Abbas couldnt make peace with the Jews; he believes his own lies about us [View all]

Almost a decade ago, in the dying months of his premiership, Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pretty much everything the Palestinians ostensibly seek from Israel.

Hosting Abbas at the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem on September 16, 2008, Olmert took out a large map and specified the remarkable territorial concessions he was offering in a bid to partner the Palestinians to statehood and end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all.

Olmert offered Abbas what amounted to 100 percent of the West Bank — with one-for-one land swaps enabling Israel to extend sovereignty to three major settlement blocs and the Palestinians compensated with territory inside Israel’s current sovereign borders. He rejected the “right of return” for millions of Palestinians to Israel — an influx that would doom the Jewish state — but indicated a willingness to meet the Arab Peace Initiative’s call for a just and agreed solution to the refugee issue, including a compensation fund and the symbolic absorption of several thousand refugees.

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Unsurprisingly, Abbas made no mention of Olmert’s extraordinary peace proposal during his two-hour-plus anti-Israel, anti-Trump and anti-peace ramble before members of the PLO leadership in Ramallah on Sunday. Yet that appalling speech nonetheless provided the dismal explanation of why the man charged with leading his people to statehood had, nearly a decade earlier, rejected the best chance he would ever have to achieve that declared ambition.

Out of Abbas’s embittered 82-year-old mouth came the truth: He himself believes the vicious propaganda disseminated first by his late and unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat and then maintained during his own 13 years at the helm of the Palestinian Authority.

Of course Abbas chose not to accept Olmert’s unbeatable offer of statehood. It would have required the Palestinians to acknowledge the legitimacy of an Israel which, in Abbas’s own words, is just an unrooted “colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism.” It would have required the Palestinians to share the territory with a people to whom the holy land was so alien, in his foul rewriting of history, that they would rather go to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis than live here. “The Jews did not want to emigrate even with murder and slaughter,” as he put it. “Even during the Holocaust, they did not emigrate.”

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-couldnt-make-peace-with-the-jews-he-believes-his-own-lies-about-us/