From the indispensable Palestinian Media Watch:
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority published an op-ed in the British Guardian newspaper. After castigating Lord Balfour for promising “a land that was not his to promise” he went on to describe the Palestinian people as “a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths.”
Contradicting Abbas’ historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917 there was no Palestinian people.
During the broadcast, the host of the program asked:
“There always was a historical struggle over Palestine, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians’ options, and the Palestinians’ possibilities of development?”
Salameh responded:
“Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended, Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine’s lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people’s political identity. However, Palestine as a geographic area and the people dwelling within it enjoyed prosperity.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017
Of course, none of this should be new to regular Israellycool readers. For instance, remember this little gem from June this year?
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