Abbas and antisemitism
In a speech to a meeting of the Palestinian National Council held in Ramallah last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed: • Ashkenazi Jews were not descended from the original Israelites and therefore had “no historical ties” to Israel. • Israel was conceived as a European project: European politicians restricted Jewish immigration into their own countries but encouraged Jewish immigration to Israel. Israel was “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness.” • The Holocaust and earlier waves of persecution of Jews were not an expression of antisemitism but...