NEW YORK/LONDON—In an editorial published this week, The New York Times slammed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at a meeting of the Palestinian National council on Monday in which he claimed Jews “social role related to usury and banks” was to blame for antisemitism, calling on him to step down from his role as a Palestinian leader.
The piece, titled “Let Abbas’s vile words be his last as Palestinian leader,” says that the president has “shed all credibility as a trustworthy partner if the Palestinians and Israelis ever again have the nerve to try negotiations.”
“Abbas’s antisemitic tendencies are not new,” it continued, referencing Abbas’s controversial doctoral thesis which seemed to put into question the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
This, along with the “governing system plagued by corruption and dysfunction” which he oversees, make Abbas an unfit leader for the Palestinians and for any prospective peace process, the editorial states.
In an opinion piece titled ‘’It’s right to condemn Mahmoud Abbas for his antisemitic remarks’’, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian writes :’’Those remarks are classically antisemitic, carrying an extra sting of victim-blaming for good measure. At a push, you could imagine someone justifying such a view by noting that tension between Jews and their neighbours in Europe was fuelled for centuries by antisemitic laws that banned Jews from owning land, excluded them from key professions and forced them to engage in financial activity religiously forbidden as “usury” to Christians. But Abbas didn’t say any of that.’’
‘’Abbas is making the mistake of thinking the Palestinian case for statehood somehow depends on discrediting the Jewish claim. That’s why he seeks to minimise, or even blame the Jews for, the Holocaust – which, for many, underpins the moral case for a Jewish homeland – and why he remains attached to eccentric theories suggesting European Jews are not really Jews at all, or which otherwise deny the historic connection of Jews to Palestine. He fails to see that a two-state solution makes such arguments unnecessary: you can believe that both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, have a legitimate claim to the same land, which is why both have the right to a state of their own.’’