With a "Ph.D. in Holocaust denial" for his doctoral thesis many years ago in which he concocted the story that the Holocaust was a joint scheme by the Jews and the Nazis, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas now has an updated Holocaust history lesson next to which his original version pales in comparison.
It seems that Abbas has despaired of denying or playing down the Holocaust. Now he is taking aim at who he says was behind it: "The social leadership of the Jews who dealt in loans."
As his remaining time grows short, Abbas' dementia increases. Besides this, he has another motif he revisits. He never gets tired of claiming that the Jews are foreigners and have no historic or religious ties to the Land of Israel, whereas the Palestinians have been here since the dawn of time.
Waging the war of identity provides Abbas with an escape. The more the attempts to annihilate us or attack us fail, the more the fight over identity intensifies. The Palestinians dress themselves up in costumes and disguises and rewrite history to create a fictitious, invented identity, in an attempt to justify themselves and their existence here.
Abbas had the gall to give the Palestinian Legislative Council a "history lesson." But from time to time, the Palestinians themselves make a modest correction to their leader's lesson and inadvertently expose the truth.
This is what happened to Fahti Hamas, the former Hamas interior minister, who appealed to Arab states for aid in these words: "God be praised. We all have Arab roots and every Palestinian throughout Palestine is able to prove his Arab roots, whether [they are] in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or anywhere else. Half the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis."
The same thing happened with Balad founder and former MK Azmi Bishara, who left Israel after the 2006 Second Lebanon War when he was suspected of spying for Hezbollah. Bashara wrote that "in competition with Zionism for the past, the Palestinian movement declared it was descended from the Canaanites."
The same goes for former Fatah activist Walid Shoebat, who once said that everyone he knew in Palestine could trace their families back to the countries from which their great-grandfathers arrived.
"We knew very well that our background wasn't Canaanite, even though that's what they tried to teach us," he said.
The people who construct the Palestinian pack of lies – Abbas, first and foremost – tend to skip this particular chapter in their history.
