Several Palestinian factions on Wednesday condemned the opening of the first United Arab Emirates embassy in Tel Aviv and called for an end to Arab normalization with Israel.
The Palestinian Authority and its ruling Fatah faction, however, did not comment (by Wednesday night) on the UAE move.
The PA leadership initially condemned the Israel-UAE normalization deal, dubbing it a “betrayal of Jerusalem, al-Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinians.”
But following a backlash from the UAE and many Arabs in the Gulf, who were enraged by the PA condemnations and the burning of the flags of their countries and the posters of their leaders, the PA leadership halted its public criticism of the Gulf states over the peace deals with Israel.
Taysir Khaled, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, condemned the opening of the embassy as a “black and sad day.”
Hamas, the terrorist group ruling the Gaza Strip, said in a statement that the opening of the UAE Embassy in Israel “marks an insistence on the great sin against our people and all the peoples of the region.”
Hamas’s denunciation of the UAE came in spite of continued UAE financial, medical and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas statement said that “the most dangerous thing is that this behavior comes from the United Arab Emirates after a terrorist Zionist aggression against our people and their sanctities, in which massacres were committed against defenseless civilians, and houses were destroyed over the heads of their residents under the hearing and sight of the whole world.”
The opening of the embassy, Hamas added, “represents a dangerous decline in Emirati politics, which would not only give an official cover to the Zionist enemy to commit its crimes against our Palestinian people, but would encourage it to commit more of them, and to complete its extremist racist Judaization projects.”
According to Hamas, the UAE and other Arab countries that normalized their relations with Israel will soon “discover the size and gravity of their crime against their people and the peoples of the region.” It urged the Arab countries to “correct this wrong path and end all dealings and normalization with Israel.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terrorist group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, accused the rulers of the UAE of engaging in normalization with Israel “at a time when the occupation is committing crimes in Jerusalem and storming the Aqsa Mosque compound,” a reference to routine visits by Jews to the Temple Mount.
Tarek Silmi, a PIJ spokesman in the Gaza Strip, said in a statement: “This [UAE] Embassy may have been built on the ruins of a house or land belonging to a Palestinian family that was abandoned or destroyed during the 1948 Nakba.”
“Nakba” (catastrophe) is the Arabic term the Palestinians use to describe the 1948 War of Independence and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arab families.
“Normalization and the alliance with the Israeli occupation will remain treason and crime[s], regardless of the justifications, and no matter how much the normalizers try to distort the truth,” Silmi said.
The PLO’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) said in separate statements that the opening of an embassy for the UAE in Tel Aviv is a step that will severely harm the national interests of the Palestinian people and all Arabs, especially the people of the UAE themselves.
The opening of the UAE Embassy in Israel means moving from “normalization to Zionization,” the PFLP said as it denounced Arabs who make peace with Israel as traitors.
“Some Arab regimes are continuing to strengthen their relations with the occupation at the expense of the blood of the Palestinian people,” the PFLP added. “The UAE has agreed to become a pawn in the hands of the Zionist-American system and its agents in the region.”
The PFLP claimed that the Arab rulers signing peace agreements with Israel are doing so to preserve their rule.
“They are looking for someone to protect them and protect their thrones,” the group said. “They are delusional in this, as they go against the will of the people, the land and the history.”
The DFLP, for its part, considered the opening of the UAE Embassy in Tel Aviv as “an attempt to give Arab legitimacy to the aggressive and fascist behavior of the occupying power, and to present it as a state that wants peace and international cooperation.”
The DFLP said that the UAE move comes “at a time when the whole world knows that Israel is a rogue state that rebels against the laws of international legitimacy. Such policies will not succeed in beautifying the occupying state, nor will they succeed in weakening the will of our people.”