Fatah | First One Through

Hamas stole the spotlight of the local Arabs in the Middle East when it launched a war against Israel on October 7, 2023. Remarkably, members of the Muslim world, western academia and others tied to the socialist-jihadi alliance rallied to the political-terrorist group, leaving its rival Fatah which holds the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, in the shadows.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has tried for eighteen months to push himself into the center of the discussion and relevance. A few months ago he began to crack down on terrorists in Area A east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL), hoping to show the West that he is capable of governing Gaza after the war.

On April 23, 2025, he gave a long speech in Ramallah, which he hoped would craft a new narrative and make the PA a political force throughout the region. Here are some highlights:

There have been FOUR Nakbas. While Arabs normally reserve the word “Nakba” for the 1948 loss of the war they initiated against Israel, Abbas added the 1917 Balfour Declaration of the Judeo-Christian western world recognizing the history of Jews in their holy land and right to reestablish their homeland as the primary “catastrophe.” He added the loss of the 1967 war to destroy Israel in which Jordan lost E49AL/”West Bank”, Egypt lost Gaza and the Sinai, and Syria lost the Golan Heights. Noteworthy, Abbas added the 2007 Hamas “treacherous coup” in Gaza in which it expelled the PA as a fourth Nakba, setting back the mission of Palestinian statehood.

Abbas did not condemn Hamas’s October 7 barbaric attack in Israel which was celebrated by the vast majority of Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs). Instead, he attacked his rival group’s expulsion of the PA. It implied that there would have been no war with Israel and no destruction of Gaza had the PA been in charge of the strip. Such adept speechcraft was likely penned by western political advisors.

The “Right of Return” is a hill to die on. Literally. Abbas said that the right of millions of SAPs to live inside of Israel is non-negotiable and that Arabs would rather die than sacrifice such right. The fact that it is a non-starter for Israel is seemingly of little concern. The United Nations has blessed such principle and the PA can do no less.

Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs are Refugees. This is a curious mind-bending twist of language. In different sections of his speech, Abbas said that there are “over eight million” “Palestinian refugees… inside Palestine and in the diaspora.” UNRWA lists 6 million wards in its five areas of operation, Gaza, E49AL/West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The two million Arabs in Israel would get to Abbas’s 8 million.

Only in Palestinian mythology can people be a refugee living in the same house and town where prior generations lived. The new Palestinian narrative is that a country of Palestine always existed, and Israel’s creation made everyone a refugee by definition, even if every local Arab didn’t move an inch. How these Arabs weren’t “refugees” under British or Ottoman rule is beyond reason, but that is the beauty of mythology.

The PA may allow Jewish prayer on the Jewish Temple Mount. Or very much not. Abbas voiced a conspiracy theory that “Al-Aqsa is now facing the most horrific conspiracy from the occupation, as incitement continues to destroy it and build a Jewish temple in its place.” Jews seeking basic human rights to pray at their holiest location – which is in the spot of the Dome of the Rock, not al-Aqsa – has nothing to do with destroying the current structure.

Towards the end of his remarks, Abbas stressed the need for “religious freedoms and… unfettered access to all places of worship for all religions,” suggesting Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount. Abbas may feel he danced around this in claiming the Temple Mount is a purely Muslim site and therefore beyond any claim of Jewish rights for prayer.

Elsewhere in the speech, Abbas repeated many of his past derogatory comments about Israel and the splendor of the PA which are not noteworthy.

CONCLUSION

The long orchestrated speech was made while Egypt and Jordan craft plans for Gaza, and before a much-anticipated June summit in New York chaired by France and Saudi Arabia in which Palestinians hope to become a full member state at the United Nations. Abbas is fighting for his personal future and the Palestinian Authority, so laid out some new markers. It will be important to find out who worked with Abbas on the speech and what impact they are having behind the scenes.

The fact is that Mahmoud Abbas in April 2025 is like Joe Biden in April 2024: people who pay attention know that the leader is a cutout figurehead but willfully pretend otherwise. There are puppeteers behind the scenes controlling the performance, leaving the frontman in place as a convenience to blot the knowledge that the alternative is worse, a losing hand.

A new Palestinian narrative is being drafted before our eyes as parties vie for roles in Gaza and the region. Abbas and others are attempting to rewrite history to seize power as the vacuum nears on the horizon. Now is a particular moment to recall facts we know to be true, and watch how society will bend historic reality to accomodate a different future.

Hopefully we will also identify the scriptwriters before it’s too late.

Abbas Pays Tribute To Murderers Of Jews Before The United Nations General Assembly, To Applause (September 2023)

Mahmoud Abbas And The Rubber Room Tango (September 2022)

Mahmoud Abbas’s Particular Anti-Zionist Holocaust Denial (July 2017)

For decades, Palestinians put on a dance that they had two personas: one peaceful and secular, the other militant and Islamist. In August 2024, they shed the former and fully embraced the latter.

Palestinian Arabs had two principal parties in their government: the more secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas. The Palestinian Authority has been ruled by President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who the west presents as a moderate voice of reason, despite being a Holocaust denier and being deeply unpopular amongst local Palestinians. Abbas has ruled E49, the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines, commonly called the “West Bank” by Palestinians and “Judea and Samaria” by Israelis.

Hamas is the more popular political party amongst local Palestinian Arabs and has ruled Gaza since 2007. It is a designated terrorist organization according to the United States, European Union, Israel and many other countries. It nominally divided the organization between its political wing and its military wing, much like Nazi Germany had different divisions of the SS, Gestapo, Waffen, Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and Wehrmacht.

On July 31, 2024, Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, while he was in Iran. In response to the vacated position, on August 6, Hamas announced that Yahya Sinwar who is the group’s military leader, will also assume the role of diplomatic leader. The move consolidated the diplomatic and terrorist faces of the organization.

Just over a week later on August 15, President Abbas spoke to the government of Turkey in a large address. In his remarks, he made clear that the Palestinian Authority is not a secular party but a religious one, intent on “implement[ing] Islamic sharia law: victory or martyrdom.”

*PA President Mahmoud Abbas addressing government of Turkey on August 15, 2024*

He called for Islamic prayers to mourn for the slain leader of Hamas with reciting prayers from the Quran to wide applause.

And then called the United States a “plague,” something nefarious and detrimental to humankind which must be destroyed.

Palestinian leadership has shed the polite diplomatic facade and embraced the genocidal jihadi mantra of the foundational Hamas Charter, in line with the desires of the Palestinian Arab public and radical jihadists around the world. It remains to be seen if this will expand the war against the Jewish State or initiates a global recognition that an antisemitic genocidal regime next to the only Jewish State is untenable in the extreme.