Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has once again postponed Palestinian elections, this time from November 2026 until September 2027. It is a familiar routine for the 90-year-old leader, who was elected in 2005 to a four-year term and has remained in power for 21 years. Palestinians last elected a legislature in 2006, when Hamas defeated Abbas’s Fatah party. Since then, Abbas has repeatedly promised elections, postponed them and continued governing by decree, knowing that he will be trounced in elections.
This latest postponement for the authoritarian leader has consequences far beyond Palestinian politics. In September 2025, Canada, France, Britain and Australia recognized a Palestinian state, citing commitments by Abbas to democratic elections and governance reform. Just over a year later, those promises have been broken.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly predicated recognition on Abbas’s commitment to fundamental governance reform, elections in 2026 excluding Hamas, and demilitarization. Australia’s Anthony Albanese similarly cited Palestinian commitments to elections, reform and demilitarization.
French President Emmanuel Macron secured written assurances from Abbas to hold presidential and legislative elections under international supervision. Britain’s Keir Starmer endorsed Abbas’s commitment to elections within a year of a ceasefire. Belgium tied further diplomatic implementation to elections and Hamas’s disarmament.
These Western governments knew Abbas’s record when they accepted his promises. He had already postponed national elections in 2021.
Meanwhile, only 32% of Palestinian Arabs are in favor of a two-state solution with a majority opposed according to an October 2026 Gallup poll. So what Palestinian state are western governments trying to recognize anyway?
The implications are straightforward. Western governments should announce that they are standing by their words and not going to recognize a Palestinian State headed by an authoritarian corrupt Holocaust denier, nor one with a genocidal jihadi legislature.
The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) do not want a state to coexist next to a Jewish State; they want to control every inch of the holy land. Perhaps it is time for western governments to recognize what these regional Arabs have been saying consistently for a century.
One points to June 1967 for borders, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Another points to 1948 for refugees and their descendants.
Another reaches to 1947, before the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Another reaches to 1917, before the Balfour Declaration endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine.
And when even that is too late, the clock can be wound back to the Ottoman era, when Palestine was governed by a Muslim empire.
Muslim women prepare to enter the Western Wall Plaza in 2010 (photo: First One Through)
The hands do not need to agree. They serve different purposes.
The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas has spent decades demonstrating how it works.
1967: The Border Hand
For the borders of a Palestinian state, Abbas is precise.
In his 2016 address to the United Nations, he said the PLO had accepted a Palestinian state on the “4 June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
He has repeated the formulation for years. In 2014, he called for Palestinian independence over the “entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war,” with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2022, standing beside President Joe Biden, Abbas again called for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders.”
Why June 4, 1967? Look at the picture the clock produces.
There were no Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Its Jewish residents had been expelled after the Quarter fell to Jordanian forces in 1948. By June 1967, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community no longer existed either, evacuated after Palestinian Arabs massacred them in 1929.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem
So June 4, 1967 creates a remarkably convenient baseline. The Jewish communities that exist today in eastern Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank disappear from the photograph.
But the Palestinian clock has another hand.
1948: The Refugee Hand
When Abbas talks about Arab refugees, June 1967 suddenly becomes useless. So the clock jumps backward another nineteen years.
In 2021, Abbas appeared before the United Nations holding up the deed to his family’s property and said Palestinians still possess deeds and keys to their former homes. He argued that Palestinian refugees have the right to “return to their homeland” and recover their properties.
In 2025, he was even more explicit. Abbas said there were now more than seven million Palestine refugees and declared that the “right of return” was an inalienable right that Palestinian Arabs “will not forsake.”
Entrance to UNRWA “refugee camp” in Bethlehem with a key on top representing that UNRWA is the portal for descendants of internally displaced Arabs to move into grandparents’ houses in Israel
Watch the hands.
For the territory of a new Palestinian state, the clock says 1967.
For Palestinians claiming homes and property inside Israel, it says 1948.
Apply 1967 consistently and the mass refugee claim reaching into Israel loses its 1948 baseline. Apply 1948 consistently and Jewish communities and property claims erased by the 1967 baseline return to the picture.
The clock cannot stay on either date.
It has to move with the argument.
1947: The Sovereignty Hand
Israel already exists in 1948, a bone in the throat of Palestinian Arabs, or a “painful settlement” to quote Abbas. So the sovereignty hand moves to 1947.
In November of that year, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the clock reaches a moment before Israeli sovereignty.
But international recognition of Jewish national aspirations predates partition by decades.
Move the hand again.
The Holocaust: The Colonial Hand
Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He dismisses the entire victimization of Jews and argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves – and Palestinian Arabs have been forced to pay the price for it.
In an April 2018 speech in Ramallah he said “the reason for the hatred of the Jews is not their religion but their function in society…. So the Jewish question, which was prevalent in all European countries, the anti-Jewish (sentiment) was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on…. So their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever – we’re tired of hearing this. The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region…”
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting Nazi Germany in 1943
1917: The Zionism Hand
In his 2016 United Nations address, Abbas attacked not the borders created by the 1967 war or the displacement of 1948, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
He called it the “notorious Balfour Declaration” and demanded that Britain apologize for the “catastrophes, miseries and injustices” he said it had created.
Look how far the clock has moved. A century.
A time when there was no modern state of Israel. There was no 1948 refugee crisis. There was no occupation resulting from the 1967 war. There wasn’t even a British Mandate for Palestine yet.
The objection has reached the international recognition of Jewish national aspirations themselves.
Still too late.
The Ottoman Hand
Before Balfour, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Even though there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the land was totally controlled by Muslims. Jews remained a small minority.
Abbas’ longtime adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs and the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash said in 2014 that “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land… it is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.” In 2016 he said about Jerusalem “We cannot allow or agree to it being under sovereignty that is not Muslim sovereignty.”
Israeli police block Jewish man from ascending to the Temple Mount because he is a Jew, in Novemnber 2025 (photo: First One Through)
Abbas referenced the Ottoman period in a speech in 2014 when he said “Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully together in Palestine for centuries. So peace between religions runs through the heart of the most sacred City in the world, Jerusalem. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Jericho the Oldest City on Earth. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Palestine.”
Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter makes the point clear: “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife.”
Watch the Hands
There is one time the Palestinian clock rarely points to: today. Because today leaves too many Jews in the picture.
Jews live in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank. Israel exists as a Jewish state. Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are facts rather than historical proposals.
To say openly that Jews should be removed from those places, that the Jewish state is illegitimate or that Jews should be denied national rights would make the prejudice difficult to disguise.
History offers a more respectable vocabulary. Just choose an earlier date when the particular Jews, Jewish sovereignty or Jewish rights inconvenient to the argument were absent.
That is why the Palestinian clock needs so many hands. No single date erases everything neatly.
History provides the dates. Antisemitism chooses the hand.
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff caused a stir when he reported on the daily rape of Palestinian Arabs by Israeli dogs while incarcerated. Pro-Palestinians were appalled and pro-Israelis were shocked at the charge – what kind of inanity? How is this even possible?
New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff
Let me tell everyone about the ugly reality. I have been investigating this for years. I have a mole (an actual one) as well as a source inside the Zionist security apparatus. Let me just call him Colonel Klink to protect his identity, and I will fully expose what Kristoff only touched upon.
The Israeli prisons have vast storehouses of Bamba that they crumble and smear all over their Arab captives for interrogations. The peanut butter smell drives the dogs wild as they sexually maul the exposed Gazans and West Bank Arabs. The Israeli guards allow the abuse to go on until the Arab prisoners reveal the sordid plans they have for Israeli Jews, which the guards write down and then sell to Lior Raz for plots for the next season of Fauda.
Lior Raz of Fauda during a fundraiser for the Zionist ambulance service
This is only the tip of the canine iceberg.
Israeli border collies have been herding Palestinian sheep into “open air prisons” for years. The Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind offers the yellow Labradors and Golden Retrievers to Jews, while reserving the black Labradors for Israeli Arabs because of the deep racism embedded in Israeli society – even for blind people.
The animal cruelty knows no bounds.
ASPCA locations around the United States have been used as Mossad safe houses since the founding of the Zionist state. Dogs that people adopt have chips in them which the Israeli government uses to track millions of Americans.
The colonialists have even established an elite cat unit trained in pickpocketing, emotional manipulation, and knocking over glasses of water during hostage negotiations. One tabby roaming tourist cafes allegedly stole three passports, two vapes, and an unopened yogurt from a Scandinavian journalist.
In New York, Israeli units have dispatched Portuguese Water Dogs in Times Square where they operate Thee Card Monte tables to rob tourists. The same unit uses Standard Poodles to sell knock-off Gucci handbags while they gather intel on Muslim Halal food cart vendors, who are in turn, casing American streets for easy targets.
In the Holy Land, Palestinian Authority President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of “weaponizing pigeons” to deliberately defecate across public spaces in Palestinian cities. “This is organized biological warfare,” Abbas reportedly declared. “The pigeons target only Palestinian vehicles, Palestinian balconies, and Palestinian laundry.”
The humanitarian crisis expanded into the political sphere this week after activists accused Israel of operating what one NGO called “a sophisticated interspecies apartheid system” stretching across land, sea, air, and now apparently pollination networks, as Israeli bees are chemically treated to be unable to approach plants in Arab fields.
Speaking emotionally before reporters, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) condemned what she described as “the ongoing Animal Nakba. Not only are Palestinians suffering under the imperialist Zionist regime,” she declared, “the indigenous animals and insects are suffering too.”
One Gazan who was set free in a prisoner exchange told me that he witnessed parrots repeatedly curse prisoners in multiple languages to degrade the Palestinian spirit. Worst of all, the parrots deliberately spoke in Arabic with a lisp, which made several Palestinians admit to raping Israelis.
Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard, having heard of this, set up in the center of the campus with placards “Polly want a ceasefire!” Brown University faculty followed launching a new course “Decolonizing Veterinary Power Structures.” Col. Klink has been drafted to be one of the lecturers. The university is seemingly unaware that he is a double agent, trashing the Jewish State to progressive audiences while simultaneously surveilling them.
Brown University online lecture about decolonizing Palestine, seeking to replicate Hamas around the world
Francesca Albanese of the United Nations said the latest findings are deeply upsetting and more evidence regarding the “occupation of bees, apartheid Labradors, militant parrots, and psychologically traumatized hamsters,” although no reports of hamsters being involved in Zionist oppression have emerged. Yet.
Anti-Israel members of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team have urged the mayor to stop the Celebrate Israel Parade, which the mayor is reportedly considering. He has also suggested banning all Jews from adopting pets in the city, but his lawyers said that crossed the line into antisemitism. Zohran reportedly just shrugged and said “so what?”
In Washington, DC, President Trump has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about deploying the specially trained animal units in the Islamic Republic of Iran and against various anti-American groups inside the United States. “Bibi” is expected to not only comply, but share data from the sleeper pet cells in millions of American homes.
A new front in the Zionist war has been exposed which runs much deeper than even the most virulently anti-Israel groups ever imagined. It’s inter-species, which Candace Owens claimed further proved that Jews aren’t even 100 percent human. (Her agent continues to state that she is not antisemitic).
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has perfected the art of self-deception — and the spectacle has become an embarrassment to watch. Its leaders trade in fantasies while their people – and the entire region – suffer the consequences of their delusions.
When President Donald Trump released his 20-point Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, it was explicit: the focus was on fixing Gaza and the PA would have no role. The document said in plain language that the PA would need to be overhauled and reformed before it could ever be trusted as a partner for peace. It deliberately withheld any credit or recognition for the current leadership, recognizing its corruption, incitement, and support for terror. “A technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” headed by Trump himself would be the day-after plan for Gaza. Only “qualified Palestinians” would get to sit on such committee, not the UN-lauded PA.
President Trump’s peace plan specifically did not hand control of Gaza to the PA and said the group had to “complete its reform program.”
The plan’s very structure was layered with conditionality — each potential step toward a Palestinian state contingent on verifiable reforms, renunciation of violence and demilitarization. Even then, the most it offered was that maybe one day, post-reform, there could be a pathway to a two-state solution.
The Trump plan layered conditions of “when,” “may” and “pathway” to Palestinian “statehood”
And yet, in a surreal twist, the official PA news agency WAFA ran an article in which Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Trump stood ready to endorse a Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as its capital. It was an astonishing fabrication — a complete lie, meant to mask Abbas’s very public humiliation and preserve his illusion of relevance.
Official PA media lied that Trump’s peace plan would establish a new Palestinian State which would follow the “June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital”
This distortion was not a misunderstanding; it was intentional misrepresentation, propaganda designed to convince Palestinian Arabs that Abbas still holds the key to their future. But everyone can see through the act. All Abbas and Hamas have delivered is destruction, division, and hatred.
The PA’s falsehoods no longer even convince its own people. Each new lie only underscores its impotence — a government in name only, ruling by inertia and deceit. The tragedy – like the lies – has layers of corruption, hatred, murder and deceit.
The Palestinian people, too, bear responsibility for their choices. They voted for Hamas, a genocidal terrorist movement to 58% of the parliamentary seats which brought death and destruction not only to Israelis but to Palestinians themselves – which the vast majority supported. They elected Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier and an ineffective president, and now watch him recycle lies and propaganda instead of leadership and reform. The Palestinians voted for failure — and the region has paid the price.
WAFA called the Israeli government an “occupation government”, clearly showing the PA was upset by being sidelined because it sorely needs reform
The Trump plan recognized that hard truth. It was not a welcome mat for Fatah or Hamas, nor a reward for decades of violence and corruption. The plan envisioned a different future entirely. The “day after” will not be another PA regime or HAMAS ruling Gaza, but the first step in a new chapter of deradicalization, where education replaces indoctrination, coexistence replaces hate, and peace is no longer a slogan but a shared reality.
Trump’s plan – as endorsed by Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – states clearly that a possible Palestinian State will come as a BYPRODUCT of deradicalization and peace, not in order to CREATE the forum for coexistence as offered by France and the United Kingdom. All of which may or may not happen, and most likely after Abbas is long gone.
In April 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon essentially blessing Sharon’s proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in exchange for the US backing Israel’s positions that the future contours of Israel would account for “new realities on the ground” and not follow “the armistice lines of 1949,” as well as ending the Palestinian so-called right-of-return by “settling of Palestinian refugees there [in a new Palestinian State], rather than in Israel.” In response to the letter, Israel withdrew all Jewish civilians from Gaza and its military in September 2005.
Gaza has ravaged itself since then.
As a charitable generous gesture, several Jewish and Israeli businessmen purchased Israeli greenhouses and related equipment, and gifted them to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which had elected Mahmoud Abbas as president in January 2005. The PA never was able to secure any of it. Palestinian security officials were overrun, saying that the Gazans looted it completely, leaving nothing behind “like locusts,” as soon as Israel pulled out.
News reports at the time were prescient regarding “concerns about Gaza’s future.”
Abbas made grand and empty proclamations. The PA did not have the respect of Gazans and the region would not be controlled by its leader from the Fatah party.
A few months later, Palestinians elected Hamas to 58% of parliament. Then, in 2007, a mini civil war broke out it Gaza which routed the PA and gave Hamas exclusive control of the strip. Amid the public failure of Abbas, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stressed his full support for Abbas and the PA, while he worried about food and aid getting to Gaza’s civilian population.
Does any of this ring familiar? Gazans overrun the Palestinian Authority; PA makes grand and empty declarations; Gazans saddle up with Hamas; UN worries about food and aid.
The underlying reality in Gaza is that the western-backed Palestinian Authority has never had a presence in the strip. The region has never truly been part of “Palestine” as envisaged by the many conferences over the last decades. How can there be a “two state solution” of Israel and Palestine, when the dreamed up “Palestine” is two distinct entities itself? What are countries “recognizing” when they cannot see reality?
The Greenhouses Swarm of 2005. The Fatah Swarm of 2007. The Israel Swarm of 2023. The Aid Swarm of 2025.
Gaza devours charity, donors, neighbors and itself so completely, that the request for ever more attention and aid is either completely nonsensical or understandable. Or both.
In an ongoing insult to Jews around the world, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said at the 32nd Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council meeting on April 23, 2025 that the two Jewish “Temples were in Yemen.”
PA President Abbas claiming the Jewish Temples were in Yemen, April 23, 2025
Abbas falsified history in an attempt to deny Jews any rights or privileges at their holiest location. The fact that it was an insult to over 2 billion Christians who believe that Jesus was in Jerusalem and not Sanaa was a slight he was willing to make to claim the site as purely Islamic.
The United Nations adopted the same position. In a 1949 map of the holy places in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount was marked as only holy to Muslims, while the Western Wall was marked as holy to both Muslims and Jews.
1949 UN map of Jerusalem’s holy places
The United States should therefore adopt a resolution called “Status of the Temple Mount,” similar to the twisted United Nations resolutions called “Status of Jerusalem,” to correct the wrong. Its passage in Congress will serve as a template for other countries to adopt before being submitted to the United Nations General Assembly.
Key phrases should be included in the resolution, to combat the disgraceful UN remarks about Jewish rights:
The United States abhors the “aggressive and dangerous” comments made by the president of the Palestinian Authority which “could inflame tensions and lead to a religious war that has no boundaries.”
Comments made by the PA president “serve the forces of extremism around the world.”
Incendiary remarks that deny Jews their heritage and history “do absolutely nothing to improve the lives of Palestinian Arabs,” and simply “push back the Middle East peace process.”
“The Temple Mount built by King Herod two thousand years ago has been and will always be the holiest location of Judaism.”
On December 9, 2021, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) expressed his disgust with a December 3 UN General Assembly resolution about Jerusalem saying “The recent vote by the United Nations disavowing Jewish historical ties and exclusivity to the Temple Mount—the holiest and most sacred Temple in Judaism—is an outrageous act of religious persecution. This is a transparent effort, supported by 129 nations but opposed by the United States, to rewrite history, cleanse the holy area of its religious ties to the Jewish faith and deny that Israel has roots to the Middle East…. The Jewish Temple, located in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, is holy ground to Jews and it belongs solely to their faith. I object to any effort to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people from their sole historic claim to this land and temple.”
It is time for U.S. Congress to endorse a resolution to correct the shameful religious persecution and ethnic cleansing of Jews, by passing the “Status of the Temple Mount” resolution.
ACTION ITEM
Write Paul Gosar (if you are in his district), your representatives in Congress and the White House (comments@whitehouse.gov) to clearly stand by historic truth and correct the ongoing slander and religious persecution of Jews. “In light of the ongoing antisemitic insults by the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations, please pass a resolution which clearly states that the Jewish Temples stood on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and that the site has been the holiest site for Jews for 3,000 years. https://primarybowman.com/2025/04/29/resolution-recognizing-the-jewish-temples-stood-on-the-temple-mount-in-jerusalem/“
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.
The United States passed the Taylor Force Act in March 2018 which prohibits the U.S. from giving funds to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues its “Martyrs’ Payments” to terrorists who killed and injured Americans or Israelis. The PA flatly refused to stop the payments for years, with PA President Mahmoud Abbas saying that he would prioritize giving terrorists and their families money even if he had only one penny left.
In the aftermath of Palestinians’ loss against Israel in the war Gazans started on October 7, 2023, Palestinians are desperate for money. Still, US President Donald Trump is halting the generous flow of money and support to various Palestinian groups and is making it very difficult for the PA’s other sponsors like Iran and Qatar to continue to fund the decimated Palestinian Arabs as long as they support terror.
Rather than halt the extremely popular pay-to-slay program, Abbas announced on February 10 that he will transfer the responsibility of terrorist-tribute from his Ministry of Social Development to a separate agency, the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment. Abbas thinks that this slight of hand to a foundation whose trustees are appointed by him, the PA president, will somehow confuse the United States to turn on the money spigot.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
The unpopular PA president is caught between Palestinian Arabs who seek the destruction of Israel and murder of Israelis, and the United States which accounts for a majority of Palestinian aid, now headed by an administration which will not countenance genocidal jihad, especially on its dime. Abbas prays that this farcical shell game will confuse US President Donald Trump as if he were former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Palestinians are starting to get the message that they must stop supporting terror. The issue is that the masses would rather live in rubble with “dignity” than coexist with the Jewish State.
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.
On May 15, 2023, the United Nations held its first “Nakba Day” event. In discussing the various activities to be held, the UN stated it wanted to “highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace, require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.”
The difference in understanding those “inalienable rights” is the crux of why no solution to the conflict has been realized.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas speaks during a high-level event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at the United Nations headquarters in New York on May 15, 2023. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP)
At the event, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas demanded “the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland, to their cities and villages, of which they were displaced by aggression and terror.” Abbas added “the issue of the refugees must be resolved. There are refugees and they should return. I am a refugee. I am a Palestinian refugee. I want to return to my town. I cannot live even in Paris or New York. I won’t have it. I want Safed. It is such a small town. I want it.”
Several countries sent solidarity messages to the Nakba event including: Algeria; Venezuela; Indonesia; Senegal; Tunisia; Türkiye; Qatar; Egypt; Jordan; Iran; Suba; Kuwait; Guyana; Malaysia; Bangladesh; Saudi Arabia; Bahrain; Namibia; Nicaragua; China; Syria; UAE; Lebanon; Maldives; South Africa and Mozambique.
Most of the Western countries officially stayed away but the Palestinian diaspora made itself felt.
At the evening of the launch of the event, Abbas “praised the role of the Palestinian community in the United States in supporting the Palestinian people, stressing the importance of their work in forming an American public opinion in support of the Palestinian national cause.” He was referring to groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine and Palestine Youth Movement, all of which have been fomenting unrest and antisemitism on American streets.
When addressing the UN at the event, Abbas furthered the point “that the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba has begun to make its way to the awareness of the peoples, who have come to uncover the fraudulence of the Israeli narrative and listening to the Palestinian narrative and their tragedy.” The anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish talk-track is now found in California public schools and on college campuses.
The United Nations led Palestinian Arabs to believe that they will all get to return to towns where ancestors once lived inside of Israel, and the world has begun to accept that narrative as told by local Muslims living in the West. It is a bastard of the fabled “two-state solution” in which a new country of Palestine is purely Arab and Jew-free, and Israel is transformed into a bi-national state. One and one-half states for Arabs and half a state for Jews.
United Nations “refugee” camp with a key on top informing Palestinians that the key to their homes inside of Israel is via the United Nations
A few weeks after the UN’s 2023 Nakba event, Palestinians polled themselves. A majority stated that they believe that the Jewish State will cease to exist within twenty-five years. Specifically, “two-thirds say Israel will not celebrate the centenary of its establishment, and the majority believes that the Palestinian people will be able in the future to recover Palestine and return its refugees to their homes.“
The logical outcome of such thinking soon became manifest. Why should Palestinians negotiate a compromise with Israel when they believe that they will achieve all of their aims with global support?
The United Nations handed the microphone and held a celebration for jihadists who seek to end the Jewish State, while colleges were educating their student bodies in a radical, antisemitic Palestinian narrative that Israel is a colonialist, imperialist, illegal project. The toxic belief became mainstreamed and realized in the heinous October 7th massacre, celebrated by an unholy socialist-jihadi alliance on Western campuses and streets.
