While many in Israel reacted positively to the anniversary of the signing of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority took a different approach, with two op-eds run in the official PA daily newspaper spreading several hateful libels about Jews and the State of Israel, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).
One op-ed was published in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida by regular columnist Omar Hilmi al-Ghoul, and it described the establishment of Israel as a conspiracy by the Christian nations of Europe in order to get revenge on the Arab world for the defeat of the Crusaders nearly a thousand years ago, as well as to allow for a wide-scale plundering and destruction of the region.
“The beginning of the robbery and theft of the resources of the Arab nation and its peoples took place in Palestine… the moment the foreign colonialist body – in other words, the State of Israel – was planted in the land of the Palestinian people,” Ghoul wrote, according to PMW.
“This was meant to target [the Arab nation’s] interests, rights, resources, independence, sovereignty and progress, and also to settle historical accounts with the Arabs and Muslims in response to the defeats of the Crusaders – and not in order to defend the believers of the Jewish religion or [the Zionists] who used them for their purposes.”
Building on these claims were the words of another regular columnist, Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muwaffaq Matar, who wrote of a European conspiracy using the Jews as pawns against the Palestinians.
“The Palestinian people’s historical and natural homeland was the scene of the crime, where some of the Jews of Europe were used as pawns in coordination and a complementation of roles with the heads of the Zionist organization,” he wrote, according to PMW.
“Was Palestine a colonialist base where Judaism and Zionism were used as pawns, or has Zionism developed and turned into a colonialist system that stands by itself by virtue of its control over tools of leadership, money, communications, security and intelligence in large states and world powers, such as the administration of [US President] Donald Trump in the US, who apparently is currently continuing the plan of ‘Israel from the Nile [River] to the Euphrates [River]’?”
Regarding the Balfour Declaration, which heralded the establishment of a Jewish state in the British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, Matar had this to say: “The Palestinian people was the number one victim of the crime against humanity that Great Britain committed.”
PA daily: Israel is Europe's 'revenge for Crusades,' Jews are 'pawns'
“The Palestinian people was the number one victim of the crime against humanity that Great Britain committed.”
