down.

What, then, did the PA hope to achieve with its UN gambit? Broadly, three things:

● Statehood without signing peace with Israel and ending the conflict.

● UN affirmation that all of Judea/Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem is “Palestinian.”

● Enabling continued conflict with Israel with recourse to international organs that such a declaration will facilitate. As Abbas wrote in May 2011 in The New York Times, “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations…would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.” The events of this week have confirmed this Palestinian intention. Several states, reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN bid, implored the PA to amend its resolution to indicate it would not pursue legal vendettas against Israel. The PA refused.

The Palestinians today are trying to play down Israel’s fear that, as soon as they are accepted as an observer state at the UN this week, they would start submitting lawsuits against Israel at the international criminal court at the Hague. But, according to Israel’s Channel 2 News, they have warned that going to the Hague would remain an option.

The PA’s UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour reiterated that, despite repeated pleas from Israel and the U.S., the Palestinians have every intention this week of carrying out their initiative to request from the 193-member general assembly to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s status from “observer entity” to “observer state.”

The current draft of the proposal to be submitted by the Palestinian at the UN on Thursday, “the UN will decide whether to award Palestine the status of an observer state at the United Nations, without infringing on any accompanying rights regarding the Authority’s role as the representative of the Palestinian nation based on previous, relevant decisions.” The proposal further clarifies that it is intended “to enhance the right of the Palestinian nation to self determination as a Palestinian state in the territories that were occupied in 1967.”

Jerusalem and Washington continue to argue that the Palestinian move is wrong, but both have already acceded to their anticipated defeat at the general assembly. The French announcement yesterday that they would vote in favor of the upgrading, was followed by announcements from Denmark, Norway, Spain and Switzerland, all supporting President Abbas, as will Great Britain. Italy and Australia are expected to abstain. The U.S., Canada, Guatemala and Micronesia—never forget Micronesia—will reject the proposal.

Germany’s position is not yet clear. Now, that’s a relief.

The truly troublesome part of the proposal is not so much the new status, which still stops short of real statehood, but with the fact that the full assembly will embrace its depiction of the urgent need to renew the negotiations as part of the peace process in the Middle East, to reach a resolution of the essential issues – the refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the settlements, the borders, security and water.

Channel 2 commented that at this stage in the draft, prisoner release is not one of those essential issues.

Mahmoud Abbas has arrived in New York and the game is on. Israel’s immediate response to his move will likely be to freeze the taxes Israel collects on behalf of the PA and to take from that money the $200 million plus the PA owes the Israeli electric company.

It’s a start.

The Jerusalem District Court, in a landmark decision 10 years in the making, ruled on Sunday that the Palestinian Authority can be sued in Israeli court for damages suffered by an Israeli Arab tortured and kidnapped by their security forces on suspicion of spying for Israel.

The case will not only enable Arab victims of PA intimidation to find justice, but will allow terror victims to sue the PA for compensation.

According to a report by The Times of Israel, the case was brought in 2002 by a man who was suspected by the PA of being an informant for Israel.  In 1999, the man was kidnapped twice – once in Israeli-controlled Hebron and once in Jerusalem outside the school in which he taught.  PA security forces allegedly tortured Rajoub during questioning, even firing a gun next to his head in a mock execution.

He was severely disabled, and tried bringing a suit against the PA in Israeli court for NIS 10 million.  However, the PA said it could not be sued in Israeli court, and that the man should attempt to sue in PA court.

Judge Moshe Drori ruled that the man could sue the PA in Israeli court for injuries and suffering, and set in motion deliberation over the amount of compensation to be paid out.  The method of extracting the settled amount is undetermined.